The 5Is Framework for crime prevention, security and community safety

The importance of process models and knowledge capture frameworks

Process models

Having well-developed process models for doing crime prevention, security and community safety is central to know-how. Process models are important for:

• Training practitioners
• Guiding them on-the-job
• Structuring and assessing bids for crime prevention action funding
• Monitoring, managing and improving the quality of their work during planning and execution
• Making routine process evaluation more efficient and systematic
• Facilitating intelligent, context- and problem-sensitive replication and innovation from success stories, and learning/ salvaging from failures

5Is is one such process model; SARA is another, but there are important differences.

In brief, 5Is has been designed to offer richer detail and greater structure to enable practitioners to work at a more advanced level, on a wider range of action, whilst coping with the complexity of the real world.

Knowledge capture frameworks

Knowledge capture frameworks are important for:

What is the 5Is Framework?

5Is is an advanced framework for capturing, consolidating and sharing knowledge of good practice in crime prevention. It aims to improve performance, scope and delivery of that practice locally, nationally and internationally, enabling smarter responses with reduced resources. It is applicable to all of crime prevention, covering both situational and offender-oriented approaches, and service-like approaches as well as project-based ones.

The 5Is has wider applicability, e.g. for constituting the core schema underlying crime prevention education and training, guiding researchers on process evaluation, structuring and assessing bids for crime prevention action funding and managing and monitoring crime prevention projects. 5Is may also be adaptable to other practice areas such as public health or wider social innovation.

The 5Is Framework has two aspects. As an advanced process model it supplies practitioners with know-how to guide the planning and execution of future action. As a knowledge capture framework it can enable practitioners and evaluators to describe past action in the form of detailed case studies and, if implemented systematically, knowledge base entries rich in practical information. The captured knowledge can then be distilled and fed back to develop the process model, and together, these can drive performance.

The 5Is covers five interlinked task streams:

Intelligence, Intervention, Implementation, Involvement and Impact.

Each task stream is further differentiated into detailed subsidiary tasks, organised using supplementary conceptual frameworks. For example, the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity Framework supplies (for Intelligence) an integrated map of the immediate causes (and theories) of criminal events, and (for Intervention) a counterpart map of preventive principles/ mechanisms. And the CLAIMED Framework (for Involvement) addresses how to mobilise people and organisations to undertake crime prevention roles and tasks.

5Is also uses a standardised and carefully-designed set of terms and definitions of key concepts such as crime prevention, security and community safety. It has been expressly designed for knowledge management, with reference to a clear specification of requirements.

5Is is deliberately more sophisticated than alternative approaches to knowledge management in crime prevention. Its fundamental tenet is that trainers, programme managers and researchers have grossly over-simplified the guidance they give to practitioners on the mistaken assumption that practitioners do not want, and cannot handle, anything more sophisticated.

5Is is based on the axiom that in order to help practitioners address a real-world domain that is messy and complex in itself (as practitioners know in their every working day), the frameworks they are given as tools for thinking and communication should themselves be sufficiently subtle and sophisticated. In parallel with leading designer Donald Norman, 5Is follows the principle of ‘appropriate complexity’.

The 5Is Framework is also designed to be flexible and adaptive, able to describe the complex ‘stories’ of crime prevention activity. In this way, practitioners can be helped to better formulate and clarify their own problems; select appropriate action to emulate; and either replicate this action intelligently customised to context, or innovate based on first principles.

The vision is of practitioners who are more like consultants with experience and organised principles at their fingertips, and less like technicians with limited diagnostic and response repertoires.

5Is process model – structure

5Is is organised as a sequence of five interlinked task streams for undertaking action in crime prevention, security and community safety. They emphasise the bringing together of evidence and experience – covering the crime problem, the context, what works and how to realise it. This often involves a range of different people or organisations being mobilised or acting in partnership with ‘professional’ crime preventers.

