STEP 1:
Think about good practice
STEP 2:
Think about the local crime picture
STEP 3:
Bring together ideas of good practice and crime prevention
STEP 4:
Implement and monitor good practice
STEP 5:
Evaluate and communicate
to step 1 again
The research for this Project was completed between 1997 and 1998, and the findings reported in this document about the use of good practice within the broad crime prevention sector relate to the situation at that time. The consultants acknowledge that, since that time, there may have been changes in the uptake of good practice and framing of crime prevention at an inter-jurisdictional level.
To order any National Crime Prevention publications please contact:
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Robert Garran Offices, National Circuit, BARTON ACT 2600
Ph: +61 2 6250 6711
Fax: +61 2 6273 0913
Publications are also available at www.crimeprevention.gov.au
The National Research Project into Good Practice in Community Crime Prevention
Australian Government Attorney-General's Department, Canberra
© Commonwealth of Australia, November 2003
The contents of this report are a true reflection of the research as conducted by the consultants but they do not necessarily represent the views of the Australian or State Governments or the Project Management Group.
Design: Design Direction
Publisher: Australian Government Attorney-General's Department
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Project brief and terms of reference
The research process
Existing understanding of good practice
Continuous improvement processes in crime prevention
The good practice system
Good practice tools
A non-prescriptive system
Constraints and barriers
The case studies - models of good practice
How widely applicable are the Project's outcomes?
Future adoption and use of the system
CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION
1.1 The national partnership in action
1.2 Who will use this report?
1.3 Project brief and terms of reference
1.4 The Project
1.5 Project participants
1.6 Limitations of the Project
1.7 The Report
CHAPTER 2 - CONCEPTS OF GOOD PRACTICE
2.1 Summary
2.2 Introduction
2.3 Good practice in crime prevention
Is good practice relevant to crime prevention?
How do these definitions of the elements of good practice relate to crime prevention?
2.4 International concepts of and guidelines for good practice
Europe and North America
City Council of Edmonton, Canada (1990)
Canada (National)
England and Wales
European Union
United Nations
Scandinavia
The Netherlands
2.5 An Australian concept of good practice
2.6 The current use of good practice in the crime prevention field in Australia
Constraints to good practice
The Senior Officers' view
A view from the field
Facilitating better practice
CHAPTER 3 - CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT PROCESSES IN CRIME PREVENTION
3.1 Summary
3.2 Introduction
3.3 Understanding continuous improvement processes
3.4 Strategically directed learning
3.5 Sharing the responsibility for continuous improvement process
CHAPTER 4 - FINDINGS: THE PARTICIPANTS' PROPOSITION ABOUT GOOD PRACTICE COMMUNITY CRIME PREVENTION
4.1 Summary
4.2 Introduction
4.3 Defining community crime prevention
4.4 Ethical criteria for good practice
4.5 Principles to facilitate the adoption of good practice
4.6 The continuous improvement system
Management processes
The tools
Domains of practice and their internal elements
Values
Measures
Three key outcome areas
Process tracking
Benchmarks
Supporting structure - the good practice support group
4.7 Investing in good practice
4.8 The structural problem and its issues
The problem for good practice
The participants' solution
4.9 Policing practices within community crime prevention
4.10 The warrant
CHAPTER 5 - PARTICIPANT NARRATIVES, PROCESS MAPS AND BENCHMARKS
5.1 Summary
5.2 Introduction
5.3 Glebe Youth Service (New South Wales)
Background
The crime problem
The action research project
Identifying stakeholders: Community Crime Prevention Group
Encouraging stakeholder participation
Developing the strategy
Reviewing and planning
Putting strategy into action
Support coordination
Police / Youth Relations Project
Outcomes
Process map
5.4 Sunshine Coast Community Policing Project (Queensland)
Background
The crime problem
The stakeholders
Developing a preventative strategy
Encouraging stakeholder participation
Reviewing and planning
Adapting to change
Putting strategy into action
Co-operation and communication
Outcomes
Stakeholder acknowledgment
Increased community involvement
Tagging of boards
Acknowledging the artistic value
Reducing graffiti
Extending the scope of the initiative
Good practice principles in action
Evaluation and feedback
Continuous improvement process
Process map
5.5 Armadale Domestic Violence Intervention Project (Western Australia)
Background
Reviewing and planning
Encouraging participation
Developing a preventative strategy
Continuous improvement process
Outcomes
Process map
5.6 Operation Flinders (South Australia)
Background
Review and planning
Developing strategy
Regular reporting
Program evaluation
Putting strategy into action
Encouraging stakeholder participation
Continuous improvement process
Outcomes
Conclusion
Process map
5.7 North-West Centre Against Sexual Assault (Tasmania), in conjunction with Big hART
Background
The crime problem
The preventative strategy
Review and planning
Developing a preventative strategy
Putting strategy into action
Outcomes
Process map
5.8 The benchmark statements
Statement 1: Collaboration
Statement 2: Negotiating responsibility for crime phenomenon
Statement 3: Context setting
Statement 4: Change management
Statement 5: Shared vision
Statement 6: Action strategy
Statement 7: Reducing crime and its consequences
Statement 8: Preventing crime
Statement 9: Proactive and reactive position
Statement 10: Accountability
CHAPTER 6 - FUTURE IMPLICATIONS FOR GOOD PRACTICE IN COMMUNITY CRIME PREVENTION
6.1 Summary
6.2 Introduction
6.3 The participants' vision
A national professional association
The action strategy
Moving strategy into action
Changing the focus of crime prevention
6.4 Future facilitation of good practice
The Action Kit
Training for good practice
Field work and electronic networking
Other electronic tools
Professional mentors
Funding criteria
Building good practice partnerships outside crime prevention
Building capacity to address adversarial criminal justice systems
The question of leadership for good practice in crime prevention
6.5 Proposed principles for facilitating good practice at an inter-jurisdictional and national level
Collaboration
Negotiating responsibility for a crime phenomenon
Setting context
Change management
Shared vision
Designing the action strategy
Reducing crime and its harmful consequences
Preventing crime
Proactive and reactive practice position
Accountability
6.6 Implications for community crime prevention stakeholders
Implications for practitioners
Implications for funding bodies
Implications for communities
The members of the Project Management Group designed the Project's concept and, through their commitment and vision, guided its development to address questions of national relevance to good practice. Over the 18 months of the Project's operations, the Project Management Group comprised:
The quality of the implementation of the research method by the participants in the Good Practice Research Project reflects their professional capacity to further the development of knowledge in the field of inquiry (good practice in community crime prevention). The participatory methodology required participants to "walk the talk", critically appraise the walk (and the talk), and invest in collaborative partnerships within the limitations of available resources. The Project acknowledges the skill, commitment and vision of the following participants:
We would also like to acknowledge the early work of:
The CultureShift collaboration was made up of:
Final editing of the document was done by Angela Kirsner.
The Good Practice Research Project (the Project) was one of a series of projects initiated by the National Anti-Crime Strategy in partnership with National Crime Prevention to research, pilot and establish good practice in community crime prevention. The Project, a research initiative on a national scale, was undertaken in collaboration with Sydney-based research consultancy, CultureShift.
