The Crime Frameworks enable effective collection, organisation, sharing and application of knowledge in crime prevention, security and community safety, making these activities more systematic, rigorous and efficient.
This page lists the Crime Frameworks presented on other pages of this website, and then briefly discusses how they relate to the key issues of understanding causes of criminal events, and envisioning interventions. Finally, a connection is made to approaches based on risk and protective factors.
To find out more about what the Crime Frameworks are for, and who they are for, see here.
To see why better Crime Frameworks are needed, see here.
| Crime Framework | |
| Terms, definitions & concepts | Building blocks for all the Crime Frameworks – systematic, consistent, in-depth suite of terms, definitions and concepts for crime prevention and security. |
| 5Is | A process model for doing crime prevention which is a more detailed equivalent of SARA; and a knowledge-management framework for capturing, assessing, synthesising, transferring and replicating good practice in crime prevention. |
| CLAIMED | A methodology for mobilising individuals and organisations to take responsibility/ assume a particular role for implementing and supporting security action – comes under the Involvement task stream in 5Is. |
| Crime Role Grid | Tabulates crime roles x civil roles (e.g. offender x householder) to aid the targeting of offenders, involvement of crime preventers and blocking of crime promoters in complex crimes. |
| Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity and Conjunction of Terrorist Opportunity | Integrated, one-stop-shop framework of immediate causes of criminal events, and principles of intervention to block them, to aid analysis of crime problems and generation of theoretically-plausible interventions. Equivalent to Problem Analysis Triangle, but more detailed/extensive. The terrorist version is adapted to handle terrorism events. |
| Ds | How security interventions work by influencing the offender, offering a fresh perspective for generating and evaluating action. |
| Disruption | Diverse ways of adversely influencing groups/ networks of organised criminals/ terrorists – going beyond the customary superficial use of the term to stimulate better thought-through interventions. |
| Co-Eco-Devo-Evo | Interactions between offenders and security on a range of timeframes, from here-and-now, to learning/resource acquisition, to arms races, to facilitate better tactical and strategic planning of intervention. |
| Misdeeds & Security | How offenders may exploit or harm things and people in their environment, and how security can respond. An aid to forecasting which maps out the generic types of crime risk that may be associated with a particular kind of new technology or design of product, place, procedure or system; and the counterpart opportunities for prevention. |
| Security Function and Vibrant-Secure Function | Systematic way of specifying security requirements for new designs, or describing security-related aspects of existing designs – purpose, security niche, mechanism, technicality. The vibrant version combines what we want more of with what we want less of. |
A discussion of a suitable design specification for frameworks, and other issues, is under Knowledge in crime and security.
Causes and interventions
Understanding the causes of criminal events, and how to intervene in those causes to make them impossible to commit, less likely or less harmful, is at the heart of crime prevention. The traditional Crime Science perspectives (Rational Choice, Routine Activities, Geometry of Crime) have generated and guided much valuable research and practice over decades; but they are fragmentary, overlapping and ‘underlapping’. They also neglect much knowledge on the offender side, such as resources for committing crime, which is important even for the better design of situational interventions (on the ‘think perpetrator’ principle).
The coverage of causes and interventions by the Crime Frameworks is diverse.
In the 5Is Framework, causes come under the Intelligence task stream, and interventions under, well, Intervention.
The Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity is a one-stop shop – which integrates, fills in and extends the traditional Crime Science perspectives in mapping out the immediate causes of criminal events from an ecological/ psychological angle, and the generic principles of intervention focused on blocking, weakening or diverting those causes.
The Ds Framework focuses on the mechanisms by which interventions work, in terms of how they influence the offender, including deterrence but going way beyond it, in search of wider coverage and greater precision. There is also an extension of the Ds to cover various forms of Disruption of organised crime and terrorism.
Co-Eco-Devo-Evo considers causes and interventions in terms of the interactions between the various crime roles, and with their environments that operate over different time frames – here-and-now, developmental and evolutionary.
The Security Function Framework & Vibrant-Secure Function Framework cover causes and interventions in two ways – as mechanisms by which a given security design is intended to work; and in terms of technicality, i.e. how the design is constructed and how it operates in practice.
Risk and Protective Factors
Risk and Protective Factors are correlates of the risk of offending, or of being the victim or target of crime. An example of risk factors is Clarke’s (1999) Hot Products, with risk factors listed as CRAVED. An example of protective factors identified for mobile phones by Whitehead et al. (2008) listed (with admirable effort) was IN SAFE HANDS. Risk and Protective Factors of course feature strongly in offender-oriented interventions (Farrington et al. 2012; see also the Communities that Care Program).
From a practical point of view, Risk and Protective Factors are functionally-equivalent to causes, discussed above. Both these factors, and causes, are to be reduced through crime prevention, security or community safety interventions, with the ultimate aim of reducing the risk of crime.
But because they are correlates rather than causes, there is no guarantee that influencing Risk and Protective Factors will actually reduce the risk of crime. However, the more they are both empirically and theoretically-plausible (by ensuring they connect to tested and well-articulated theoretical principles, as advocated here), the better the chances that they will succeed.
CRIME FRAMEWORKS 