Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity – Dynamic
January 2008 Prof. Paul Ekblom
5Is, CCO, CLAIMED and definitions in depth of partnership, crime prevention and community safety are all covered in Crime Prevention, Security and Community Safety Using the 5Is Framework, by Paul Ekblom (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2011). See www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=296569 and author’s blog at http://5isframework.wordpress.com/.
Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity – Dynamic Prof. Paul Ekblom
This is a recent, and still fast-evolving, development of the classic Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity framework which incorporates dynamic concepts such as crime scripts, explicitly attempts to link with design and specifically seeks to balance abuser/offender perspectives with user/preventer ones.
Origin and Background Paul Ekblom’s arrival at the Design Against Crime Research Centre (DAC) in mid-2006 placed his own, criminological frameworks for crime and its prevention and the approaches of his design colleagues Lorraine Gamman, Adam Thorpe and Marcus Willcocks in close proximity. But only when work began on two funded research and development projects at DAC later that year did a serious and systematic attempt to bring the perspectives together begin. Projects to prevent theft of bags and their contents from bars and cafés, especially Turning the Tables on Crime – Boosting evidence of impact of design against crime and the strategic capacity to deliver practical design solutions (www.grippaclip.com) funded by AHRC required clear briefing of designers to develop high-performance products that securely clipped customers’ bags to tables without interfering with other user requirements or provoking unnecessary levels of anxiety. Various BikeOff projects, especially Bike Off 2 – Catalysing anti-theft bike, bike parking and information design for 21st Century living funded by EPSRC required a systematic and rigorous approach to drawing together and assessing existing design guidelines and standards for bike parking security, and generating our own. Initially CCO Classic was the framework used for these purposes, because it systematically mapped
out causes of crime and principles of intervention. But it rapidly became apparent that fairly far-reaching modifications would be necessary to make CCO fit for present purposes, and indeed to mesh well with design in general. In particular, balancing abuser/ offender perspectives with user/preventer ones becomes especially important. This is captured in the epithet ‘Don’t let the abuser-unfriendly tail wag the user-friendly dog’. In parallel, the thinking stimulated by Project MARC (with co-author Aiden Sidebottom of the UCL Jill Dando Institute www.jdi.ucl.ac.uk) inaugurated attempts to develop a complete suite of definitions of the risk and security field initially focusing on product design (see Risk and Security framework on this website). Insights from this process, centring on the importance of explicitly adopting different discourses to discuss causation and intervention including functional, mechanistic and technical perspectives, led CCO to evolve significantly. This began with incorporation of Cornish’s (1994) cognitive scripts for crime (e.g. ‘seek, see, unlock, take, escape, sell’), combined with the ‘scenario’ approach to user-centred design trailblazed by IDEO, but adding abusers. There is interest, too, in the notion of offenders (and others) as ‘caused agents’, requiring parallel consideration of causal mechanisms underlying their behavior (for example underlying perception, motivation and emotion), and their conscious decisionmaking and goal-directed, instrumental action. Again emerging ideas have wide implications for situational prevention, especially for refining/extending the Rational Offender model. Some idea of the flavour of these new developments is in the downloadable presentation ‘Striking Sparks’ (Ekblom and Sidebottom
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Design Against Crime Paper
Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity – Dynamic
2007). A presentation exploring the ideas in depth is available here and see also http://www.bikeoff.org/ tags/paul-ekblom/. Key overview slides from this presentation, as a taster:
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Design Against Crime Paper
Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity – Dynamic
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Design Against Crime Paper
Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity – Dynamic
References Cornish, D. (1994). ‘The Procedural Analysis of Offending and its Relevance for Situational Prevention’, in R.Clarke (ed), Crime Prevention Studies, 3 151-196. Monsey, NY:Criminal Justice Press.
www.popcenter.org/Library/CrimePrevention/Volume%2003/06%20cornish.pdf Ekblom, P. and Sidebottom, A. (2007). ‘Striking Sparks: Fresh and evolving ideas from the collision of Situational Crime Prevention and Design’. International Crime Science Conference, British Library, London; and International Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis seminar, UCL, London, July.
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