The aim was to define, on the basis of the current practical experience and strategies in preventing crime in communities, how good practice and continuous improvement in community crime prevention can be facilitated in the future.
This document describes that research and reports on its outcomes. It presents the proposition regarding good practice that was developed by the research participants-community crime prevention practitioners in a range of initiatives across the country-under the guidance of the research consultants, and validated in the participants' practice. It describes the benefits to participants and communities achieved through applying good practice and continuous improvement processes, and the system's demonstrated ability to accommodate the wide range of human, financial and material resources that are invested in community crime prevention.
Importantly, the document argues strongly for a national strategy to facilitate, coordinate and fund the next stage of development in good practice, and to gain acceptance among the wider community crime prevention network of the Project's outcomes. This document will inform that process, and the development of customised Action Kits for practitioners in a range of environments. National endorsement of the Project's good practice proposal has the potential to build understanding, competency and commitment to a way of working that actually makes a socially valued difference to community safety.
The Project's research amongst crime prevention practitioners revealed that, at the time of the Project, good practice as a fully fledged management system was rarely, if ever, implemented in the field of community crime prevention. At worst, good practice tools were used piecemeal-by funding bodies, as mechanisms to drive preventative strategies regardless of local factors, or by local agencies, as ways of exerting leverage to secure funding deals. At best, some generic quality management principles were used within agency operations, or practitioners referred to imported and validated methods of preventing crime in community settings.
Until this Project's completion, there had been no practice-based Australian crime prevention system to integrate preventative methodologies with quality management principles in a way that is congruent with the priorities of community, management and funding body, at an inter-jurisdictional level.
The Report draws largely on the outcomes that the research participants generated at the three-day Evaluation Workshop that concluded the research, and its claims are substantiated by data that they generated throughout the Project, as documented in regular reports to the Project Management Group. This Report also draws on those reports, the results of three surveys of a wider group of community crime prevention practitioners, a survey of Senior Officers, and selected texts from the literature. It has been endorsed by the Project Management Group (comprising representatives from National Anti-Crime Strategy and the South Australian Crime Prevention Unit, National Crime Prevention, Queensland Police, and the NSW Attorney General's Department) and by the research participants.
The purpose of the Good Practice Research Project was to define and facilitate a generic form of good practice and continuous improvement within community crime prevention. The Project's brief called for national benchmarks to be defined with regard to good practice in community-based crime prevention programs that were already in place. It also required that the participants explore and establish ways of facilitating good practice crime prevention across jurisdictions.
The aim was to enable and encourage the use of good practice in crime prevention among State and Territory governments and their agencies, local government, and community crime prevention participants such as crime prevention workers and community groups.
The terms of reference required:
The Project involved action research undertaken by a group of selected community crime prevention initiatives-"the participants"-in a range of settings and locations, and facilitated by the research consultants, under the guidance of the Project Management Group.
The project officers in each participating initiative worked as "participant-inquirers". The validity and strength of the outcomes that this form of research generates is determined by the extent to which the participant-inquirers use and take responsibility for the research method, and the extent and value of their use of the outcomes that the research delivers. The consultants' role is to work as trainers and facilitators of the research method, respecting the participants' practice-based expertise in crime prevention.
The Project's research community comprised three levels:
The key Project outcomes, as defined by the consultants were:
Among these outcomes, "good practice training" was the training in concepts of good practice and methods of participatory action research that was delivered to the participants to enable them to carry out the Project; and the peer mentoring community comprises the level 1 participants.
The research involved six steps, or stages: establishing infrastructure, reflection, interpretation, decision, action, and evaluation. The Project Management Group received reports at the end of each stage of the research. They critically assessed the outcomes from each stage, endorsed the findings, and contributed to the direction of the next stage of research.
In the first stage of the research, the consultants conducted interviews, surveys and a literature scan to establish the research community and the existing, un-critiqued and un-tested understandings of good practice and community crime prevention.
Each subsequent stage began with a training program to inform the participant-inquirers how to facilitate the research method, to introduce concepts of good practice, and to reflect on their activities in the previous stage, as a means of developing the knowledge construct about good practice in community crime prevention.
The participants were asked to reflect on their current practice, local context and stakeholders, the outcomes of their strategies, the nature and purpose of crime prevention, and its value to funding bodies, management, practitioners and community.
They identified the professional disciplines and skills that informed their preventative actions and provided the theories of practice from which the "good practice" proposition is drawn. These included behavioural change psychology, feminism, inter-cultural communication, Aboriginal cultural restoration and development, mentoring, cultural development, problem solving, community development and criminology.
The participants' task was to reframe community crime prevention in terms of good practice management, working from accepted concepts of good practice management in other industry sectors. This represented a radical departure from the existing ideas of good practice in crime prevention, which has been conceived very largely in terms of models that work, "recipes" for intervention. The Project Management Group wanted to see the development of a system that enables practitioners to learn to generate in their own terms what good practice is, according to their own resources, cultures, objectives and crime issues.
The participants' reflection provided the basis for identifying and refining a number of qualities of change, or "success factors", that were experienced by all stakeholders in successful community crime prevention - things such as safety, accountability, equity of access. It also enabled identification of other aspects of good practice, notably a range of "domains"-generic, defined and bounded areas of activity in the management of crime prevention, that have an impact on crime prevention (eg. community consultation, education and crime prevention awareness).
On the basis of this process, and incorporating the elements developed, the consultants prepared a draft Action Kit which was used in the fifth stage - the six-month Action Stage - to enable the participants to develop processes and systems for continuous improvement, test the tools that had been developed in the previous stages, and identify good practice in crime prevention. During the Action Stage, the nine participating community crime prevention initiatives generated:
The final stage, a three-day Evaluation Workshop and final reporting, drew these ideas together on the basis of the field work and monthly reporting and used them to create the final Evaluation Report (which this Final Report draws on).
In their evaluation, using established criteria for assessing the validity of collaborative research outcomes, the participants rated at 76 percent the shared research capability that developed between the consultancy and themselves. The participants' evaluation of the Project is summarised in terms of new knowledge output, research method strengths and weaknesses, and the relationship between the research method as experienced in this Project and the sustainable knowledge that it generated.
The literature review, interviews and surveys in the initial stage of the Project aimed to establish existing language and beliefs about good practice. This showed that there was considerable divergence, both within and between policy and practitioner levels, about the meaning of good practice in a generic sense, or about what good practice actually looks like when applied to crime, nationally or internationally.
The literature (both local and international) yielded a number of core definitions and indicators of good practice, and each organisation and field has created its own unique interpretation of these definitions. A range of guidelines for achieving results in crime prevention were also identified, yet only some of these corresponded to accepted definitions of good practice as discussed within the management sector (across all industries) and none identified either the standards against which they had been measured or how change management can be implemented. A set of good practice guidelines developed by Senior Officers at the National Anti-Crime Strategy (NACS) and the National Crime Prevention (NCP), however, came closer to meeting concepts of good practice in the management of crime prevention - something not found in the international literature, which tended to see good practice in crime prevention only in terms of "recipes" for intervention. The concepts in these NACS/NCP guidelines provided the Project with a basis for expansion through consultation with project officers in the field.
