Paris, July 2024 – As Paris welcomes the 2024 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, cities have a unique opportunity to showcase the actions they are taking to prevent crime in and through sport. Indeed, sport is a remarkably efficient way to promote social cohesion and educate young (and not so young) people about civic values.
Years of experience
The European Forum for Urban Security (Efus) has been working for over two decades on various aspects of crime prevention and sport, whether the prevention of violence in stadia, the security of large sports events, or the prevention of discrimination in amateur sport. The theme of one of the sessions at Efus’ 8th Security, Democracy and Cities conference, in March 2024 in Brussels, was ‘large sporting events and violence’.
The 2024 Crime Prevention Award
The French Forum for Urban Security (FFSU) has chosen crime prevention in sport as the theme of its 2024 Crime Prevention Award (PrixPrev), with applications open in three categories:
- sport as a tool to prevent crime
- the prevention of violence in amateur sport
- the prevention of crime and risky behaviours in large events, including in sports, and ensuring safety and security in such events.
European cooperation projects
Efus led or was a partner in several European projects dealing with crime prevention linked to sport. Two of the most recent were:
- Sentry Sport (Surfacing, preventing and mediating discriminations through sport) (2021-2023) – Policy recommendations of the project
- MATCH SPORT (Make Amateur Sport Tolerant by Eliminating Racism and Discrimination) (2019-2021)
Further reading
- MATCH-SPORT – Analysing discriminatory violence in amateur sport – State-of-the-art in 7 countries. Make Amateur Sport Tolerant by Eliminating Intolerance and Discrimination (Efus, 2021)
- MATCH-SPORT – Preserving amateur sport’s cohesive capacity by fighting discriminatory violence at the local level (Efus, 2021)
- European Practices for Social Integration through Sport (Efus, 2017)
- Preventing Violence in Sport – A handbook for cities – GOAL (Efus, 2012)
- Euro 2000 Cities against Racism (Efus, 2000)
