What Have We Learned From Evaluations of Community-Based Crime Prevention Programs?

A variety of community-based crime prevention programs exist. It is common for communities to have multiple crime prevention programs operating at the same time. These programs may or may not be implemented as part of a comprehensive approach to crime prevention such as Operation Weed and Seed. Crime reduction within the community is one of the major long-term goals measured to determine the success of community-based crime prevention programs. Intermediate objectives include increasing citizen satisfaction with police, reducing citizen fear of crime, increasing citizen involvement in neighborhood crime prevention programs, and improving citizen/police interactions. Intermediate effects are more frequently measured than long-term effects.

There have been few evaluations that have examined long-term goals or allowed for the assessment of whether the program or other factor(s) were responsible for observed outcomes. Community-based crime prevention programs have been difficult to evaluate due to factors such as program evaluation costs, the implementation of multiple programs in a community, small samples, ethical issues (e.g., not wanting to withhold programs from some participants/groups/communities), and data collection problems (e.g., refusal of stakeholders to support data collection efforts). Thus there is little evidence of crime reduction or prevention attributable to community-based crime prevention programs. This may be attributed as much to weak evaluation designs as to ineffective programs.

Studies examining the accomplishment of intermediate and short term objectives have shown that some community-based crime prevention programs can accomplish objectives such as increasing citizen satisfaction with police, reducing resident fear of crime, increasing resident involvement in crime prevention activities, and increasing interactions between residents and police. However, positive intermediate outcomes appear to be dependent on program type and the circumstances in which the program is implemented. Program evaluations indicate that the likelihood of success can be increased by the presence of community leaders or experience in building partnerships prior to the start of the program. It is possible that some community-based crime prevention programs do better than others at accomplishing certain objectives. For example, an evaluation of the Weed and Seed program showed reduction in perceptions of crime after the program began, but a community policing study indicated perceptions that the crime problem increased after instituting community policing. It is common to find that involvement of criminal justice system actors in community-based crime prevention programs will change their attitudes toward the community. For example, evaluations of community policing has shown that positive attitudes toward community-based crime prevention programs by police officers increased after program implementation.

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