History• My long-standing involvement in crime prevention

policy, delivery and practice from Home Office days• Evaluation of Safer Cities Programme 1988-95

exposed me to problems of describing, and quality assuring, huge variety of preventive action

• Taken forward during start-up of EU Crime Prevention Network 2001-

• Then Home Office interest in Knowledge Management 2003- which sadly petered out

• Now a more general revival in Knowledge Transfer, and need for crime prevention to be smarter for fewer resources

The book

http://5isframework.wordpress.com

The problem addressed by the book

Problem with replicating good performance in crime prevention, security & community safety:

– Pervasive implementation failure

Knowledge as a cause of the problem• Many causes of implementation failure, but interested in those

centring on knowledge• Limitations of practice knowledge and how it’s captured,

consolidated, evaluated and transferred, has implications for practice, delivery, policy

• Fragmentation of CP field into Situational and Offender-Oriented interventions, implemented through very different institutions

• Fragmentation within domains such as SCP, with 3 poorly-integrated theories and suites of terms

• Failure to address rich, messy complexity of crime prevention, extreme context-dependency of what works, and Heraclitean world of social/technological change and adaptive offenders

• Instead, several alternative strategies, equally maladaptive – Pervasive faith that simplicity is all you need to get practitioners doing it right;

and all that practitioners can take – so slogans, checklists, limited career paths– Rigid adherence to procedures and prescriptions – programme fetishism– Surrender to ineffability of crime prevention

The solution in principle – strategic concepts• Appropriate complexity

– Theories as simple as possible but no simpler (Einstein) – Add a little, structured complexity to help practitioners handle vast complexity of real world (Ashby)

which they daily have to address– Add underlying structure to live with complexity (Norman)

• Articulating knowledge & concepts– Tacit knowledge (Polanyi, Tilley) hard to transfer– Unclear or conflicting discourses are blunt tools for thinking and communication nationally/

internationally

• Backwards compatible with existing frameworks, but improving on them – e.g. SARA, Crime Triangle

• Integrated approach – Incorporating full range of interventions - situational and offender-oriented – and institutional contexts

• Supporting both impact and process evaluation– What works.... and what is workable/deliverable

• Supporting both capture and application of practice knowledge– ‘Record’ and ‘Playback’

• Replication as innovation – Every context is different (Tilley)– Copy the process not the product (Blackmore)– Importance of causal mechanisms – how it works (Pawson, Tilley)

• Practitioners as consultants not technicians• Investing to deliver (Homel)

– Better education, guidance, career structure, infrastructure based on more sophisticated concepts leads to better performance

The solution in practice• Specification

– Setting out detailed features of a knowledge framework to realise the strategic requirements

• A framework to meet this specification– The 5Is process model of prevention – Intelligence,

Intervention, Implementation, Involvement, Impact– Suite of clear, interlocking terms for crime prevention and

its institutional settings – Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity – sophisticated

model of causes of crime and interventions – complete map of ‘diagnosis space’ and corresponding map of ‘intervention space’ for managing existing knowledge and stimulating generation of more

How the book sets out 5Is in detail• Under each ‘I’ task

– Foundations• Key definitions (e.g. ‘Intelligence’)• Contextual considerations• Process, methods and mechanisms of undertaking the task• Purposes of describing this task• Structuring the action description

– Content• Helps define the scope of task • Illustrates kinds of rich information that can be systematically

captured and organised for retrieval under this task • Range of sources – situational and offender-oriented – from 5Is

descriptions of actions by police, youth services, national evaluations• Illustrates alternative formats relating variously to projects, services

and knowledge syntheses

– Master-list of headings/subheadings

Importance of design in developing 5Is• A criminologist fallen among designers... has affected the

development of 5Is in many ways

• Design needed because attempting to reconcile conflicting

requirements– Reconcile simplicity and complexity, richness and brevity

– Make concepts, structures and language precision tools, but usable and

communicable

• Design process– Requirements capture

– Developing a specification before realising that specification through 5Is

– Iteration – repeated trial and adjustment till get it about right

– Elements of co-design – e.g. in definition of community safety

• Design features to realise requirements– Zoom structure – handling the tradeoff between simplicity and complexity by

doing precisely what Donald Norman recommends

Zoom structure – reconciling simplicity and complexity, richness and brevity

Thanks Spike

Design through 5Is

• Besides getting designers to ‘think thief’, getting crime prevention practitioners to ‘draw on design’ – not just end products of design but design process

