Recent Evolution of Governmental Crime Prevention Strategies and Implications for Evaluation and Economic Analysis

Situational crime prevention and Public Safety Canada’s crime-prevention programme

“…It can take between ten to twenty years, if not a generation, for useful social development projects to run their course and demonstrate valuable results on both social welfare and crime (Waller 2008). These programmes also often require comprehensive problem evaluation and targeted intervention and prevention that can be quite expensive and beyond the means of the small grants offered by NCPC (Sherman et al 1998;Waller 2013) Furthermore, project-based evaluations do not examine the parts of the process that lead to success, making it difficult to replicate them on a larger scale (Sansfacon and Waller 2001). The evaluation method, often used to demonstrate if further funding should be allocated, is not in line with social development or good scientific scholarship.…”

“…This does not mean turning crime prevention back to a piecemeal community-based effort (Hastings 2005). Nor does it mean creating sweeping national policies that do not address specific crimes and make it difficult to disentangle cause and effect for evaluation (Sansfacon and Waller 2001). Rather, it means the centralized knowledge and funding for crime prevention is used to support localized efforts.…”