These are the five task streams:

Intelligence, Intervention, Implementation, Involvement, Impact

These task streams are described in more detail below, along with illustration of the kinds of knowledge which can be captured under each.

5Is has four hierarchical levels of detail:

The hierarchy diagram below shows the four levels of detail graphically:

The task streams form an idealised sequence of steps; however, in practice the order may not be so linear; it may even be recursive or iterative. For example, it may be necessary to establish a multi-agency Partnership (under Involvement) before information contributing to Intelligence can be exchanged. And likewise, in order to identify appropriate partners and to negotiate the possibility of Involving them in joint action, it may be necessary to gather Intelligence about them.

The tasks are organised at the Methodology level using supplementary frameworks. For example, (as illustrated above), the CLAIMED process (for Involvement/ Mobilisation) addresses how to mobilise people and organisations to undertake crime prevention roles and tasks. And the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity Framework supplies (for Intelligence) an integrated map of the immediate causes (and theories) of criminal events, and (for Intervention) a counterpart map of preventive principles/ mechanisms.

5Is also uses a standardised and carefully-designed set of terms, definitions and concepts such as crime prevention, security and community safety. 5Is has been expressly designed for knowledge management, with reference to a deliberate specification of requirements – see Chapter 6 of the 5Is book.

5Is – task streams and tasks

INTELLIGENCE is about gathering and analysing information on:

• Crime and disorder problems and their consequences for community safety (a wider, ‘quality of life’ and ‘harm reduction’ concept)
• Offenders and their modus operandi
• Causes of the crime problem – preferably using the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity Framework but it is possible to use the Problem Analysis Triangle as a more elementary alternative
• With longer-term, developmental prevention, the ‘risk and protective factors’ in young children’s life circumstances which are associated with later criminality
• Intelligence for the other four task streams, including identifying partners and people to mobilise, demographic information to aid targeting and other Implementation activities etc

INTERVENTION is about blocking, disrupting or weakening the causes of criminal events. Interventions are described at three levels:

• Crime prevention objectives – which crime problems are intended to be reduced in frequency and/or severity; which indicators of community safety are to be improved
• Generic principles of intervention (preferably using the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity Framework) and
• Detailed practical methods of prevention customised to context

For example, preventing shoplifting (objective) by reducing the attractiveness of target property (principle, linking cause and intervention), by affixing ink capsules to clothing on display in shops (practical method). Further discussion of alternative ways of describing planned or past interventions is under discourses.

IMPLEMENTATION is about converting the intervention principles and methods into practical action on the ground. It covers:

• Inputs of funds and human resources
• Process describing practical actions taken such as targeting on offenders, victims, buildings, places and products, planning, management, organisation, monitoring and quality-assurance
• Outputs (actions implemented in the real world (e.g. numbers and quality of houses receiving security equipment, young people attending youth club)
• Handling of ethical issues

To guide the selection and planning of action, the basic information listed below needs to be determined:

• Over what timescale and what geographical scale the action is designed to operate (e.g. does it deliver a short, medium or long-term impact on crime? Is it a local, regional, national or international intervention?)
• At what ‘ecological level’ the action operates – individual, family, peer group, community, market, network, society
• The tradeoffs the action has with other policy values (e.g. with privacy, energy consumption, bureaucracy, justice) and how they were resolved in the context in question
• The scope of the action – whether it tackles a narrow range of crime types or a broad range
• The coverage of the action on the ground – how much of the crime problem it can tackle (e.g. is it cost-effective only in high-crime areas, or all areas?)

INVOLVEMENT is about the ‘people and organisations’ side of action. It covers:

• Mobilising other agencies, companies and individuals to play their part in implementing the intervention, or
• Acting in partnership
• A range of other tasks such as accountability

In both cases specifying:

• Who were involved
• What broad roles or specific tasks they undertook
• How they were alerted, motivated, empowered or directed (e.g. respectively by publicity campaigns, financial incentives or sanctions, security advice, standards or objectives)
• How a broadly supportive climate was created in the community and how any hostility (for example to the police) was reduced

These aspects of mobilisation are set out in detail in the CLAIMED process, a Methodology-level task for mobilising crime preventers/demobilising crime promoters. Its position in the 5Is hierarchy of tasks is shown in the hierarchy diagram above.

