professor Michael Scott is director of the centre for problem-oriented policing and a clinical

professor at the university of Wisconsin law school in the u.s he started his career in policing
he was formerly chief of police in Lauderhill Florida he served in various civilian
administrative positions in the saint louis metropolitan fort pierce Florida and New York city
police departments and was a police officer in the madison Wisconsin police department.
Michael developed training programs in problem-oriented policing at the police executive
research forum and is a current chairperson for the Hermann Goldstein award for excellence
in problem-oriented policing
crime prevention planning when he wrote this but nonetheless it's apt
most of my professional work has been devoted to promoting better policing
to include better crime prevention through the framework of problem-oriented policing a
concept which is undoubtedly familiar to many of you though perhaps not to all and without
trying to give a thorough explanation of problem-oriented policing here the concept heavily
emphasizes a deliberate planning and analysis process as being useful to achieving policing
objectives a variety of these
so-called problem-solving processes have been developed for problem-oriented policing
going by their supposedly easy to remember acronyms Capra partners proctor the five eyes
and the most widely recognized of them Sarah model standing for scanning analysis response
and assessment by whatever label these processes remind problem solvers to ask the
following sorts of questions what is the nature and scope of the problem what sort and degree
of harm is it causing and to whom who wants what done about the problem what is causing
the problem or causing it to be as bad as it is what is currently being done about the problem
and to what effect what else might be done about the problem and what from among these
possibilities should actually be done and then who is responsible for doing these new things
and how can they be persuaded to do them and if and when these new things are done what
impact do they have on the problem are things better the same or worse than before much has
been studied and written about the various phases of the problem solving processes using the
Sarah framework the scanning phase we're identifying and defining public safety problems
there is information that has been written about that phase of the process and I’m currently
working with a colleague on writing a short guide for police on this aspect of problem solving
the analysis phase much has been written about understanding what causes or contributes to
crime problems and how we go about figuring that out and in the assessment phase much has
been written about evaluating or measuring the impact of problem-solving efforts on the
problem but considerably less attention has been paid to this middle phase the response or the
implementation phase compared to scanning analysis and assessment response seems
deceptively simple and straightforward indeed sometimes we think all the advice we ever
needed was provided to us by Nike just do it if only it were so but wishing it were so or
believing it were so won't make it so now it does turn out that some attention has been paid to
this aspect of problem solving
indeed the reason I was invited to speak to you is that rick brown the deputy research director
at aic and I co-authored a guide for police on implementing responses to problems and I have
brought along some copies of this guide which are available in the resource room but let's
think a bit about why some of our crime prevention initiatives fail or in burns’ words why are
best laid schemes go after glay there are four basic reasons why crime prevention initiatives
can fail the first is that the problem was inaccurately identified what we thought to be the
problem turned out not to be the problem at all so we tried to solve the wrong problem or
worse something that wasn't really a problem at all by way of example many efforts to
address the problem of sexual assault emphasize responses that seek to prevent
violent rapes by strangers so improving lighting in public places identifying and monitoring
known rapists in the community providing safe transportation for women at night-time
teaching women self-defence techniques and so forth and while that problem is of course real
and very serious the far more common sexual assault is that which is committed by
acquaintances of the victims and most of the responses to violent stranger rapes won't have
much impact on acquaintance rapes which is a quite different problem in many important
respects the second basic reason why crime prevention initiatives fail is that the problem was
inadequately analysed more precisely the causes and contributing factors to the problem were
not accurately understood for example efforts to reduce fights in and around licensed liquor
establishments by arresting the combatants are highly likely to fail for problems like these
where there is a steady stream of new potential offenders changing the environment of the
license. Establishment is the better course of action because a substantial amount of research
demonstrates that patrons take their cues about whether fighting in and around the
establishment is tolerated from the environment and the rules of the establishment not from
fear of police arrest. the fourth reason crime prevention initiatives can fail is that the response
simply didn't work even though the problem was correctly identified the cause is analysed
and understood and the response plan was implemented faithfully, some good ideas just don't
work.
