CRITIC: a prospective planning tool for crime prevention evaluation designs

This paper is aimed at developing and trialling a clip to reduce theft of customers’ bags in bars. It is a pioneering attempt to merge the disciplines of practice-led research on product design, and crime science, an applied social research approach to crime prevention. The paper covers technical aspects of evaluating the impact of the clips on crime, which required simultaneous consideration of issues in the design of the evaluation, and the design/deployment of the product. Planners of crime prevention evaluations must manage numerous interacting variables. Failure to consider one at the expense of another, or lavishing disproportionate attention on some and not others, can increase the likelihood of non-convincing and/or non-significant findings. To assist the decision processes at start of evaluation design, this paper describes a systematic prospective planning tool, CRITIC. CRITIC raises awareness, and discusses the effect, on the likelihood of statistically significant outcome analyses and cost-effective results, of Crime history (how crime-prone the action and control sites are), Reduction (proportional reduction in the crime problem anticipated in the action sites compared to the control), Intensity (number and/or strength of interventions necessary per target exposed to crime risk), Time period (over which the sites are tracked before/after implementation), Immensity (number of units of analysis at risk of crime to be tracked) and Cost (unit cost per intervention). The spreadsheet developed enabled the team to conduct a what-if exercise with a range of product design-relevant values (such as number and cost of clips to be manufactured and trialled) to estimate the most cost-effective combination designed to give a reliable and credible evaluation result. It is applicable to a wide range of other crime prevention evaluations, and fellow researchers have requested copies to aid their own studies