The sharing and accumulation of knowledge – whether experience-based, research-based or ideally both – requires deliberate effort and design so it can best support thinking, communication and collaboration.
This page introduces the need for the field of crime prevention, security and community safety to dedicate resources to developing its glossaries and ontologies. It includes:
- A glossary for terrorism and crime at complex stations
- An ontology for Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED)
- An ontology for understanding reciprocal changes between offenders and security over different time frames – Co-Eco-Devo-Evo
- A glossary for secure products
- A list of alternative discourses for describing crime prevention action in different contexts of use
The main page listing terms, definitions and concepts is here; and the main page on knowledge in crime and security here.
Glossaries are a familiar, albeit often neglected, aspect of scholarship and practice. Ontologies are perhaps less widely-known. Originally a term in traditional philosophy, an ontology is now used to refer to a formal naming and definition of types, properties, and inter-relationships of entities that exist for a particular domain of discourse in science, practice or in this case, both. (see difference between glossary and ontology here.)
The value of a properly formulated ontology is that it permits us to closely track what is included within a conceptual framework or model and to deliberately make relevant additions, subtractions or amendments to the key elements where considered appropriate, as the developing ontology itself ‘learns’ to handle reality, and that reality itself continues to change.
Treating ontology as a process is important because at any given moment some concepts are inherently hard to resolve and with others, premature fixation of a controlled vocabulary may stifle conceptual development (particularly when combining of disciplines is being explored) and excessively constrain research and practice (cf. Driscoll 2017).
So far, two glossaries and two in-progress ontologies have been developed with Paul Ekblom’s involvement. One of the glossaries covers the secure design of products; the other accompanies a toolkit for counterterrorism and crime prevention at complex stations. The ontologies cover CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) terms and concepts, and a cybercrime-focused exercise with an evolutionary focus.
It is inevitable, when glossaries and ontologies are developed at different stages of thinking, for different purposes and with involvement with different disciplines, that there will be inconsistencies, overlaps and gaps between them. The glossaries and ontologies on this page are as consistent as possible with the terms and definitions set out on this page. The intention is ultimately to merge them in a single, unified and up-to-date glossary. However, tensions between the different disciplines that crime science has to dance with may mean that slightly different alternative definitions may need to be preserved.
Links are provided below to the topics/projects from which the glossaries/ ontologies derived.
Glossary for secure products
Background
A glossary was produced with Aiden Sidebottom of UCL (Ekblom and Sidebottom 2008), in a first attempt to develop an integrated and rigorous suite of definitions spanning the unclear divide between the fields of crime prevention and security. The definitions relate to the theft-centred risks, and counterpart security properties, attached to domestic electronic consumer products such as mobile phones or music players. although it does contain more generic terms. Some revisions are planned for consistency with more recent glossaries. The full glossary is on a separate page:
Glossary for terrorism and crime at complex stations
Background
This glossary was produced as part of an EU-funded project to develop an interactive toolkit to guide security managers to prevent, and prepare for, terrorist and criminal incidents at complex, ‘multimodal’ rail stations. The glossary element was developed based on diverse sources including current Situational Crime Prevention thinking and an earlier ‘risk lexicon’ by US Department of Homeland Security. But it also reflected the specific needs of this project and aligns as far as possible with Crime Frameworks.
One distinguishing feature of the glossary is a graphical representation of the relationships between the various terms/ concepts.
The glossary, including the graphical version, is covered in more detail here:
Ontology – sharpening up Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design
Initial ontological work (Ekblom 2011b) sought to develop CPTED from the top down, starting with the familiar principles of surveillance, defensible space, territoriality etc, and defining and differentiating these. This included distinguishing between, for example, the act of surveillance and the environmental property of surveillability. An earlier presentation on territoriality is here.
The later study (Ekblom 2019) sought ways to connect CPTED more closely to Crime Science and architecture, and to recent computational approaches including simulated environments. The aim was to start from the bottom up, identifying a range of conceptual ‘primitives’ from which the higher-level principles could be constructed and/or defined.
Some of these primitives came from Crime Science but were supplemented by a wider and more generic framework of ecology. Examples of such primitives are the causal properties of spatial containment, movement and perceivability, as influenced by structural features of the built environment and any content (such as walls or parked vehicles obscuring perceivability). These three kinds of primitives can be brought together, as in the green box of the following diagram, which also incorporates the concept of different discourses for describing preventive interventions:
A note setting out these environmental properties more systematically is here.
The human/social side of CPTED
In order to understand the effects of the built environment, and crime preventive changes in its design and management, it is also necessary to understand the human agents who respond to, and modify, that environment in various roles, whether as offenders, preventers or promoters of crime. Although the ontology was centred on the immediate crime situation, it sought to incorporate the more community-oriented aspects of Second-Generation CPTED (Saville and Cleveland 2003a,b) and the contextual aspects of architecture and design.
A presentation covering this aspect is here.
Ontology – Co-Eco-Devo-Evo
Background
This ontology emerged from a sequence of evolutionary studies and the opportunity to apply the thinking within the context of an EPRC-funded project on human factors in cybercrime, Project ACCEPT.). The project leader was Shujun Li (University of Kent) and main collaborators on the ontology are Michael McGuire (University of Surrey), Ingolf Becker (UCL) and Hervé Borrion (UCL).