Within the community crime prevention field, there were some shared understandings of the term "good practice" with regard to quality management principles, but at policy levels, there was wide divergence about the meaning of "community crime prevention" and "good practice"-whether, for example, crime prevention should or should not address the causes of crime. Divergence was also seen between policy and practice and very possibly exists between practitioners as well (although this was not so evident in the surveys that comprised Level 2 of the Project's research). At the practitioner level, the imperative is to develop strategies from community participation, that result in long-term outcomes that meet with community support as well as funding body satisfaction.
The difference between policy and practice was characterised by basic differences between the values and shorter-term priorities that guide State policies, on the one hand, and the longer-term professional obligations that guide daily prevention practice in communities, on the other.
The consultants' approach was not to compare different methods-an approach that would be neither productive nor, probably, feasible, given the diversity of contextual factors and jurisdictional differences. Rather, the Project recognised the merit of all stated approaches and developed a communication, learning, management and monitoring system that could be applied to any of them. The same system could also gather grounded data to resolve or move towards resolution of conflicting frameworks and operational assumptions across jurisdictions and between policy and practice levels.
Continuous improvement is a key element in the achievement of good practice. It forms the link between management practices and the achievement of community crime prevention organisational or project goals, and provides evidence to support, question or change these practices.
At the time of the Project there was a perceived and real danger that inappropriate continuous improvement process criteria and measurement were being imposed on community crime prevention practice, resulting in a diversion of energy from the initiatives' core business, and dissatisfaction with results amongst policymakers or stakeholders. This situation led to the perception amongst those working in the field that policy and practice were pulling in different directions, with policy-makers unaware of field practice and issues, and practitioners unable to respond to the demands of policy.
In the Project, the link between policy and practice was achieved through the creation of good practice support groups, which included management committee members, project officers, peer mentors and individuals with knowledge and understanding of good practice, continuous improvement and adult learning strategies. Each good practice support group took responsibility for understanding and developing concepts and processes from the draft Action Kit to develop a continuous improvement process for implementation within their individual projects. The group provided essential support to the community crime prevention worker, and the Project created a protocol recommending that a worker should embark on developing good practice only if a specialised good practice support group was in place.
The Project participants successfully generated internally driven learning strategies appropriate to their community crime prevention context, which resulted in valuable, measurable outcomes. The strategies included identifying entry points into the continuous improvement process, encouraging involvement and sharing responsibility, mechanisms to translate theory into practice, and processes to develop success factors and evaluation methodologies appropriate to their field of action and desired outcomes. These learning strategies, while context specific, offer insights into elements of continuous improvement process that are applicable to the community crime prevention field as a whole.
The challenge for the community crime prevention sector is now to take these learning strategies into the wider context, to encourage continuous improvement processes to support a national, good practice culture in crime prevention.
Good practice, as envisaged by the Project participants, involves a constant striving, through continuous improvement processes, to achieve practice that is locally relevant and meets the needs identified by all stakeholders at the three different levels - community-based, management, and funding. It involves continuous reflection on practice, collaboration with stakeholders to identify the factors that underpin success in the particular local context, and monitoring and evaluation of strategies. This is reflected in the definition of community crime prevention developed by the Project:
Community crime prevention is a locally-based partnership between community, agency and funding sources with the purpose of significantly reducing the occurrence, severity and/or harmful consequences of a crime phenomenon in that community. The partnership is based on a negotiated and equitable responsibility for crime. It implements a culturally appropriate change strategy that realises a shared vision of improved relationships between authorities, business and community.
The Project participants sharpened their definition of good practice by juxtaposing it with its opposite. In this comparison, community crime prevention:
The Project's final proposition describes a comprehensive, non-prescriptive, self-managed system, for use by community crime practitioners, to generate continuous improvement in their practice on three levels:
It provides a management system for crime prevention that can be applied at these three levels. As a generic system, however, it relies fundamentally on the user's ability to customise the principles to the particular practice environment.
Good practice in community crime prevention is defined in terms of a quality of practice, rather than "recipes" for intervention or a description of benchmarks (which are the results of good practice). The participants identified criteria that characterise practice that is considered "good" because it successfully prevents crime by building community capacity to take responsibility for crime phenomena. The focus, in this form of practice, is on achieving behavioural and attitudinal change by offenders, victims, the larger community, agencies and funding bodies so that crime can be prevented. Facilitating such change must be guided by ethics to ensure that crime prevention does not transgress universal rights of self-determination and co-existence for any citizens.
The proposed system is distinguished by two innovative features:
These aspects of everyday crime prevention practice-reflective practice and working to ethical references and social worth of crime prevention-had not previously been recognised as formal structural elements of crime prevention implementation.
The system includes an integrated set of "tools", as follows.
The participants formulated a foundation definition of "community crime prevention" (quoted above), and defined the quality of "good" in non-competitive, ethical and effective terms so that collaboration developed across jurisdictional, disciplinary and cultural differences.
They distinguished ten precise crime prevention domains of practice (generic, defined and bounded areas of activity in the management of crime prevention, that have an impact on crime prevention), and crime prevention action principles for each, together with process and outcome indicators formulated by the consultants from the participants' Action Stage reports and endorsed by the participants. These enabled practitioners to carry out the continuous improvement process sequence within non-prescriptive but nevertheless congruent boundaries. This enabled continual innovation on strategic, operational and structural levels, as needed by each worker and their management committee. It also allowed any methodology (as, for example, preferred by jurisdictional policy) to be competently brought into continuous improvement processes and still meet the success factors that funding bodies, management and consumer groups require to meet their responsibilities in crime prevention in three key outcome areas - crime prevention, social enhancement, and system strength. Each domain is distinctive yet able to interact with any (or all) of the others within operational, strategic and structural levels of community crime prevention operations, depending on the need of the initiative (and thus the resources available to developing good practice).
The participants also developed good practice criteria for the community crime prevention sector, and principles for the implementation and monitoring of good practice (as distinct from the crime prevention action principles identified within each domain, noted above). To monitor good practice developments, they implemented a measurement and process tracking system devised by the consultants.
The Project consultants brought the first draft of these elements together in the draft Action Kit, to provide a practical proposition about good practice and continuous improvement process (using the participants' reflections on their current work) which was further explored in the Action Stage of the research. The Kit's fundamental resource was a set of generic templates or tables that described domains and their internal elements. Field practice resulted in changes to the form and content of the templates, and an example of the original templates and the full set of final, validated templates are in Appendix 3.
During the Action Stage, the participants continually improved and broadened their use of the good practice tools, as well as the actual content and structure of the tools themselves. They used the tools to guide strategy orientation, carry out crime mapping, review their management and prevention processes, design strategies, and plan and carry out implementation, monitoring and evaluation.
The continuous improvement system integrates adult learning and communication strategies with peer mentoring. This self-managed process of professional development (which could also be made available to lay participants in crime prevention) enabled practitioners to access methods of prevention used by other practitioners and to generate local benchmarks.
The project officers had only limited time in their daily schedules to make use of peer mentoring, and this aspect of good practice did not develop to a point of being self-initiated and sustained (un-facilitated by the consultants) during the Action Stage. This is symptomatic of the lack of an endorsed and resourced national network-peer networking and, thereby, the implementation of good practice, would be considerably strengthened by such national action.