I think a good example is drug abuse education programs for teenagers when programs such
as dare were first developed in the United States in the mid-1980s,
they did address a real problem, entry-level drug use by young people that could lead to their
using harder drugs and becoming involved in crime that accompanies illegal drug markets.
the analysis of the problem led to the reasonable conclusion that among the reasons young
people started using illegal drugs was that they didn't understand the consequences and they
didn't have the skills to say no in the face of peer pressure and so the dare curriculum was
developed, standardized and taught by police with great zeal to millions of young American
students but nearly all of the many impact evaluations of dare have concluded that whatever
other virtues dare might enjoy apparently reducing future drug use by students isn't one of
them. of course, dare and similar programs remain tremendously popular and alive and well
but I suspect this is because the programs are meeting objectives other than reducing drug
use, perhaps job security for dare Instructors. now I didn't lose count or lose a page of my
notes here I skipped over the third reason that crime prevention initiatives can fail because
this is the one that I want to spend the balance of my time discussing.
crime prevention initiatives can fail because they weren't properly implemented or weren't
implemented at all. we American football fans say somebody dropped the ball. well maybe
this is a better uh my limited knowledge of Australian foot rules football is that this guy is
deliberately dropping the ball in order to kick it here it's not I can't figure out why but I can't
say this with any scientific certainty but in my experience this third reason for failure is much
more common than one might imagine. we don't often read about these failures to implement.
after all who would bother to write a report about what didn't happen but we do experience
them at least I know I have. perhaps in our zeal to entice police to embrace a more deliberate
analytical process for addressing their work.
we oversimplified the problem-solving
model especially the deceptively simple Sarah model within its response phase is actually
three separate but interconnected steps.
the first being conducting developing a range of possible alternatives the second being
choosing from among those alternatives and only the third being actually implementing the
chosen responses to which we could easily add a fourth modifying the plan if and when the
implementation doesn't seem to be going as planned as is often the case. there are many
factors that influence whether crime prevention initiatives are or are not successfully
implemented and one can't plan for every contingency but I’d like to talk about six factors
that I think are particularly important I chose six because apparently that's one less than the
maximum number of items that humans can readily memorize and I’ve alliterated them here
to help further help you remember them so I will call them prerequisites of positive
performance
they are proprietorship persistence patience persuasion problem orientation
and practicality I’ll tell you a few of my own personal experiences with successful
and failed implementation to illustrate these essential elements by proprietorship I mean
ownership and by ownership I mean leadership the the precise term matters little but the
concept matters a lot successful implementation of crime prevention initiatives requires
strong leadership to make sure that what is supposed to get done does get done and leadership
very often follows from a sense of ownership of an initiative a true sense of commitment to
that initiative because one has a personal investment in it and where should that leadership
come from it need not come from the top of an organization. in fact, it rarely comes from
there chief executives are usually far too consumed with other matters to lead any but the
largest initiatives in so many successful crime prevention initiatives the leadership comes
from far closer to the operating level.
a couple of years ago I was having lunch with a a former violent crimes police
detective who had recently been promoted to lieutenant and been assigned to what must have
seemed like purgatory to him the police department's training division.
his personal passion remained in working on violent crime cases and catching bad guys, so
we got talking over lunch about better ways to catch bad guys and better ways to deal with
them once they were caught so as to get them to stop doing bad things to make a long story
short, I enticed him to think about policing the worst offenders the most violent the most
prolific in a very different way and he got hooked enough on the idea of rethinking this to
read more about it himself and to
truly educate himself on a different approach. now maybe he just saw this as his ticket back
to criminal investigations but either way with some further assistance from me and a few of
my law students this lieutenant developed a solid proposal to
try out a radically new concept he persuaded his superiors in the police department of its
merit and even of course managed to get himself transferred and put in charge of a new
police unit that would coordinate this approach and although i might have sown some of the
seeds for this new approach by the time the lieutenant was pitching the idea to his superiors
there was no doubt that he owned this initiative this was his baby and what he has
accomplished to date is remarkable.
He has enlisted the active support of several dozen law enforcement and social service
agencies persuaded judges no easy matter and has his program up and running to great
acclaim all within about a year and a half which is light speed for an initiative of this
magnitude now. interestingly the same police lieutenant
again, recently met with me to pitch his latest idea for extending his focus deterrence
concept to a wholly new policing problem that of drunken driving and as he enthusiastically
began working out the details for this new initiative.
