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:
The Senior Officers were of the view that crime prevention should be able to be managed by using good practice concepts in the same way as any other public sector activity. With limited knowledge of good practice and few resources to implement it, however, the ability to change current practice is also limited.
The Project conducted a survey of exemplary projects identified by Senior Officers in each jurisdiction, to comment on the current use and understanding of good practice in crime prevention. The survey aimed to assess whether the Senior Officers' definitions of good practice were congruent with field practice, and to develop other definitions that might arise from field practice. All the surveyed projects were confident that they were using some elements of the Senior Officers' guidelines in their daily practice.
Among the domains described in the Senior Officers' guidelines, those that the project officers of the surveyed initiatives felt they were most successfully applying were:
The weakest domains of practice were:
Other good practice domains generated by the field-based project officers were:
These other elements were integrated into the final output of the Project.
The Senior Officers identified several constraints to the sector's adoption of all the elements of good practice. The fundamental issues were agreement about good practice terms and criteria, together with government policies that lack conformity. Other more specific barriers to good practice were identified, as follows:
Some Senior Officers expressed the view that national level operations had failed to develop meaningful partnerships between government agencies, the community and the private sector, and they saw the need for an all-inclusive good practice framework for partnerships to develop. They believed that partnerships are currently focussed on shared commitment to outcomes rather than integrated community consultation. It was, therefore, a priority that an accountability framework for good practice crime prevention be relevant to all stakeholders.5
Reflective reporting from the exemplary projects and the research participants also identified many constraints to the uptake of good practice. These related to education and information dissemination, community participation, professional practice and project resourcing, as set out in the following table.
| Constraints relating to EDUCATION AND INFORMATION | Constraints relating to COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION | Constraints relating to PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE | Constraints relating to PROJECT RESOURCING |
| Lack of knowledge about the meaning of crime, crime prevention and restorative justice issues | Uncertainty about the value of intended consequences of intervention | Unequal power relationships within working context inadequately addressed | Lack of adequate funding for projects and programs |
| Lack of clarity in the concept and definition of collaboration | Inability amongst participants to stand back and reflect | Lack of congruence between espoused theory and theory-in-use, with an impact on quality of working environment | Time constraints - including the time and energy involved in developing collaborative relationships |
| Lack of knowledge about research methods affecting attitudes on the validity of consultation data | Directive instead of collaborative processes which inhibit the exploration of issues, disagreement and diffusion of deeper understanding | Directive instead of collaborative processes, which inhibit exploration of issues, purposeful conflict and healthy working relationships | Competing interests |
| Failure to identify and discuss values, hampering the good management of divergent values | Public attitudes towards government policies | Lack of understanding about relationships to past, present and future. Attitudes about future seem to be important in facilitating change, and unless they change, it is questionable whether actions and behaviour change | High staff turnover |
| Lack of shared language and purpose | Power inequities between stakeholders | Lack of cohesion between theoretical and philosophical foundations | Lack of developed links and consultative processes within cultures that do not foster inquiry, change, challenge and critique |
| Inability to understand concepts | Lack of confidence in the quality of change | Lack of discussion about the relationship between offenders and victims in particular crime scenarios, and how crime prevention activities can productively address that relationship | Lack of structures in place to develop, design and implement ideas around restorative justice, thus promoting the concept that only the perpetrator has to change |
| Lack of information to inform attitudes and priorities | Lack of research methods and lack of understanding of the concept of validity | ||
| Lack of understanding to support a change focus from the individual perpetrator to cultural responsibilities for issues underpinning crime |
The Project enabled participants to develop and implement strategies that addressed the significant constraints to good practice within the environment of their own crime prevention initiative, as described in the participants' narratives (Chapter 5). In developing responses to these constraints, participants achieved significant changes in the operations and outcomes of their initiatives by:
These benefits were achieved through the participants' action research, addressing each of the constraints identified both by the Senior Officers and by the participating local project officers.
The strategies offer one approach to dealing with constraints and building good practice within crime prevention initiatives. Some of the major constraints identified throughout the Project, however, were issues outside the control of the project officer or the Project community. These revolved around funding, State and national policy and its management, time and constant change due to political and financial issues.