The continuous improvement process that the participants developed involves the following sequence:
STEP 1: Think about good practice |
|
STEP 2: Think about the local crime picture |
|
STEP 3: Bring together ideas of good practice and crime prevention |
|
STEP 4: Implement and monitor good practice |
|
STEP 5: Evaluate and communicate |
|
| Endorsement of good practice tools | Carry out crime mapping | Access benchmarks from peer mentoring system | Implement good practice developments | Evaluate outcomes | |||||
| Set up good practice support group | Identify local success factors | Plan good practice developments in current strategies | Monitor adoption of good practice system in current strategies | Define new benchmark using benchmarking process | |||||
| Orient the organisation, including the good practice support group, to the notion of good practice | Review practice, strategies and management structures accordingly | Endorsement of good practice developments by management | Carry out risk management (consult, review, modify) | Communicate learning and benchmarks to peers and upper management |
The Project's proposition about good practice in community crime prevention is intentionally non-prescriptive. This enables practitioners to be guided, in formulating their preventative strategy, by the local success factors that their funding bodies, management committees and consumer groups identify - that is, those intrinsic qualities that an initiative develops, responds to and reflects (eg., safety, accountability, etc.), if it is congruent with the local community values and priorities. The non-prescriptive tools enable these local factors to be brought together to create a continuous improvement process that is unique to each agency, community and individual professional. The degree of degree of uniqueness is related to the level of investment in professional development and management practice that a management committee can afford. Because each agency is working within the same generic system, this customisation does not reduce the generic capacity of the continuous improvement process system at the national level.
The participants demonstrated that the continuous improvement process, the defined domains, the definition of community crime prevention and the definition of good practice provide a common base and language for discussing processes of mapping, planning, dialogue facilitation, design, monitoring and evaluation relevant to a wide range of community crime prevention applications. The continuous improvement process was also deemed valuable to organisations that do not regard crime prevention as their core business but are active in crime prevention partnerships.
The initial stage of the Project identified the many constraints to good practice, and the Project subsequently used these constraints to create the tools to govern the continuous improvement process.
For example, the majority of community crime prevention projects run for a relatively short time because of resourcing and political issues. This often means that tracking and evaluation is limited to answering funding body interests rather than community interests. To compound the problem, measurement criteria are difficult to apply to the concept of prevention.
Through determining organisational and strategic priorities, and addressing the constraints to achieving these priorities, the participants attained significant changes in the focus, structure and operation of their community crime prevention initiatives. They were able to work with the constraints, and develop stability and strategic strength. In good practice, as in community crime prevention itself, progress is an incremental process of overcoming day-to-day challenges while keeping a focus on the desired outcome.
The proposed system also has the potential to close a disabling "structural gap" between policy and practice, which the participants identified as a significant barrier to the implementation of good practice. The "structural gap" is not peculiar to crime prevention, but in this field it has serious implications for community safety, which were repeatedly experienced by the participants. The Project did not investigate the problem as it was not in the research brief, so can offer no valid data to explain it in detail or suggest solutions - it is an area for further inquiry. The gap is, however, in information management, and is sustained by policy differences, management structures and practices at the funding source. Significant issues (listed in Chapter 4) remain unreconciled because of this structural problem. To resolve it - to close the "gap" - requires a system that enables grounded, practice-based knowledge to inform policy.
The field of crime prevention would benefit from recognition of the proposal's generic value to crime prevention policy. This recognition is unlikely, however, while this perceived structural gap persists, which, in the participants' view, prevents knowledge transferring from grounded practice to upper level management.
The participants responded to this issue by suggesting solutions (presented in Chapter 6 of this Report, "Future implications for good practice in community crime prevention"), demonstrating the advantages that good practice can manifest for communities, management and funding bodies alike.
The Project's proposition about good practice and continuous improvement was developed by the participating project officers engaged in action research in nine community crime prevention initiatives, across five States, over six months. Four of these projects had participated throughout the development of the proposition and draft Action Kit. The other five were self-nominated projects which, up to this stage of the Project, had participated as external critical observers only. These five projects were included in the Action Stage to test whether the proposed continuous improvement system and draft Action Kit were generally accessible with minimal consultant support and in other contexts.
Five of these case studies were selected and included in this document, as examples.
Each participant defined their specific crime prevention context, developed and implemented a strategy in relation to one or more good practice domains as described in the draft Action Kit, and regularly reflected on their practice within the context of their own community crime prevention initiative. The nine case studies resulted in the following good practice outcomes:
These benchmarked outcomes provide examples of what it is possible to achieve through good practice, within the level of public investment in community crime prevention that was current at the time of the Project.
Good practice, as defined in this document, is applicable in areas of crime prevention that use the same professional disciplines in intervention as those used by the Project participants.
It should be noted that the Project research did not include crime prevention in relation to environmental (ecological) crime, public event crime, fraud, robbery, break and enter, armed assault, car theft, and drug-related crime. Fear of crime was also not addressed. Similarly, the Project did not work with the following demographic groups: children, older people, disabled people, ethnic minorities other than Aboriginal participants, or remote communities.
More extensive field application is needed to determine the broader relevance of the Project's outcomes, and to achieve this in any systematic way will require endorsement of the Project's proposal at the national level. Nevertheless, because the Project worked from, and validated, the assumption that good practice is about using continuous improvement processes to generate benchmarks (rather than regarding good practice as the adoption of benchmarks), its self-managed system for continuous improvement process can be used by any crime prevention initiative that is delivering action strategies in communities.
Furthermore, to extend the relevance of the research beyond the Level 1 participating projects, the consultants carried out two surveys with an additional thirty-three observing projects across all States and Territories (with the exception of the Northern Territory), and feedback from these surveys was used to modify the draft good practice proposition before its use in the action research environment.
Importantly, the good practice tools have been assessed as valid and valuable for prevention practices addressing Indigenous crime issues. Three Indigenous workers, in reconciliation, community development and juvenile justice respectively, were asked to critique the good practice proposition, highlight its strengths, and describe how it would need to be modified to suit application in Indigenous communities. Their feedback suggests that the Project has laid down the right foundations for crime prevention to be effective in Indigenous communities. In particular, the Proposal uses a crime prevention approach that is based in community development. Such an approach is fundamental to effective crime prevention in Indigenous communities, and in mixed communities that are addressing crime issues that affect Aboriginal people.
Three characteristics of the generic system need to be highlighted for practitioners who use the system in the Indigenous context:
In any cultural group, crime prevention must be undertaken in a way that respects people's right to safety and their right to participate in strategy design and implementation. In Indigenous communities, there must be particular sensitivity to historic and socio-economic differences in these activities.
The national research Project produced descriptions of good practice and values, processes and mechanisms for continuous improvement that have been proven to benefit the individual participants in the Project. Benefits have included more equitable and cohesive working partnerships, more efficient operations, and measurable results that were congruent with outcomes desired by both community and stakeholders. The Project has produced a strong framework within which the participants developed strategy, actions and evaluation.
