Taught Red-Handed: Learning Crime Prevention from Offenders

• In Event: You Can Teach an Old Dog a New Trick: Enhancing Policing Strategies

Abstract

Police crime prevention efforts are often focused at the aggregate level; however, this can overlook the nature of crime at the individual-level of the offender, meaning that crime prevention policies may risk being somewhat 'removed' from the offender on the street. The current paper seeks to address this within the context of residential burglary. This paper will present work undertaken into the decision-making processes of burglars in Leeds, in the north of England. The research involved a series of semi-structured interviews with offenders with current or previous convictions for burglary, to explore their target selection criteria when choosing a property to burgle. Participants also engaged in a 'property image task', where they were asked to select properties that would be attractive to burgle from an array of property images, identifying features that would attract or deter them from targeting each property. This paper will conclude by discussing how this work has been utilised by local criminal justice agencies; namely, West Yorkshire Police and Safer Leeds Partnership, for the purposes of crime prevention.

Authors

• Nick Addis, Sheffield Hallam University

• Andrew Evans, University of Leeds

• Susanne Karstedt, Griffith University

• Nicolas Malleson, University of Leeds