In theory, a strategic approach may be required. In reality, however, resources for good practice management may be limited and a coherent strategic approach thus not possible. If this was the case, Project participants demonstrated that a limited level of success can be achieved through a more general adult education approach.
Good practice, in its generic sense, is a management discipline that is not specific to any particular industry and is increasingly influenced by quality management constructs. As a management system for crime prevention, it may be applied on three levels:
All three levels of good practice require changes in daily management and prevention practice by individual workers if they are to be realised. Continuous improvement processes sustain this change of practice.
Failure to address agency (organisational level) good practice will obstruct good practice crime prevention. Without organisational cohesion, the practitioner will be unable to establish continuous improvement processes to produce the desired outcomes.
To add to the challenge of making a "generic" form of good practice in crime prevention, the definition of an "agent" may include any tier of government, private sector, community or academic organisation. Good practice, then, cannot be conceived of as a management system that is generically applicable to a specific organisational structure, resource base or agency's value-driven mission. It must exist on a level of abstracted principle and rely on the user's ability to customise the principles to the practice environment.
The Project's research amongst crime prevention practitioners revealed that, while the language of good practice is used widely, the actual practice of continuous improvement processes (reflective learning, collaborative critique, performance monitoring, determining success, evaluation and non-competitive national benchmarks, for example) is rarely implemented.
In its current best application, good practice is self-determined participation in cultural change to achieve agreed success factors. Properly implemented, continuous improvement processes result in flexible management and intervention practice, high degrees of local ownership, and consequences for communities that are lasting and locally valued.
As documented in Chapter 4, the Project consultants created a draft Action Kit to put forward a practical proposition about good practice and continuous improvement process using the participants' reflections on their current work. The Kit included many elements, but its fundamental resource was a set of generic templates or tables that described domains and their internal elements (an example of the original templates and the full set of 10 revised and validated templates are included in Appendix 3).
As a consequence of using this draft Kit, each initiative achieved a cultural orientation towards good practice that reflected their stakeholders' success factors and generated models of good practice using a shared resource (the Kit) and a shared understanding of the nature of good practice community crime prevention.
The Project's final proposition describes a self-managed system that can generate continuous improvement of prevention strategies, the management structures that act as agencies for these strategies, and professional daily practice.
The proposition 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, and by each practitioner's continuous improvement process.
| … [the best practice concept] was new - there seemed to be ad-hoc structures around funding projects - this looked to be a way to develop some consistent structure around community prevention projects. The [best practice] framework answered questions about strategy, consistency and purpose. This is what I wanted to learn about. Also, there is a belief that these kinds of projects [community-based] are often hard to "prove" their usefulness. I saw this Project as an opportunity to do that. The really good thing was that there was a very broad range of contexts where continuous improvement process could be applied - this is actually an outcome of this Project. It brought to light the need for valuing experiential learning as a knowledge base. |
Vicki Russell, North west centre Against Sexual Assault Evaluation Report |
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.
With origins in the manufacturing industry, continuous improvement processes are a relatively new and unfamiliar concept to many community crime prevention professionals, their management groups and stakeholders. The traditional form of continuous improvement process is based on tracking outputs and changing processes to reduce variation of a final product. This is clearly not appropriate for a constantly changing environment such as crime prevention, where variation is essential to maintain local differences, and keep ahead of criminal intent and rapid change. Instead, continuous improvement process in this context is seen as a learning strategy, which encourages reflection on current processes and the introduction of new thinking and methodologies to respond appropriately to changing situations within a specific context. The consistency of practice is held in the defined domains and the elements, and the devotion to local success factors.
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 are pulling in different directions, with policy-makers unaware of field practice and issues, and practitioners unable to respond to the demands of policy.
Learning-based continuous improvement process has the capacity to span policy and practice, across fields and jurisdictions; to bridge these gaps and create greater effectiveness in community-based crime prevention. Continuous improvement process is the strategic response to developing a learning culture within crime prevention.
The implementation of continuous improvement processes in a community crime prevention environment requires commitment from management and practitioners within a flexible structure that links policy to practice, both within a project and across projects.