If the outcomes of the Project are to gain acceptance among the wider community crime prevention network, they will need to be endorsed by the National Anti-Crime Strategy. The Project proposes that the most efficient way to gain such acceptance is through a national strategy to facilitate, coordinate and fund the next stage of development in good practice. This may include:
The good practice tools developed by the Project provide the basis for the development of a variety of products. In particular, they can be used as source material for developing targeted training programs, a range of resources such as electronic and hard copy action kits for various users (including voluntary workers and local government stakeholders), and information management systems within and between agencies, States and Territories.
The Project suggests that a national investment in the proposed good practice system has the potential to achieve a transition towards a two-way, knowledge-focussed management system, because of its ability to inform policy with practice-originated knowledge. This development would be a significant move towards improving the safety of our communities and reducing the costs of crime.
The Good Practice Research Project (the Project) is one of a series of research projects which have been initiated by the National Anti-Crime Strategy in partnership with National Crime Prevention to research, pilot and establish good practice in community crime prevention. The Project was undertaken in collaboration with Sydney-based research consultancy, CultureShift..
The National Anti-Crime Strategy is a shared initiative of State and Territory governments. One of its obligations is to harness Australia's crime prevention talent and ensure that all agencies and officials cooperate to develop and promote good practice in crime prevention.
National Crime Prevention is a strategic Australian Government initiative to develop, implement and promote programs, policies and projects that prevent violence and crime. Australian, State and Territory governments cooperate as equal partners. This partnership recognises the primary role of the States and Territories for law enforcement, crime prevention and community safety; and the key role of the Australian Government in research, evaluation, training and social policy issues.
The Project that delivered the outcomes described in this Report provided a unique opportunity for representatives of National Crime Prevention and the National Anti-Crime Strategy to contribute actively to formulating good practice in crime prevention, through their participation in the Project Management Group. The Project Management Group was responsible for the Project's concept, and guided its development to address questions of national relevance to good practice.
This Report is addressed in particular to the Senior Officers of the National Anti-Crime Strategy and National Crime Prevention, who were instrumental in initiating the Project. Understanding of and national support for the Project's outcomes, and the strength of the research that generated these outcomes, is essential at this policy-making level, if the good practice proposal contained in this Report is to realise its considerable potential benefits for the Australian community.
The Report will also be of interest to crime prevention workers within community organisations, local government, community service managers, case managers and field workers, and including Indigenous communities. It does not, however, aim to provide the outcomes of the research in a form that is easily useable by practitioners-this will require further work to package and customise the research outcomes for use in a range of settings and contexts.
The purpose of the Good Practice Research Project was to define and facilitate a generic form of good practice and continuous improvement within community crime prevention. The Project's brief called for national benchmarks to be defined with regard to good practice in community-based crime prevention programs that were already in place. It also required that the participants explore and establish ways of facilitating good practice crime prevention across jurisdictions.
The aim was to enable and encourage the use of good practice in crime prevention among State and Territory governments and their agencies, local government, and community crime prevention participants such as crime prevention workers and community groups.
The terms of reference required:
The Project was a research initiative on a national scale undertaken to define how good practice and continuous improvement within current community crime prevention strategies can be facilitated in the future, on the basis of the current practical experience in preventing crime in communities. It involved action research undertaken by a group of selected community crime prevention initiatives-"the participants"-in a range of settings and locations, and facilitated by the research consultants, under the guidance of the Project Management Group.
This form of research-"participatory action research"-involves an intervention to bring about change and is founded on a research relationship in which those involved are participants in the change process (Hart and Bond; 1995: 37-38). The research is educative, problem-focussed, context-specific and future-oriented. It deals with individuals as members of social groups, and aims at improvement and involvement. Importantly, it involves a cyclic process in which research, action and evaluation are interlinked-reflection on practice is an integral part of it.
In other words, it is research that is grounded in the practice experience of the research participants, that encourages them to reflect on, analyse and understand this experience and how it is shaped, and thereby identifies what change is possible, the social value of that change, and the potential validity of these ideas if used by others.
The project officers in each participating initiative worked as "participant-inquirers". The validity and strength of the outcomes that this form of research generates is determined by the extent to which the participant-inquirers use and take responsibility for the research method, and the extent and value of their use of the outcomes that the research delivers. The consultants' role is to work as trainers and facilitators of the research method, respecting the participants' practice-based expertise in crime prevention.
The overall research community comprised three levels:
The research was structured into six stages-establishing infrastructure, reflection, interpretation, decision, action, and evaluation.
The Project Management Group received reports at the end of each stage of the research. They critically assessed the outcomes from each stage, endorsed the findings, and contributed to the direction of the next stage of research.
In the first stage of the research, the consultants conducted interviews, surveys and a literature scan to establish the research community and the un-critiqued and un-tested meaning of good practice.
Each subsequent stage began with a training program to inform the participant-inquirers how to facilitate the research method and to reflect on their activities in the previous stage, as a means of developing the knowledge construct about good practice in community crime prevention.
The participants were asked to reflect on their current practice, local context and stakeholders, the outcomes of their strategies, the nature and purpose of crime prevention, and its value to funding bodies, management, practitioners and community.
They identified the professional disciplines and skills that informed their preventative actions and provided the theories of practice from which the "good practice" proposition is drawn. These included behavioural change psychology, feminism, inter-cultural communication, Aboriginal cultural restoration and development, mentoring, cultural development, problem solving, community development and criminology. These professional disciplines continue to be key skill bases used in preventing crime in collaborative partnerships with agencies that work in community contexts. They are not necessarily relevant to crime prevention in partnerships with law enforcement agencies.
The participants' task was to reframe community crime prevention in terms of good practice management, working from accepted concepts of good practice management in other industry sectors. This represented a radical departure from the existing ideas of good practice in crime prevention, which has been conceived very largely in terms of models that work, "recipes" for intervention. The Project Management Group wanted to see the development of a system that enables practitioners to learn to generate in their own terms what good practice is, according to their own resources, cultures, objectives and crime issues.
The participants' reflection provided the basis for identifying and refining a number of qualities of change, or "success factors", that were experienced by all stakeholders in successful community crime prevention - things such as safety, accountability, equity of access. It also enabled identification of other aspects of good practice, notably a range of "domains"-generic, defined and bounded areas of activity in the management of crime prevention, that have an impact on crime prevention (eg. community consultation, education and crime prevention awareness).
On the basis of this process, and incorporating the elements developed, the consultants prepared a draft Action Kit which was used in the fifth stage - the six-month Action Stage - to enable the participants to develop processes and systems for continuous improvement, test the tools that had been developed in the previous stages, and identify good practice in crime prevention. During the Action Stage, the nine participating community crime prevention initiatives generated:
The final stage, a three-day Evaluation Workshop and reporting, drew these ideas together on the basis of the field work and monthly reporting and used them to create the final Evaluation Report (which this Report draws on).
In their evaluation, using established criteria for assessing the validity of collaborative research outcomes, the participants rated the shared research capability that developed between the consultancy and themselves at 76 percent. The participants' evaluation of the Project is summarised in terms of new knowledge output, research method strengths and weaknesses, and the relationship between the research method as experienced in this Project and the sustainable knowledge that it generated.