The Crime Role Grid relates to the Involvement task stream. The Grid cross-classifies crime roles (including offenders, preventers and promoters) with civil roles (e.g. user, resident, landlord) as a means of mapping complex human systems for planning and implementing preventive policies and actions.

IMPACT and PROCESS evaluation specify the kinds of evaluation desired (first box below) and the information to be assembled for planning and undertaking them (second box below):

• The nature of the evaluation itself (how the project was assessed, by whom; whether this was a reliable, systematic and independent evaluation; and what kind of evaluation design and statistical tests were used)
• Impact results focusing on the ultimate outcome – how much crime reduction was achieved and how much community safety was improved (e.g. through reduced fear of crime); what interventions worked, and if possible how they worked (the causal mechanisms believed to have been activated)
• Intermediate outcomes (e.g. ‘change in attitude of young people to the ownership of property’ – a first step on the path to the ultimate outcome of crime reduction)
• Process evaluation results can be described for each of the 5Is tasks – including information helpful for replication (what problems and tradeoffs were faced in each of the tasks, and how they were resolved); what worked for each of the other tasks (e.g. which methods of involvement were successful)

Information sought from evaluations

The kinds of information to be collected in a given evaluation will depend on their purpose:

• Outcome; Cost-effectiveness; whether benefits significantly outweigh costs; whether the action has any serious undesirable side-effects (e.g. increasing fear of crime)
• Sustainability of actions in effectiveness, financial, and Human Resource terms – how long the intervention can be maintained, how long the impact lasts
• Responsiveness of actions – whether they can be efficiently targeted on causes of the crime problem, and efficiently prioritised on basis of the consequences of crime, needs of victim and wider society
• Legitimacy and acceptability of actions to community
• Adaptability of actions – assessment of how far they are proofed against social/ technological change and adaptive offenders
• Replicability:
  • Whether actions are implementable with an acceptable level of risk, given the context and the resources available (e.g. if the action requires a charismatic leader of a youth club, finding such a person cannot be guaranteed)
  • Which contextual conditions and infrastructure are helpful, or necessary, to successfully replicate this project – or particular elements of it

Ideally, only knowledge from reliably and independently evaluated projects should be captured using 5Is. However, such evaluations are still too rare, and for cost reasons supply will never meet demand – so for the interim at least, 5Is can equally be used to capture and apply experience-based knowledge. Even the most rigorously-evaluated and articulated project generates and uses tacit knowledge (Tilley 2006) – but interviewing practitioners in depth using 5Is headings can help to make some of this publicly available.

The place of 5Is in evaluation more generally

The general Crime Frameworks page on evaluation covers broader approaches to the methods and uses of evaluation. It contains an account of the place of the 5Is Framework in evaluation.

5Is as a knowledge capture framework

In its knowledge capture mode, 5Is uses the same structure as the process model. Here, though, the task streams, tasks, methodology and detail used to guide action, take the form of headings and subheadings used to record and describe it, then organise it in, and retrieve it from, a knowledge base.

Knowledge capture can be done in this ‘headline’ fashion. By preference, though, the 5Is Framework should be used at as detailed a level as possible, to extract the most benefit out of what may be months or years of practical experience – successes and failures – in working on a project or service. A half-page summary of a project in a glossy report of a crime prevention programme is no substitute for this.

Full project descriptions take 5-10 pages depending on the amount, complexity and newsworthiness of the preventive action. (Shorter descriptions could cover just the ‘best bits’ of projects, for more experienced practitioners.) A full description of a burglary project is here. A presentation on an underage drinking and disorder case study here, and a formal description of the same project is here. All 5Is case studies are here.