I asked him whether his team of detectives would be the ones responsible for monitoring the
drunk drivers no he said that would most likely fall to the police department's traffic team
now what might be the problem here no doubt some of your instincts are like mine wondering
how enthusiastic the traffic team will be.
to implement an idea developed by members of another unit and given to them so I strongly
suggested to the lieutenant that he involved members of the traffic team in the early
conceptualization and design of this initiative which he's now doing the main point here is
that a sense of ownership of an idea goes a long way toward ensuring faithful implementation
of that idea. for the same reason that very few people take a rental car to the car wash and few
people paint a house that they're leasing few people are as committed to someone else's idea
as they are committed to their own. so, ownership need not mean total control of the project
but it should mean that those who are tasked with implementing the project have some
involvement in its design in order to maximize their commitment to it. a decidedly less
successful initiative involved a police detective in Florida with whom I worked. this detective
having newly been encouraged to think about his work in a more proactive and preventive
fashion
asked me to help him find the resources to purchase an expensive piece of medical
equipment that could improve the quality of investigations of sexual abuse of children.at the
time I was in charge of the police department's finances but I knew that we lacked the money
to buy the equipment outright so I asked our police chief to call the head of another
government agency to see if his agency might contribute funds toward the purchase of this
equipment. the chief agreed to do so but one day when the chief's phone call was returned.
while we were sitting in another meeting my heart sank when the chief told his secretary to
tell the head of that other agency that the chief was busy but that the purpose of his call
wasn't all that important anyway so the request for funding was not made the money was not
procured the equipment was not purchased. The investigations were not improved and the
status quo prevailed and for years I saw this as a failure of the police chief's leadership which
perhaps it was but upon greater reflection the failure was at least partly my own and maybe
partly the detectives it's not that we failed to recognize a genuine problem it's not that we
failed to analyse the problem and recognize an appropriate solution we failed to build and
make the case. that might have persuaded others our own police chief included that this was
truly important and worth the cost to acquire it and the costs weren't just the cost of the
equipment only when years later I became a police chief myself. Did I come to appreciate
that what I really was asking of my police chief back then was that he spends some of his
political capital a precious commodity for a police chief and for that the detective and I were
not persistent passionate and persuasive enough the leadership necessary to see this initiative
through to fruition was lacking now the less sexy dimension of proprietorship and leadership
is management where leadership involves vision authority. the power of persuasion
management involves attending to the details scheduling funding reporting prodding
assigning reassigning adapting to exigencies in short keeping things on track and moving
ahead inertia kills projects as surely as anything else can. ideally the project leader is also a
good manager but such is not always the case many. chief executives who are good leaders
are not especially good managers they lack either the skills or the time to attend to details.
however, they're combined both leadership and management are absolutely essential to
success closely related to proprietorship is persistence. many of the successful crime
prevention initiatives with which I am familiar have been led by people who have the
persistence of a bulldog .they are guerrilla warriors .they are determined to achieve their
objective by whatever means quite often the reason this quality is so critical with respect to
crime prevention is that much crime prevention necessitates a departure from the status
quitches means almost invariably that someone is not going to welcome the proposed new
way of doing business. after all if the old way of doing business was satisfactory, there likely
wouldn't be a problem to solve the core reason why people all of us resist change is that we
don't always know ahead of time how we personally and our personal interests will shake out
in the new order of things we might come out ahead but we might come out behind and that
uncertainty leads most of us to conclude that the safer course of action is to maintain the
status quo to overcome such natural resistance.one must be persistent patient and
persuasive.so I’ve now said that both persistence and patience are crucial to successful crime
prevention implementation and I appreciate that that might sound like a contradiction in
terms what I really mean by patience is awaiting the right opportunity to put a plan into
action and that right opportunity isn't always right. after the plan has been hatched a couple of
anecdotes will help make this point some years ago, I was working as a research consultant to
the police in a city in Georgia in the southern part of the United States the project was funded
by the federal government and was intended to help police apply the advice provided in the
problem-oriented guides for police that I had helped to develop to real crime problems that
were being experienced in that community. at the time we had only produced about 20 of
these problem-oriented guides so the participating police agencies had to select problems to
address from among these 20 topics this police department chose to work on the problem of
residential burglary for which there was a pop guide now because this project was funded by
