Securing the knowledge

Knowledge of practice is a vital part of any security capability, contributing to the quality of performance and our ability to keep up with adaptive offenders and changing social and technological context. It connects with, but goes beyond, the accepted understanding of an evidence-based approach. Management of practice knowledge has been significantly neglected, a shortcoming implicated in the implementation failure too often encountered in crime prevention/security programmes. This chapter covers the purpose and nature of security knowledge, its strengths and weaknesses, and its management. It concludes with examples of tools designed for sharing of crime prevention and security knowledge: the 5Is process model of crime prevention and security, and the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity, a map of causes of criminal events and interventions to block those causes.