How to police the future: scanning for scientific and technological innovations which generate potential threats and opportunities in crime, policing and crime reduction

This paper, arose from my long-standing involvement in horizon-scanning, technological innovation and crime prevention within Home Office research. It emerged from my work to systematically/rigorously identify future crime risks and prevention opportunities posed by advances in hard science and technology (a need identified by the Police Science and Technology Strategy Group), acknowledging social-science-oriented crime prevention alongside science and technology.

I developed the ‘Misdeeds and Security’ framework described here, underpinning it theoretically and practically using my Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity framework for mapping causes of crime and prevention principles. A multidisciplinary group of scientists, social scientists, engineers, forensic scientists, and police used it to review candidate innovations, identify significant ones and report to the Strategy Group. The wider purpose was to ‘alert, motivate and empower’ scientists, technologists and designers to ‘think thief’, to recruit them as ‘scouts’ to spot crime risks/preventive opportunities within their diverse fields and to inform design of new tools and technologies for preventing crime.

The Misdeeds and Security framework was incorporated in the reports of the Government Foresight Project ‘Cyber Trust and Crime Prevention’ and I was invited to produce ‘crime scenarios’ for the subsequent ‘Intelligent Infrastructure’ project. The Misdeeds and Security framework now imparts ‘futures’ perspectives to the Design Against Crime Research Centre’s work, supporting its objective to empower designers to 'think thief' by identifying the broad kinds of crime risk facing their products.

Paul Ekblom

Research Interests

Theory, development, implementation & evaluation of Design Against Crime.

Definitions & conceptual frameworks for knowledge transfer of good practice in crime prevention.

Horizon scanning, incl. crime risk/ impact assessment.

Evolution, arms races, complexity & simulation applied to crime.

Current Research

1.Principal Investigator, AHRC-funded project, with JDI/UCL, to design, implement and evaluate range of security products intended to reduce theft of customers' bags in bars. Based on this, developing concepts and language for describing/specifying security and security weaknesses in designed products, systems and environments.

2. Co-investigator, AHRC-funded project to develop more secure bike parking, including through guidance and standards. Based on my part of this work, recently completed, www.bikeoff.org/2009/01/05/final-report-wpa2-of-bike-off-2/ developing advanced frameworks for supporting crime risk analysis leading to design guidance. Currently discussing development of these frameworks in built environment and anti-terrorist contexts.

3. Currently writing book to elaborate key concepts, details and applications of 5Is framework, an advanced process model for crime prevention, and used in capture, synthesis and retrieval of good practice knowledge, supporting intelligenf replication and innovation. See www.designagainstcrime.com/web/crimeframeworks. Related to this, involved as partner in EU-funded project Beccaria on developing crime prevention training in EU and a range of informal national/international collaborations on knowledge management.

5. Developing new ways of thinking about Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design based on a tighter conceptual/theoretical framework than currently exists.

6. Investigating scope for using graphic/communications design to represent complexity in policy/practice systems such as, but not confined to, crime prevention.