The Project involved action research by community crime prevention practitioners in a range of settings. Initially, seven community crime prevention initiatives, across three States, agreed to participate:
The South West Multi-Cultural Project withdrew after the first training session due to serious illness. All other projects signed a letter of agreement to endorse their participation in the research initiative. During the first three stages of the research process, a draft proposition for good practice was developed, and following this, a new agreement was created with the management and/or funding body of each initiative to endorse the use of the draft proposition in the Action Stage of the research. At this point, two of the original projects (Purfleet Community Youth Centre and the Anti-Violence Project) chose not to continue due, respectively, to funding instability and staff losses. With the Project Management Group's agreement, five new projects were invited to join the initiative to test and develop the draft proposition for good practice. There were thus nine community crime prevention initiatives, across five States, who collaborated in the Action Stage:
The crime issues addressed by the various participants included domestic violence, sexual assault, graffiti, youth crime, anti-social behaviours in sports facilities, school-ground vandalism, and police/youth relationships. These issues were addressed within inner city, business, regional and rural settings reflecting Anglo-Saxon and Aboriginal cultural contexts.
Good practice, as defined in this document, may be applied in areas of crime prevention that use, in their interventions, the same professional disciplines that the Project's participants used. Its application in areas of crime prevention where other professional disciplines are used has not been tested in practice. The broader relevance of the Project's outcomes will not be known until endorsement has been given at the national level to authorise more extensive field application. However, the proposal can be applied at three different levels to accommodate greater or lesser variations in practices:
The Project research did not include crime prevention in relation to environmental (ecological) crime, public event crime, fraud, robbery, break and enter, armed assault, car theft, and drug-related crime. Fear of crime was also not addressed.
The project officers did not work with the following demographic groups: children, older people, disabled people, ethnic minorities other than Aboriginal participants, or remote communities.
The theories of practice that inform situational prevention and environmental design were also not included in the Project.
The Project outcomes described in this Report were created by eleven participating initiatives in five States. The extent of analysis, negotiation, field application, reporting and evaluation that these participants carried out ensures that their proposition can be deemed to be valid for them. To extend the relevance of the research beyond the participating projects, the consultants carried out two critiquing surveys with an additional thirty-three observing projects across all States and Territories (with the exception of the Northern Territory). Their critique was used to modify the draft good practice proposition before its endorsement by those stakeholders with the highest level of interest in the various participants' projects, and its subsequent use in the action research environment.
This Project did not regard good practice as the adoption of benchmarks, but worked from the researched and validated assumption that good practice is about using continuous improvement processes to generate benchmarks. In this sense, the Project's outcome is a system for continuous improvement process that can be used by any crime prevention initiative that is delivering action strategies in communities.
This Report draws largely on the outcomes, or "shared constructions", that the participants generated at the three-day Evaluation Workshop which concluded the research. They described:
The participants' claims are substantiated in this Report by data that they generated throughout the Project, as documented in staged reports to the Project Management Group. The Report draws on those reports, the results of the three surveys, and selected texts from the literature.
The Report has been endorsed by the Project Management Group and the action research participants as being true to their experience of the Project and the knowledge that they generated.
The Report is structured as follows, with each chapter starting with a summary of its contents.
Following this Introduction, Chapter 2 sets the Project's context by laying out the way in which good practice is understood first, as a generic management capability, and second, within the specific context of crime prevention, internationally and in Australia. It looks at the use of good practice in Australia, drawing on data developed by the Project in its formative stage by surveying Senior Officers and the exemplary projects they identified. This survey identified constraints that might limit the use of good practice, and in response, the Report describes strategies developed by the participants for facilitating better practice.
Chapter 3 looks at the nature of continuous improvement processes as they unfolded in the Project. Continuous improvement is a key element in the achievement of good practice, forming the link between management practices and the achievement of community crime prevention organisational or project goals, and providing evidence to support, question or change these practices. The chapter discusses the central role of strategically directed learning and peer mentoring, and the importance of the good practice support group within an initiative, in supporting continuous improvement process.
Chapter 4 discusses in detail all the elements of the good practice proposition that the participants developed, applied, critiqued, evaluated and re-constructed. It describes the Project's outcomes in response to the Brief, other than the "future facilitation of good practice in community-based crime prevention" (which is the subject of Chapter 6). Chapter 4 also describes (as requested by the Project Management Group) issues identified by the research that were outside the Project Brief. The chapter concludes with the participants' warrant for claiming the validity of their definitions and propositions.
Chapter 5 presents participants' accounts of the good practice models they developed in the Action Stage of the research, using the draft proposition for good practice. This proposition had been developed, critiqued and modified in the first three stages of the Project, and had been translated into a draft Action Kit, which was circulated to interested projects. Nine projects agreed to use the Kit and report every month for six months on their developments. Users were given very little support by the consultants so that the participants could develop their own continuous improvement processes and share these with each other to generate generic processes using the Kit's resources. Space constraints have limited the number of participant narratives presented in this document to five, and each of these narratives describes:
Each narrative is followed by a "process map" that summarises the steps taken. The chapter concludes with a list of benchmarks, created by using a researched benchmarking process that has been simplified for this industry sector.
The final chapter, Chapter 6, engages with the future of good practice, drawing on participants' discussion during the Evaluation Workshop and translating this into guiding principles that are congruent with the domains of good practice that the Project defined and validated, based on the practice of participants. This should ensure that future implementation at national policy levels is congruent with grounded practice. The chapter also considers the implications that such a development could have for crime prevention stakeholders.
The Appendices provide more detailed discussions of certain areas:
• Appendix 1 considers the good practice proposition in the context of crime prevention in Indigenous communities, as practised by Indigenous professionals. Three Indigenous workers, in reconciliation, community development and juvenile justice respectively, critique the proposition, highlight its strengths, and describe how it would need to be modified to suit application in Indigenous communities.
• Appendix 2 describes the six-stage research method that the Project developed. It describes what took place, the data output from each stage, and how the participants, the consultants and the Project Management Group responded to the data to take each stage forward within the terms of the Project Brief and the consultants' tender. The Appendix includes the participants' own assessment of their use, and the consultants' use, of the research method; and two external critiques of the outcome and the process of research.
• Appendix 3 describes the monitoring tools that the Project developed. These include the forms developed by the Project, and descriptions of the first and second draft templates indicate the extent of development that the participants achieved in the Action Stage.
• Appendix 4 provides a "map" of community crime prevention in Australia, as drawn from the Project survey data.
• Appendix 5 presents the established validity criteria against which the participants and consultants evaluated the research.
• Appendix 6 provides references and bibliography.
Good practice originated as a management theory. Its purpose was to identify successful procedures to enable manufacturers consistently to create a product of a standard quality that was internationally competitive. Since its inception, "good practice" has come to mean many different things in a wide range of contexts and has been transferred from product to service delivery. For example, it can be used to manufacture a car of international standard or to strive for continuous improvement in service quality at a kindergarten. A review of literature (both local and international) identified a number of core definitions and indicators of good practice. In developing good practice, each organisation and field has created its own unique interpretation of these definitions.
International studies also yielded a range of guidelines for achieving results in crime prevention, yet only some of these corresponded to the accepted definitions of good practice as discussed within the management sector (across all industries) and none identified either the standards against which they had been measured or the way in which such practice can be implemented (process indicators). A set of good practice guidelines developed by Senior Officers at the National Anti-Crime Strategy and the National Crime Prevention, however, came closer to meeting concepts of good practice in the management of crime prevention - something not found in the international literature, which tended to see good practice in crime prevention only in terms of "recipes" for intervention-and the concepts in these guidelines provided the Project with a basis for expansion through consultation with project officers in the field.