the federal government work on the project needed to adhere to the federal government's
timeline its fiscal calendar and with my help to push things along. We actually managed to do
a pretty good job collecting information and analysing the problem and out of that analysis
we came up with what I still think was a pretty good burglary prevention. Implementation
plan involving plans to improve police reporting of burglaries, improve collection of
evidence at burglary scenes reduce false reports of burglary improve burglary prevention
advice provided to victims improve the apprehension of prolific burglars reduce school
truancy to control daytime burglaries better control the market for stolen goods and improve
the design of some neighbourhoods to deter burglary we really did learn a lot about the
problem that we didn't know and over a decade later I’m still pretty pleased with our plan but
in the midst of our project September of 2001 the police department's attention became drawn
to other concerns the terrorist attacks in new York and Washington a local anthrax scare and
a proposed merger of the police department with another department understandably made
residential burglaries seem rather less urgent so by the time I had to close the project and
submit my report to the federal government little to nothing of the burglary plan
had been put into action there were both problems of ownership here the police saw this more
as my research project than their crime prevention project and timing problems. the problem
simply lost out to more urgent problems but my next anecdote about the role of patience and
opportunity is. I swear purely coincidental as I was writing down the George burglary story, I
just told you for this talk I got a phone call from a police chief who said that he was suddenly
getting some significant pressure from his city's mayor about homeless people creating
nuisances in the city centre and the chief felt the need to have a plan to respond to the mayor's
concerns
and that needed to be done quickly fortunately some of my law students had
collaborated with some of the police chief's officers just a few years back in studying this
very problem. a few elements of which had been implemented smelling a ripe opportunity I
wiped the virtual dust off of those now four-year-old plans and put them back in the chief's
hands within the hour. Like the Georgia burglary project, I had been somewhat disappointed
that our plan to address chronic nuisance. Offenders had fallen by the wayside four years ago
when key police officials working on the project were promoted and transferred now it
remains to be seen whether my patients and my good filing system will be rewarded with
implementation of the plan but the prospects have suddenly brightened oh and by the way
when the idea for the drunken driving initiative that I mentioned earlier surfaced I literally
pulled off of my shelf a study of drunken driving and a recommended plan of action prepared
for that very problem in that very same city that included the very same proposal to deal with
chronic drunken drivers that I had worked on and which was completed and submitted to that
police department in 1981 over 30 years ago the plan was even written on a typewriter.
That’s how old it was and yet upon re-reading that plan it seemed as fresh and relevant as the
day it was written.it was just a plan waiting patiently for its opportunity because it is often the
case that the individual or agencies spearheading the crime prevention initiative does not
have the authority or resources to implement the proposed responses to the problem some
persuasion of others to do so will be necessary what I want to focus on here is not the form of
persuasion that derives from direct authority do it or else or the form derived from a
compelling personality or even the form derived from reciprocal deal making but rather the
form of persuasion that comes from the power of evidence.
I will be leading a more extensive workshop on the subject the day after tomorrow at
the university so I won't go into great detail here but just sketch the outlines police of course
are very accustomed to gathering and presenting evidence but usually in the context of
building a criminal case the sort of evidence required to persuade others to implement crime.
Prevention measures is different it is firstly evidence that the crime problem being addressed
is serious and demands attention. it is secondly evidence that the current response to the
problem is inadequate. it is thirdly evidence of what is causing the problem it is fourthly
evidence that the proposed new response of the problem is likely to be effective and it is
fifthly
evidence or at least a compelling argument that this individual or this organization should be
responsible for implementing the new response. Again, none of these forms of evidence are
the sort that police agencies are accustomed to presenting but they are becoming increasingly
important to successful policing and crime prevention the basic argument. Here is that too
often the public expects crime problems to be dealt with by the police through either their
physical presence or their powers of arrest and while those remain important tools. for police,
they seldom have the sort of crime prevention effect we hope for because they do little to
address the underlying conditions to crime problems. let me use a local example that I read
about in a crime journal it involves so-called ram raiding at shopping malls here in the greater
Sydney area I wasn't familiar with the term when I first read it so I had to look it up but
apparently ram rating involves thieves crashing their vehicles into the shopping mall and
using the vehicle to rip out the ATM in the mall in order to steal the cash inside the problem
was of concern both to the public police and to the private corporations that owned the
shopping centres and the ATMs the corporations likely would have preferred a new response
that enabled police to arrive quicker to the scene to apprehend the thieves that would involve
