60 Steps

Facilities are environments with special functions (Step 15). Educational facilities involve teaching and study. Industrial facilities produce and process materials. Office facilities process information. Retail facilities involve sales and monetary transactions. Some facilities are frequent sites for crime and incivilities. These include taverns, parks, railway stations, payphone booths, convenience stores, and public housing projects.

When one place has more crimes than another place, one possible reason is that one has more targets than another. Examining rates helps you understand if number of targets contributes to your problem (see Step 17).

Some people are repeatedly victimized and, in conformity with the 80-20 rule (Step 18), a small proportion of victims account for a large proportion of all victimizations. Ken Pease and Graham Farrell carefully documented this fact in a seminal Home Office publication called "Once Bitten, Twice Bitten". Using British Crime Survey data (see the table), they showed that about 4% of people experience about 40% of all victimizations in one year.

In line with the 80-20 principle (Step 18), not all products are equally at risk of theft because thieves are very picky about what they will steal. They focus on relatively few "hot products," such as cars, laptop computers, DVD players, and cell phones. The hottest product of all is cash, which Marcus Felson describes as "the mother's milk of crime." It is the most frequently stolen item in larcenies, burglaries, and robberies.

One of the fundamental facts of criminology is that a small proportion of individuals commit a large proportion of crime. Data from Marvin Wolfgang's famous Philadelphia cohort study suggested that around 5 percent of offenders account for 40 percent of crimes.

When analyzing a problem, it is always useful to ask, "why are these persons, places, times, or events troublesome, when other similar entities are far less troublesome?" Answering such questions requires you to compare problem cases to non-problem cases.

Do parking lots with gate attendants, for example, have fewer thefts from vehicles than parking lots without gate attendants? Are apartment buildings with on-site managers at less risk of having drug dealing than ones without such managers? To answer questions like these you will need to determine if there is a statistical association between some characteristic of persons, places or events and some measure of the problem (crime, injury, etc.).

Crime facilitators help offenders commit crimes or acts of disorder. There are three types of facilitators:

When you have completed your analysis using the concepts discussed in the previous steps, you should ask whether it meets the test of a good newspaper story. Does it adequately answer the 5 W and one H questions: what, where, when, who, why, and how?

We think of crime as over in a flash. It takes just a few seconds to snatch a necklace in the street, pick a pocket, or to break into a car. And rare are the burglars who search every conceivable hiding place. Instead, they try to leave as soon as they have found something worth stealing - usually within a few minutes of entering the house.