Interviews and surveys in the initial stage of the Project, together with the literature review, aimed to establish existing language and beliefs about good practice. This process revealed considerable divergence within and between policy and practitioner levels about the meaning of good practice in a generic sense, and about what good practice actually looks like when applied to crime, nationally or internationally.
Within the community crime prevention field, there were some shared understandings of the term "good practice" with regard to quality management principles, but at policy levels, there was wide divergence about the meaning of "community crime prevention" and "good practice"-for example, whether crime prevention should or should not address the causes of crime. Divergence was also seen between policy and practice, and very possibly exists between practitioners as well, although this was not so evident in the surveys that comprised Level 2 of the Project's research.
For example, at the time of the Project, South Australian policy (which had recently adopted a problem-solving approach) expressed a preference for practitioners to use imported methods of prevention, and held that the theory that crime prevention that addresses the "causes" of crime was no longer valid. In the interview survey with other Senior Officers, however, there were mixed feelings about using imported methods, and the Queensland Government's new discussion paper focussed very strongly on dealing with the causes of crime. At the practitioner level, the imperative is to develop strategies from community participation, that result in long-term outcomes that meet with community support as well as funding body satisfaction.
The difference between policy and practice was characterised by basic differences between the values and shorter-term priorities that guide State policies, on the one hand, and the longer-term professional obligations that guide daily prevention practice in communities, on the other.
The consultants' approach was not to prove that one method was better than another. This was not the intention of the Brief, would only increase division, and is unlikely even to be a possibility, given the great diversity of contextual factors and jurisdictional differences. Rather, the Project recognised the merit of all stated approaches and developed a communication, learning, management and monitoring system that could apply to any of them. The same system could also gather grounded data to resolve or move towards resolution of conflicting beliefs. The Project's intention was to create a "generic" system, not to prove or disprove prevailing methods.
The Project identified the many constraints to good practice, including the basic differences in values and priorities discussed above, and used these constraints to create the tools to govern continuous improvement process, in order to facilitate better practice. The majority of community crime prevention projects run for a relatively short time because of resourcing and political issues. This often means that tracking and evaluation is limited to answering funding body interests rather than community interests. To compound the problem, measurement criteria are difficult to apply to the concept of prevention.
Through determining organisational and strategic priorities, and addressing the constraints to achieving these priorities, the participants attained significant changes in the focus, structure and operation of their community crime prevention initiatives. They were able to work with the constraints, and develop stability and strategic strength. In good practice, as in community crime prevention itself, progress is an incremental process of overcoming day-to-day challenges while keeping a focus on the desired outcome.
This chapter begins with a generic overview of good practice and moves on to review how good practice is described in international crime prevention literature. It refers to the Project's research data to put forward an amalgamation of the views of Australian crime prevention policy makers regarding good practice in crime prevention, and it reports on the extent to which this definition is being used by exemplary projects. It also summarises other definitions of good practice generated by the field that were not included in the policy makers' views. Finally, the chapter considers constraints to using good practice (as identified by the Senior Officers and exemplary projects), and how these constraints were addressed in the Project.
The Project included a literature review to determine the accepted meaning of "good practice" as derived from the professional use of specific terms within a range of industries. The review accessed industry journals, papers, some texts and Internet references, to ascertain how practitioners applying good practice in fields other than crime prevention were using the language. This was equivalent to "benchmarking" the use of the language of good practice.
The review indicated that several key phrases associated with good practice have undergone significant shifts in meaning, depending on the context in which they have been applied. "Good practice" is a management strategy that originated in manufacturing and industry sectors. The literature reports it in terms of human resource management and technical developments in single corporate entities or companies tracked across timeframes of many years. While the development of good practice in Australia has been significantly assisted by government to increase the international competitiveness of our national product, it was, at the time of the Project, still a relatively new approach to apply good practice to the public sector itself, particularly in community-based initiatives such as crime prevention. To say that such an application is new does not mean that it is unusual.
Crime prevention is a particularly challenging field in which to apply good practice principles. Australia has yet to resolve its taxonomy of crime prevention. Is it a sector, an industry, a profession, a philosophy, a political platform or a science? The scope of community crime prevention goes way beyond the traditional good practice model. Community crime prevention exists across jurisdictions and within them. It brings a variety of public, private, academic and community players together in its "whole of government" approach. Multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary thinking and practice are built into crime prevention management strategies that sustain partnerships whose members may or may not use concepts of good practice. If they do, these concepts and their resulting practices may have significant variations and may even be contradictory.
Crime prevention "produces" a service or product that intends to prevent an outcome rather than manifest one. This makes it particularly difficult to define "success" and even harder to measure outcomes - a concept that is fundamental to established concepts of good practice. Crime prevention initiatives are frequently short-term projects or aspects of community service programming that exist only while public funding is available. The short-term nature of funding results in continual structural and procedural change, bringing new stakeholders into partnerships and changing government responsibilities. These issues of time, resourcing and structural change, all of which were felt keenly by the participants in this Project, are very different to the good practice contexts of manufacturing or major corporate entities where much of the literature (and thus the implied meaning of the terms) has been developed.
The characteristics of crime prevention raise challenging questions for good practice. What sort of agency management is needed to support collaborative leadership? How do we define the classic good practice terms of "investor", "producer" or "consumer" in this varied and "many-structured" activity? How can "efficiency" and "effectiveness (of intervention)" be measured when initiatives are relatively short-term and the outcome is largely a matter of social construction - complex, evolving and reflective of the socio-political dynamics of a specific community of interest? How can we align concepts of "quality" that arise from the often incongruent perspectives of perpetrators, victims, professional practitioners and political or corporate "investors"? And how can such quality be incorporated into an initiative's production processes when resources for social change and community services do not meet the demand for such services? Fundamentally, is "good practice" even applicable in the community crime prevention context?
Coming to terms with the language and the basic ideas of "good practice" was a first step towards finding firm ground with regard to these challenging questions. The following summary of terms lists these definitions in a concise table form, as they are understood within the management literature (rather than from a crime prevention perspective). The table presents a collation of many perspectives to generate some core ideas. Two things, however, should be noted. Firstly, the use of these terms in good practice literature varies considerably. Secondly, understanding of the terms as it developed during this Project also differed, sometimes substantially, from the definitions presented below. These definitions nevertheless provided a valuable starting point for the Project's development, and they also served to orient the participants' thinking to good practice in management of crime prevention (rather than seeing good practice as providing "recipes" for action).