some added costs to the police and consequently to the taxpayers. On the other hand police
would likely prefer that the corporations better secure the ATMs or the shopping centre so
that the crime was harder to successfully commit that would involve some added cost to the
corporations for whose argument would be more persuasive to the other the new south Wales
police organized a task force to address the problem the task force's work included mounting
some of the sort of evidence I just mentioned it presented evidence of the scope and
seriousness of the problem there were 69 of these crimes in one year across the jurisdiction
with significant financial losses just determining the number of ram raids took considerable
effort because police records classified this crime in different ways the task force presented
evidence that the current responses to the problem were not especially effective having police
respond quickly to apprehend the thieves wasn't effective given the time gap between how
long it took thieves to commit the crime and how long it took police to be notified and to
arrive. The existing alarms surveillance cameras traffic bollards and the hardware that
secured the ATMs to the walls and the floors were also proving inadequate and the detailed
analysis of successful and unsuccessful ram raids provided evidence about what sorts of new
responses might better prevent the crimes it turned out that placing ATMs where vehicles
wouldn't fit and installing barriers right next to the ATMs in conjunction with the alarms
were effective responses all this evidence pointed the way toward a combination of new
responses. The costs for which were apportioned between the police and the corporations an
evaluation of the initiative provided the final form of evidence it revealed a 72 percent
reduction in attempted ram raids
and a 93 reduction in successful ones the missing evidence which is admittedly
hard to derive is that which would demonstrate which of the various responses implemented
had the greatest positive effect this initiative is somewhat unusual in
that police and the private corporations appear to have worked well together
and that they came to mutual agreement as to who would do what to address the problem
with costs and labour being divided equitably again by coincidence it turns out that the
person taking the lead on the project on behalf of the private corporations is a former police
officer with whom I used to work in new York city and currently working here in Sydney for
the Westfield corporation and his experiences in public policing and private security might
well abridge the communications and trust gap that is often hard to bridge if I’m not mistaken
he's also standing at the back of the room where communications and trust is lacking between
those promoting the crime prevention measure and those with the capacity to implement it
other methods of persuasion might be called for this is what I’ll be talking about more
on Wednesday but this graphic represents a framework for how police and by extension other
crime prevention practitioners might employ various methods for shifting responsibility for
crime prevention to those we might call reluctant partners
for those of you interested but who cannot attend the Wednesday workshop there is a
guidebook written for police available on this topic. Crime prevention initiatives should be
launched in order to solve some particular problem they should not be launched to prevent
crime in general if we've learned nothing else about crime we've learned that it is not a
monolithic thing the only sure common denominator among all crimes is that some
legislature has deemed that conduct punishable by incarceration but no more than one can
prevent all illness with one health measure can one prevent all crime with one crime
prevention measure the response to a crime problem must be carefully tailored to the
particular type of crime but more than that it must be carefully tailored to the particular
setting in which that crime problem is occurring just because a particular crime prevention
measure is known to have been effective in some other place does not mean that it will be
equally effective in your place context matters we've seen this tendency all too often in the
united states the successful crime prevention measure developed in one jurisdiction
gets favourable national media coverage or favourable coverage within the crime prevention
community and other jurisdictions across the country feel compelled to adopt it blindly
without first analysing their own local problem to determine if they even experience the same
problem as the original jurisdiction now a problem orientation also contrasts with a response
orientation the underlying crime problems should drive the initiative not the preferred
response the neighbourhood watch movement is a classic example of a crime prevention
measure in search of crime problems.at least in the united states some police agencies assign
police officers full time just to organize and support neighbourhood watch programs
notwithstanding that much of the research on them tells us that they are notoriously hard to
sustain in the absence of acute neighbourhood crime problems especially
in impoverished neighbourhoods that commonly lack the natural social cohesion that would
both sustain a neighbourhood watch but which if it existed would also prevent much crime in
the first instance so the net effect is that neighbourhood watch tends to thrive where it's not
needed and tends not to thrive where it is needed neighbourhood watch like drug abuse
resistance education gang resistance education street lighting surveillance and other popular
crime prevention programs might well be sensible responses to some crime problems but not
to all crime problems and seldom as stand-alone responses. Most effective crime prevention
is that which is tailored to specific problems in which is multi-dimensional with one measure
reinforcing others.
