Policing and criminals are traditionally locked in an ‘arms race’, offenders adopt new tools or methods, police and law makers innovate in response and offenders adapt again. But new technologies, coupled with rapid social change and increased globalisation, mean this rate of change is becoming increasingly swift. However much they try to keep up, police organisations are finding themselves falling further behind.
The key issue, identified in the Police Foundation’s seminal A New Mode of Protection: A Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales is that policing alone isn’t enough to deal with modern crime challenges. It relies too much on reacting after crime instead of preventing it, and what prevention it does is often conceptually fragmented and thus of limited effectiveness.
What is needed, to riff on the Review’s title, is a New Mode of Prevention. In other words, we should stop trying to catch up, and instead prevent the race happening in the first place.
This paper Modes of Prevention: A Framework for Cutting Crime, first sets out why previous attempts to prevent crime have been of limited success. It describes the need for policing to narrow the field, to focus on criminal behaviour and to understand and organise crime prevention clearly using the best available evidence. It then sets out a more structured, mechanistic framework to help improve how we design and deliver prevention. The paper is being launched today at the CCJP AND P-ACE LAB ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2026 held jointly between Birmingham University’s Centre for Crime, Justice and Policing (CCJP) and P-ACE LAB (a consortium of the University of Birmingham, University of Leicester and Aston University).
Prevention is hard to do and hard to measure, and thus hard to fund. This is in part because it lacks conceptual clarity. There is no clear agreement on what crime prevention is, what it includes or how its different parts fit together. It can be physical security like locks and alarms, it can mean police patrols, or sports programmes for young people, it can also mean better housing, or improved health care. Because it includes so many activities, it can be confusing and unclear. As a result, ‘crime prevention’ becomes an umbrella term that risks meaning everything and therefore nothing. Coupled with this conceptual fuzziness is the lingering idea of criminals as rational actors and crime as personal responsibility. This ignores the fact that crime is influenced by emotions, situations and social context, as much as rational decisions – and so any successful approach must recognise this complex interaction between individuals and environments.
This paper creates that conceptual clarity, by first creating clear boundaries, identifying that crime should focus on proscribed harmful behaviour, basing prevention efforts on empirically informed descriptions of crime ‘problems’ and setting out clearly what mechanisms we have available to structure strategic and operational activities.
The framework itself has four key modes:
- Make crime harder
- Increase deterrence
- Reduce propensity
- Build social connections
We can stop making crime an option by simple changes. Rather than simply telling children not to share nude images of themselves, we can work with the tech sector to make it impossible for a child to take, let alone share, them. We can shut down crime as service websites so offenders cannot learn to commit fraud or ransom-ware attacks.
We can increase the likelihood that potential offenders will be identified, apprehended and legally sanctioned by using the evidence of what works, such as hotspot policing, and focused deterrence. We can also harness new technology and the power of the public through neighbourhood watches, journey cams and ring doorbells (future Police Foundation research will address this).
We can go beyond the ‘provocations’ that may be present in the immediate crime situation to look at long term reasons why some people may offend. We can offer social and mental health support such as cognitive behavioural therapy, to those who live precarious lives and where factors such as chronic stress, undiagnosed and untreated neurodiversity, head injury, environmental toxins and childhood trauma, mean they are at risk of committing crime.
We can prevent crime by building stronger communities. By treating the public fairly, courteously and by using minimum force, police can secure citizens’ willing compliance with laws. Engaging at risk or delinquent young people in sports or mentoring programmes can positively reinforce pro-social behaviour.
Ultimately, improving crime prevention is not just about doing more –
but about thinking more clearly about what we are doing, and why. Only then can policing finally break out of the wild torrent in which it is being swept along and finally get upstream.