Using the 5Is (sub)headings as consistently as possible helps communication and retrieval. Different crime prevention projects may be organised in very different ways (some may use several methods of prevention). To build in flexibility, writers can vary the order of the description providing that headings are clear. The content – what information is documented – should be chosen on the basis of what is judged to be critical for success of the project; what is newsworthy (including to less-experienced practitioners); and what is needed just to complete the picture and make it intelligible.

5Is guidance material

The full guidance for compiling 5Is descriptions of crime prevention, security and community safety action supplies more detail of the kinds of information to include. There is also a simpler master list of 5Is headings/ subheadings. Both are here.

5Is, complexity and adaptability

5Is is deliberately more advanced and sophisticated than alternative approaches to knowledge management in crime prevention. It is predicated on the belief that trainers, programme managers and researchers have grossly over-simplified the guidance they give to practitioners on the mistaken assumption that practitioners do not want, and cannot handle, anything more sophisticated.

In contrast to the (over)simplification tendency, 5Is is based on the axiom that in order to help practitioners address a real-world domain that is messy and complex in itself (as practitioners know in their every working day), the frameworks they are given as tools for thinking and communication should themselves be more subtle and sophisticated. In parallel with leading designer Donald Norman, 5Is follows the principle of ‘appropriate complexity‘.

5Is is also designed to be flexible and adaptive, able to describe the complex ‘stories’ of crime prevention activity in a way that helps practitioners formulate and clarify their own problems, select appropriate action to emulate, and either replicate this action intelligently customised to context or innovate based on first principles.

Sidebottom and Tilley (2011) review knowledge management frameworks for crime prevention and attribute a limited take-up of 5Is relative to SARA to the former’s complexity. However, this takes no account of the vastly greater resources dedicated to disseminating and providing guidance on SARA. The article does, though, include a quote on 5Is from a focus group of Problem-Oriented Policing practitioners (p234), “Getting over the initial hurdle is difficult but worth the ‘frown time.’”

5Is – origins

The name ‘5Is’ was first introduced at the Aalborg conference of the European Crime Prevention Network (EUCPN) in 2002 as a means of standardising information on good practice across member states. However, the central ideas have a long history. Ekblom (1988), in the first published guide to crime pattern analysis, introduced the term preventive process as a generic label for the rational, ‘action research’ model of crime prevention applied and developed in the UK Home Office and North America from the mid-70s and leading also to the ‘SARA’ process of Problem-Oriented Policing (e.g. Clarke and Eck 2003).

As practical experience of crime prevention developed, and as UK government policy increasingly supported local, non-justice-based crime prevention (culminating in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998), there was growth in dedicated training for crime prevention. Various national working groups and projects arose with an interest in the ‘core competencies’ of doing crime prevention. The Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity Framework expanded in stages from its initial focus on causes and interventions to take in various process elements which later became hived off to the 5Is Framework.

A multi-national Council of Europe project to introduce crime prevention into Ukraine (Alexandersson et al. 1999) identified the importance of transferring good practice via specifying generic crime prevention tasks drawn together in a process model, rather than suggesting organisational structures, and set out one such model. Transfer of good practice knowledge in the context of crime prevention programmes was explored in depth in a paper From the Source to the Mainstream is Uphill (Ekblom 2002), which laid much of the conceptual groundwork for knowledge management in crime prevention.

The Danish Crime Prevention Council, organisers of the first good practice conference of the newly-founded European Crime Prevention Network, invited Paul Ekblom to develop a framework for capturing and sharing that good practice. 5Is was the result. 5Is was used for EUCPN practice conferences for several years (and is likely to return as of 2023), and has featured in several other UK and international contexts.

Video interview

A video interview in which Paul Ekblom explains the rationale and features of 5Is was recorded at the University of Sydney in 2010.

Feedback

Feedback and queries on 5Is are welcome. If you have used 5Is, please send copies of any relevant documents (in any language), web addresses etc.