• This means incorporating design within the 5Is ‘how to’ process – Capturing demand under Intelligence– Putting together Intervention principles– Realising, testing and adjusting practical preventive

methods in Implementation and Involvement – customisation to context, iteration and innovation

– Design of Impact evaluations

Further applications for 5Is FrameworkBeyond capturing good practice examples, last chapter of book

explores further applications for 5Is:• Synthesis/ testing of principles and theories• Risk assessment & Failure-mode analysis at each ‘I’• Framework and source for toolkits, education and training • Supporting gap analyses for research, and strategic overviews for policy

and delivery – ‘deliverability’ as key dimension of Systematic Reviews of

what works• Generic framework for process evaluation – more efficient research• Prospective business-planning/appraising tool, for project development

and monitoring of implementation – ‘playback’ beside ‘record’• Fostering communication and collaboration nationally/internationally• Giving back to design

– Use of specific 5Is concepts e.g. ‘climate setting’

– Contribution to process model for doing design – and social innovation

– Exemplar for graphics/communications design students to address and resolve

complexity

Taking it forward• 5Is framework itself is not ‘finished’ – designed as a ‘learning engine’

• Want to resume collective, collaborative development – we think not just I think

• Vision– Move on from the book which is a statement of rationale by practice-

oriented academic, to material which can directly be used by practitioners, educators/trainers and delivery managers

– Practitioners as innovative, disciplined consultants not technicians

• Realisation – development of a web-based training/guidance facility that’s user-friendly but also user-challenging and empowering

• Ideally on an international basis – interest from Australia (AIC), Hong Kong, Sweden, Poland, Lithuania and possible others

• Needs collaboration and funding• Hopefully the ideas remain open-source but training facilities

may be profit-based

Complexity revisited – (1) From the book

The claim (in earlier HO report) that crime prevention

is “ ‘not rocket science’ can be turned on its head. The

science and the underlying technical principle of

rocketry are actually dead simple – feed fuel and

oxidant into a chamber, stand well back, ignite, apply

Newton’s laws of motion, and whoosh! What is difficult

are the detailed, practical engineering and control

systems required to reach the sky alive and not plough

into a nearby hillside. Just like crime prevention.”

(2) Donald Norman Oct 2010 Living With Complexity

“When complexity is unavoidable, when it mirrors the

complexity of the world or of the tasks that are being

done, then it is excusable, understandable, and

learnable. But when things are complicated, when the

complexity is the result of poor design with completely

arbitrary steps, with no apparent reason, then the

result is perplexing, confusing, and frustrating. Poor

design leads to the emotional distress we have come

to associate with modern technology. Good design

can provide a desirable, pleasurable sense of

empowerment.”

(3) A word from a practitioner

‘5Is is difficult, but worth the frown time’

Thanks Aiden

Thanks to...• Particular thanks to Martin Gill the book series editor who

kicked things off and to Palgrave Macmillan, the patient publishers.

• Grateful too, to the Home Office for allowing me to use various 5Is materials from my time in that august institution.

• Thanks too to my immediate colleagues in the DACRC for putting up with the distractions and abstractions, and getting me halfway to thinking like a designer... and laying on this launch.

• And finally thanks to CSM for the time I was able to dedicate to the book. I hope the return benefit comes not just from feeding into the impending REF but from future funded work from the DAC team, graphic design and other colleagues; and equally importantly, a fertile blending of ideas on the design process and the crime prevention process.

Thanks Eleanor