| TERM |
EXPLANATION |
| Good practice |
The use of a variety of management strategies to enable a quality product or service to be produced in an efficient, effective and reliable way. The management strategies span and integrate i) corporate objectives ii) human resource management iii) production processes and iv) consumer or consumer group perspectives on quality. |
| Quality |
A characteristic derived from stated or implied needs, which makes up the quality of an entity. For example, the need for dependability is manifested in a product as "dependable" under a range of jeopardising circumstances. Dependability becomes a quality of the product or service. (Drawn from Praxiom definition) |
| Total quality management |
A management approach that uses criteria to evaluate and manage good practice within the context of organisational learning and continuous improvement. The criteria may or may not be pre-determined, and are broken into sub-categories (also known as "items" or "categories") of activities which are measured for their efficiency and effectiveness. Measurement may be qualitative or quantitative depending on whether a direct cause/effect relationship between an activity and its quality outcome can be demonstrated. Measurement may be by observation and/or self-assessment. |
| Quality assurance |
A set of prescribed activities whose purpose is to demonstrate that an entity meets all quality requirements. (Drawn from Praxiom definition) |
| Benchmarking |
Creating definitions of a particular activity; mapping how that activity is carried out, the amount and quality of its outcomes; learning from others the extent to which the amount and quality can be improved and the steps needed to improve them; taking the steps and broadcasting what was learned. (Drawn from Evans, A. 1994) |
| Continuous improvement process |
Participation in a culture of learning to utilise the management strategies in the achievement of good practice. |
| Critical success factors |
Qualities of a product or service, as defined by management, investors and consumers, that must be addressed and be evident in the product or service for it to be deemed successful by its stakeholders. |
| Performance indicators |
Actions or product qualities that demonstrate that the desired quality of production or service (the critical success factors) is being realised at crucial points of a sequence of activity. They are answers to questions about that sequence of action in a specific context. |
| Key performance indicators |
Performance indicators that demonstrate that several critical success factors are being realised in the service or product. |
| Key performance measures |
Qualitative and quantitative measures of observable actions or product qualities that identify the extent to which critical success factors have been realised by the product or service - in other words, a measure of the quality of the product or service. |
How do these definitions of the elements of good practice translate into the way an organisation develops and implements processes and procedures? Some indicators that good practice is taking place in any industry are:
Good practice also increasingly incorporates values of knowledge generation and quality of life of "producers and customers" in both environmental and socio-cultural contexts.
Crime prevention is concerned with local issues, reflecting local culture, but not necessarily using local methods of intervention to create the preventative outcome. The focus on international or "world class" criteria and standards therefore may or may not be appropriate to a local community.
| One should exercise caution in adopting crime prevention programs which have been proven to be successful. What works in Wollongong may fail in Washington or vice versa. In some cases, this may reflect cultural differences between the setting in which a program was introduced successfully, and the location in which it was replicated. |
| Grabosky and James; 1995 |
What does international literature say about good practice crime prevention, and what is the assumed meaning of good practice as a generic concept in this literature? At an international level, good practice has been largely documented as evaluated outcomes and option appraisal material. There is frequent reference to key strategies to aid in the development of effective programs, with little focus on continuous improvement process. International literature indicates consistent trends in effective crime prevention. In general, themes relate to:
While these features of community crime prevention are compatible with good practice, their development from a limited number of evaluations of specific projects and options appraisals means they do not incorporate all of the identified good practice characteristics. In particular, they do not include aspects such as:
The fact that these generic good practice concepts are not evident in the current literature does not mean that they are not being incorporated into management strategies in community crime prevention projects around the world. Our early surveys confirmed, however, that while some crime prevention initiatives around Australia are, independently, developing strategies that will incorporate these characteristics, they are the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, they are only incorporating these characteristics on a piecemeal basis rather than having a strategic commitment to all elements of good practice including continuous improvement process. Our surveys with the referred exemplary projects revealed that no initiatives were using a management system to introduce, learn about, implement and streamline good practice in community crime prevention in Australia. The outcome of this Project provides this development.
Internationally in the field of crime prevention, the language of good practice continues to be used in an inconsistent fashion, and we see the introduction of different domains of practice-for example, quality of life, sustainability and environmental quality.
In the United Nations document, Guide to Nominating and Learning from Best Practices in Improving Living Environments (United Nations Conference on Human Settlements [Habitat II], 1996), best practices are defined as:
…examples of actions which could be recommended for further application, whether in a similar or adapted form. They are actions, initiatives or projects which have resulted in clear improvements in the quality of life and the living environments of people in a sustainable way.
Further, those best practices have a significant role to play "in building a world-wide picture of urbanisation trends and in identifying ways in which common needs and problems can be met through the application of successful options". In discussing why best practices are important, this publication proposes that they have much to offer in terms of identifying solutions and problems, and creating knowledge bases for learning. It suggests that best practices:
Best practices have been understood as the best ways to perform a process, the means by which world-class organisations achieve top performance. The term "best practice", however, may be a misnomer:
| No practice is "best" for all organisations. Best practices must be evaluated in the context of an organisation's strategy, its stage in its life cycle, its use of technology, and the importance of the process to the business. Best practices therefore should be thought of as a source of creative insight. |
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 1997 |
Guidelines for good practice in crime prevention have been issued in a number of countries, as follows.
Guidelines developed from the experience in Europe and North America underline the importance of:
The Mayor's Task Force on Safer Cities identified priority areas and specific actions to prevent crime and decrease citizen insecurity through the following strategies:
The National Crime Prevention Strategy (Canada) emphasises the importance of social development as a central element in crime prevention. In developing problem-oriented/neighbourhood-based prevention programs, Justice Canada is committed to a strategy of preventing crime through neighbourhood involvement. They have produced a community-based crime prevention manual, Building a Safer Canada, which offers support for the development, implementation and evaluation of local crime prevention initiatives in Canada.
Neighbourhood initiatives aimed at developing detailed and sound crime prevention/community safety programs are advised to adhere to the following steps:
Crime Concern has provided a useful set of guidelines for the development of customised, comprehensive, coordinated and cost-effective prevention measures to tackle crime and criminality. They provide examples of projects that have reduced common crimes by 50 percent or more. Good practice guidelines to promote safer neighbourhoods include:
They state that prevention initiatives following these principles of good practice have seen impressive reductions in crime.
After reviewing a multitude of local crime prevention programs offered throughout the European Union (approx population 300 million), the European Forum for Urban Security identified the following key supports for effective policy and practice in promoting safer neighbourhoods:
In 1995, the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations adopted a set of guidelines for cooperation and technical assistance in the field of urban crime prevention. The guidelines are designed to enhance the effectiveness of urban crime prevention initiatives. The key principles to these guidelines include:
The Scandinavians are regarded as pioneers of social development approaches to crime prevention. This approach rests on two fundamental principles, that crime is most effectively dealt with:
Experience in The Netherlands indicates that successful crime reduction requires:
The Lead Ministers Paper (1995) identified the need to develop and promote good practice in crime prevention in a manner that had bi-partisan support. Two rounds of interviews with Senior Officers in the National Anti-Crime Strategy and National Crime Prevention created specific guidelines for good practice in crime prevention in Australia as derived from the respondents' current work. These criteria do greater justice to generic concepts of good practice than many of the international criteria.
The Senior Officers' amalgamated criteria are as follows:
These guidelines for good practice in community crime prevention include some of the elements that the Project participants generated from their own practice in the field. In particular, they emphasise collaboration, learning, ethical practices, accountability and participation. These elements are also the fundamental aspects of the ethical principles for good practice and the continuous improvement process that generates good practice, as identified in the Project.
The Senior Officers considered that good practice criteria would make participation in their core business more productive - including setting evaluation and accountability mechanisms. They expressed the following view: