SITUATIONAL CRIME PREVENTION (SCP)

Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) emerged more than 40 years ago and is based upon a well-developed interdisciplinary model drawing from criminology, economics, psychology and sociology. Its major concepts include: rational choice, specificity, opportunity structure, and its 25 prevention techniques.

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This approach shifts responsibility from people onto things – while asking how crime occurs, its focus is to stop crime at the site of criminal activity. This often means responsibility for crime control moves away from police and onto public and private organisations most competent to reduce it. Importantly, a growing number of empirical studies and scientific evaluations have demonstrated SCP’s effectiveness in reducing crime.

 

Gamman & Thorpe (2016) [link here] have explained how SCP has informed the Design Against Crime methodology that seeks to ensure that secure design, whilst inhibiting crime, should not look criminal or be difficult to operate. The article explains how SCP was successfully taken up by police and Government as a way of motivating anti-crime behaviour, long before the Nudge Unit emerged working directly with the Cabinet Office.

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