Evaluating Safety and Crime Prevention Policies in Europe

Stated in very general terms, evaluating a policy means estimating its impact. While the evaluation of safety and crime prevention policies is currently a widely debated issue, both in official discourse and academic circles, a variety of practices come under this heading, ranging from mere incantation to highly sophisticated techniques. Moreover, the apparent favour in which evaluation is held more often than not hides genuine reluctance to actually carrying it out. Finally, conditions required for a real evaluation are the subject of serious controversy. This is why a spectrum of countries where the expression "evaluation of crime prevention and safety policies" refers to very divergent practices was selected. Reports have been presented by Sybille Smeets and Carrol Tange (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Tim Hope (Keele University), Anne Wyvekens (Centre d'études et de recherches de sciences administratives et politiques – CERSA – CNRS and Université Panthéon-Assas) and Karin Wittebrood (Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau, SCP). On this basis, a comprehensive synthesis was prepared by Philippe Robert (Centre de recherches sociologiques sur le droit et les institutions pénales – CESDIP – CNRS, Université Versailles Saint Quentin and Department of Justice) who coordinated this volume. This European comparison will be useful for public policies decision makers at various governmental levels (European, national, regional, local), for crime prevention NGOs, for journalists, and for academics, researchers, students as well. This comparison was carried out in one of the workpackages of a Coordination Action (CrimPrev, see http://www.crimprev.eu) funded by the European Commission (under FP6) under the leadership of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS, Groupe européen de recherches sur les normativités – GERN). This workpackage (coordinated by Philippe Robert and Renée Zauberman) includes three more European overviews : on victimisation and insecurity surveys, on self-reported crime and delinquency surveys (two previous volumes in this series) and on the comparison between overall population crime surveys and public criminal statistics