my organization the centre for problem-oriented policing has created a series of guidebooks
on how some crime provincial responses work and how to implement them but all of them
say that the problem should drive the response not the other way around similarly a problem
orientation stands in contrast to partner orientation crime prevention partnerships are usually
good things but
again, the orientation should be to the problem not to the partnership I’ve been having
a bit of a running debate these past few years with some of our British police and crime
prevention colleagues a while back the British police and crime prevention practitioners
opted to rename problem-oriented policing problem-oriented partnerships and they built some
of their crime prevention. legislation around the notion of partnerships and thus crime
prevention partnerships have sprung up all over the UK which in some respects is to be
envied because police most certainly can use the assistance of partners but however well
intended the partnership should never become the goal the prevention of particular crime
problems should remain the goal. if a partnership is required or helpful to prevent or control a
problem that should be organized and administered but not all crime problems require
elaborate partnerships moreover once a particular crime problem is resolved it's not such a
bad thing for the partnership to dissolve so long as it or a different partnership can be
reconstituted if the need arises prematurely constituted partnerships outstanding partnerships
can be complicated by virtue of the fact that they often feel compelled to find a role and an
equal voice for each partner neither of which might make sense in the context of a particular
problem. let the problem determine the need for and the contours of a partnership not the
other way around. lastly the more practical the response plan the more likely it is to be
implemented.by practical I mean several things one that the resources needed to implement a
response are available at the time the plan is devised obviously that isn't always possible.
indeed, in many instances if the resources for a particular response were available the
response might already be in place. Among the most critical resources are the authority to
implement the response the know-how skills and time to implement the response and the
money to purchase supplies or pay someone else to implement the response if you personally
lack the authority to execute the response do you know how to obtain that authority if it will
require a new law or a change in policy obviously that will take some time and effort to
realize but it can be done I know of a good number of American police officers who
succeeded in getting local state and even federal laws changed so that they had the authority
to implement a new crime prevention response.in one example a university police officer was
able to get local law changed to require second-hand bookstores to keep a record of the
identity of all people selling textbooks. This simple change in the law virtually eliminated
textbook thieves opportunity to sell stolen textbooks easily and yielded a 90 percent reduction
in reported textbook thefts on that campus as a side note but one that reinforces the
importance of practicality the police officer who developed this idea agreed that the law
should exempt bookstores that did not routinely purchase textbooks and eliminated the
requirement that police departments routinely inspect these records that concession made the
law much more practical and alleviated the opposition that both the booksellers and the police
department was mounting to his original proposal. with respect to know-how skills and time
when people are asked to take on new tasks that they already know how to do and which they
can reasonably accomplish within their regular work routine they're far more likely to
perform them. faithfully try not to ask individuals and organizations to do things they don't
ordinarily do and with respect to money where possible try to establish or find
a pool of somewhat unrestricted funds that can be spent on a variety of crime prevention
activities crime prevention planning doesn't always sync up with organization AL’s annual
budgeting cycles. Effective crime prevention of the sort we're discussing today that is tailored
to needs that are determined on the basis of careful analysis and that is problem oriented calls
for a more flexible funding arrangement than is usually offered by annual budgets and
government grants.in some us jurisdictions privately run police foundations have been
created through which corporate donations in support of public safety can be drawn upon by
police on an as needed basis with oversight and accounting of the funds handled by an
independent organization. alternatively, many us police departments accumulate funds
through the seizure and forfeiture of illegal assets mainly drug money and for the most part
these funds can only be used for law enforcement purposes which can include crime
prevention.
in conclusion with all of these obstacles to implementing new responses to crime
problems it's a wonder that anything ever gets accomplished and yet it does perhaps not
always according to plan but effective responses do get put into place on the centre for
problem oriented policing website we continue to gather hundreds of examples of effective
crime reduction and prevention some led by police some by others.in nearly every one of
them each initiative is written down and put out for others to read and some degree of success
was usually realized and yet in nearly every one of these reports is some discussion of the
obstacles that had to be overcome to implement the plan
the lessons of proprietorship persistence patience persuasion problem orientation and
practicality are gleaned from these real world experiences.so I’ll leave you with two last
thoughts from others who gave serious and not so serious thought to implementing plans both
of which seem applicable to our work said general Eisenhower in preparing for battle I have
always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable it's in developing the plan
that we are compelled to give serious thought to why we want to take certain actions and to
better prepare ourselves to adapt to the as yet unknown contingencies that lie ahead and lastly
because I started with a mouse I’ll finish with a mouse
British author suck wrote invading a mousetrap with cheese always leave room for the
mouse because no matter how much technology might be involved. Crime prevention is
mostly about human behaviour so it's worth reminding ourselves that even more so than for a
mouse the human factor is hard to anticipate and that's not mere speculation you can plan on
it