Three timeframes and reciprocal relations
The ‘Co-Eco-Devo-Evo’ framework was designed to help policymakers, practitioners and researchers to get a grip on the rapidly-moving and jinking target of cybercrime, but with relevance too for material crime. It distinguishes between changes over different timeframes; and the fact that at each timeframe, there exist reciprocal relations between offenders and the security side.
The timeframes distinguish three fundamental aspects of physical, social, informational and technological interaction between agents and their environment: Ecology, Development, Evolution. In more detail:
- Ecology refers to the familiar here-and-now tactical interactions between offenders, crime preventers, crime promoters, victims, material/cyber targets and places – as described, for example, through familiar crime science frameworks brought together in the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity.
- Development covers change, including learning, within the lifetime and career of offenders and preventers, and over the lifetime of particular deployed products or systems.
- Evolution covers change across populations (of individuals, groups, cultures, products and systems) and over generations. While lessons are drawn from biology, the main focus is on cultural evolution.
- Recent advances in evolutionary thinking enable further application to co-evolutionary arms races, niche construction and other concepts relevant to crime prevention and security.
- The reciprocal ‘co-‘ element applies to all three timeframes – hence co-eco-devo-evo.
This diagram (from Islam et al. 2019) represents the key relationships of Co-Eco-Devo-Evo:
Discourses
As the above glossaries and ontologies on this page have shown, there are many ways of describing a crime prevention/ security intervention. Deliberately choosing which to adopt may help to guide contextually-appropriate thinking and action, and allow us to jump out of locked-in ways of viewing particular crime problems/solutions.
In the design world, these different ways of talking about some product, service, system or place are called discourses. The following list (from Ekblom 2012g) sets out alternative ways of referring to, for example, a burglary prevention project:
- Purposive: serving user (protecting householders), crime reduction (reducing burglary risk)
- Performance: purpose plus ultimate quantitative crime reduction target criteria (e.g. reduce burglary in area by 10%) or intermediate outcome criteria (e.g. alley gate to resist attack by burglars for five minutes)
- Risk-management: mostly used in the professional security world (e.g. avoid, accept, treat or transfer burglary risk)
- Reverse-purposive: frustrating offender’s purpose (e.g. disrupting burglary plans)
- Problem-oriented: tackling specific problem (burglary) in specific place, perhaps by specific method (e.g. gaining access via rear alleyways)
- Ideal Final Result: solution-oriented/design requirement descriptions in terms of all the purposes and/or performance criteria (e.g. reduce burglary cost-effectively whilst maintaining user convenience, safety, sustainability and aesthetic quality)
- Positive: what we want more of, rather than less of – a design approach that emphasises, say, people feeling safe and secure in their homes
- Mechanistic: how the intervention is supposed to work causally/theoretically (e.g. increasing effort and risk to offenders by creating target enclosures)
- Reverse-causal: focusing on the causes of crime the intervention aims to remove, weaken or divert (e.g. tackling poorly-defensible space, compensating for absent guardians, addressing vulnerabilities)
- Technical/structural realisation: how the intervention is achieved through a practical procedure or product (e.g. creating enclosure with lockable wrought iron alley gates)
- Constructional/instructional: how to manufacture, implement, install or operate method (e.g. alley gate customisation, installation and locking procedure)
- Delivery: targeting of interventions (e.g. ‘primary, secondary, tertiary prevention’ or as I prefer, ‘universal, selected, indicated’ (5Is book, Ch 8); often regrettably used as a substitute for specifying the actual intervention)
- Mobilisation: how to get people to implement the intervention (e.g. anti-burglary publicity campaign centring on acceptance and use of alley gates)
- Partnership: ‘working with’ some group or organisation to implement a burglary intervention (often regrettably used as a substitute for specifying the actual intervention)
The Security Function Framework describes interventions in a design frame using several of the above discourses, namely purpose, mechanism, technical/constructional.
These discourses can be confused by security practitioners – it is common to see a publicity campaign, for example, listed in a series of preventive methods alongside target-hardening, when the campaign could in fact be seeking to mobilise target-hardening. It is also obvious from the above list that there is no universally best discourse – some will be optimal for the strategic planning or impact evaluation stages; others for design; others for standard-setting, manufacture or gaining public acceptance. The important thing is for practitioners and researchers to be self-aware of which discourse they are using, which their collaborators are assuming and when is the appropriate occasion for a particular discourse.
Intervention, action, activity, task, measure
In both literature and practice, terms to describe action in crime prevention, security and community safety are used interchangeably. This makes for confusion in sharing research and knowledge of practice, hence some further definitions are offered, based on the 5Is Framework:
- Intervention has a more specific meaning relating to blocking, weakening or deflecting the causes of criminal events.
- Action is taken here to cover anything done in service of the entire preventive process (intelligence, intervention, implementation, involvement and impact).
- A group of actions, with or without a common theme or purpose, could be taken as activity.
- Within the 5Is Framework specific purposive actions are referred to as tasks, and the 5Is headings (Intelligence, Intervention etc) as task streams to reflect the fact that they are not rigidly sequential but can be undertaken in parallel or in loops (e.g. Intelligence for Involvement).
- Measures is a loose and general vernacular term for intervention but may stray to include e.g. involvement (e.g. when a ‘lock it or lose it’ publicity campaign is listed as a measure – it is actually not an intervention, but a means of involving householders, say, to implement the intervention of locking their doors and windows). There is also the potential for confusion with measurement, under intelligence or impact evaluation. Ideally the term is best avoided.
CRIME FRAMEWORKS 