Innovation and Crime Prevention

The UK Cox Report on creativity in business (HM Treasury 2005: 2), identifies three key interlinked terms:
‘Creativity’ is the generation of new ideas – either new ways of looking at existing problems, or of seeing new opportunities, perhaps by exploiting emerging technologies or changes in markets.
‘Innovation’ is the successful exploitation of new ideas. It is the process that carries them through to new products, new services, new ways of running the business or even new ways of doing business.
‘Design’ is what links creativity and innovation. It shapes ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users or customers. Design may be described as creativity deployed to a specific end.

Innovation, creativity and design of course occur not just in the scientific and technological domains but in the social, institutional, economic, environmental, commercial and legal. And the business in question could be a criminal enterprise, whether run by a lone, casual thief or the Camorra. This chapter focuses on innovation and creativity; design is covered separately by Ekblom in the 'Designing Products Against Crime' chapter of this encyclopedia.

Why should criminologists and crime scientists be interested in these concepts? Simply put, there is a dynamic such that innovation regulates both the quantity and the quality of crime opportunities and crime reduction solutions. Examples are given of obsolescent crimes and the process whereby they become obsolete. The metaphor of co-evolution or arms race between offender and preventer is found helpful in understanding the dynamic. It is noted that the consequence of this insight is the relative unhelpfulness for understanding crime trends of statistics of recorded crime, since the same crime label is attached to crimes whose nature and method has changed with the profile of presenting opportunities. The crime drop experienced throughout the Western world in the last decade of the twentieth century is interpreted in terms of a temporary advantage enjoyed by preventers, notably via enhanced security of motor vehicles. The integration is advocated of this understanding into the crime reduction enterprise, and into the strategy and tactics that follow.