February 2021 – The Cutting Crime Impact (CCI), project led by the University of Salford and in which Efus is a partner, conducted a preliminary assessment of the toolkits it has developed to reduce the impact of petty crime during a meeting of its Advisory Board* held online on 27-28 January.
Of a duration of three years (2018-2021), the CCI project seeks to develop bespoke support tools, resources and guidance materials (“toolkits”) to enable police forces and policymakers in the UK, Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain to effectively reduce the impact of petty crime on local communities, and where possible to prevent it.
Support tools, resources and guidance material
The project partners – regional and local authorities as well as national and local police forces – developed and prototyped eight toolkits in total, i.e., two for each of the project’s four focus areas – predictive policing, community policing, crime prevention through urban design and planning (CP-UDP) and measuring and mitigating citizens’ feelings of insecurity. The kits include tools to improve internal LEA knowledge systems, foster multi-disciplinary collaboration with local partners and improve the evaluation of petty crime’s impact.
End-user-friendly tools
One of the tenets of the project is the key role of the different end-users of these toolkits, which are national and local police forces and local security actors. In practice this meant that partners did extensive research on their real needs and difficulties in order to produce tailored solutions. This also means that at times, the partners shifted away from the initial objectives in order to adapt their solutions not to preconceived notions of a problem but to needs stemming from actual situations on the ground.
Spotlight on two Efus members: Lisbon and Catalonia
Two Efus members, the City of Lisbon through its local police and the Government of Catalonia, are partners in the CCI project. They were among the six LEA partners that presented at the meeting the toolkits they developed and the results of the testing phase.
The City of Lisbon created a tool to raise awareness on the importance of community policing among senior police officers and decision makers. The government of Catalonia developed guidance material for local security actors to help them better understand and mitigate feelings of insecurity among local residents.
An opportunity to share practices with Efus members
Efus will create practice sheets that highlight the problems faced and solutions found by the partners during this development phase in order to share them with its members, most of whom face similar issues in terms of local feelings of insecurity linked to petty crime.
Furthermore, Efus has capitalized on the work conducted by the CCI partners in this development phase, as well as the methods they used, to enrich and update the methodological tools that are part of its long-standing strategic approach to urban security. We recently published an article on this approach and the new tools it now includes.
*CCI’s Advisory Board gathers six international experts in crime prevention, law enforcement and criminal justice.
> We invite all our members to check out the new Strategic Approach space on Efus Network for regular information on tools and best practices, including examples from the CCI project.
> More information on the CCI project on Efus website and on the project’s website.