In this current 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. These good practice support groups 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 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, which 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.
| …Continuous improvement and best practice are inextricably linked. Continuous improvement is a key element of best practice and without it best practice cannot be achieved… Crime prevention obviously relates to the prevention of a wide range of criminal activities and offences, and no one approach or strategy will ever achieve prevention of all crime… Therefore we can assume that there will always be a need for police, the government and the community to be seeking ways of continually improving existing community crime prevention strategies or practices… |
Office of the West Australian Police Commissioner 6 |
Good practice and benchmarking are the outcome of continuous improvement processes and cannot be achieved without them. Continuous improvement processes embrace the management functions of an organisation or initiative, and link them into organisational or Project objectives. The intention of this linkage is to implement a strategy in ways that are resource efficient and have the widest benefit to all stakeholders. In the context of crime prevention, resource efficiency may be achieved in three ways:
The participants in the Project noted that funding bodies tend to exert external controls on their practice in the form of predetermined criteria and measures. Facilitators of good practice throughout the management sector assert that this form of continuous improvement process runs counter to achieving good practice.
As a consequence of the research Project, the participants successfully generated internally driven learning strategies according to their local needs, resources, disciplines of practice and contexts of community crime prevention practice. These strategies produced valuable outcomes for each participant Project and the community crime prevention sector as a whole. However, there is some doubt that they will be sustained across the national sector in the absence of national coordination and support for good practice. Possibilities for this development are considered in Chapter 6.
The challenge for good practice on the national level is to link these internally driven changes in practice to national policy, and to support this with management structures and processes that achieve a sustainable and congruent balance between internal and external controls on implementation and policy development. The continuous improvement process developed by the Project could lay the foundations for this next step, as directed by the Brief.
The term "continuous improvement process", like other management sector terms is unfamiliar to many community crime prevention workers, their management groups and other stakeholders. Moreover, it has contradictory connotations in the management sector depending on the culture of the organisations using it.
In some instances it can mean simply tracking performance to measure whether or not "targets" are being achieved. For example:
| ...measurement combined with benchmarking can form an effective tool for continuous improvement. |
Van Weert, 1995, page 18 |
One of the original intentions of a continuous improvement process was to monitor output and make process changes to reduce variation. While applicable to product manufacturing, this approach does not support improvement in a field such as crime prevention. In this constantly changing field, variety is essential as a means of keeping ahead of crime trends and ensuring a diversity of relevant strategies to increase community amenity:
| In implementing situational preventative measures, there is a temptation to economise by going for uniformity - with every house in the neighbourhood being fitted with the same alarm or lock, for example… Having the capacity to evolve, learn and upgrade is as important as possessing any individual preventative or defensive feature which gives temporary advantage. |
Ekblom, 1999, page 38 |
Bates (1995) comments that imposing standards on processes by means of systems approaches can actively inhibit innovation, which is critical to problem solving and diversifying outcomes.
| Hard core innovators… thrive on variation and certainly make no attempt to eliminate it. |
Bates, 1995: 25. |
Bates goes on to state that managing innovation can be done badly. It can cause dissent, rigidity, chaos and wastage. She illustrates bad management as the propensity to separate policy from planning, which she sees as being akin to separating thinking from doing. If this separation is maintained there is a risk is entrenched incongruity, including:
In the research Project, it became evident that the common practice of funding bodies using the same criteria to manage their investments in different crime prevention initiatives was in many instances the only formal linkage between policy and practice. This practice is an example of using measurement systems from outside the operational environment, and in the absence of a learning culture, it can separate policy from action by focussing practitioners on accounting to funding bodies rather then implementing actions congruent with policy.
The Project participants expressed their frustration with imposed criteria that were not relevant to implementing their community crime prevention strategies.
| The validity of performance measures being the domain of policy advisers who develop criteria for strategy development funding is questionable… In most instances the criteria merely serve to ensure that strategies will inevitably miss their mark as the community of concern has no means to impact on them and negotiate terms that are more relevant to the local environment. |
Julia Knight, Sunshine Coast Community Policing Project, End of Action Stage report. |
Participants experienced the consequences of this situation as:
The participants saw that the estrangement between policy and practice contributed to a lack of confidence in community based crime prevention, making community development based practice unpalatable in the face of angry public demands. The "angry public" experience is, nevertheless, seen by an experienced crime prevention practitioner as no more than a first stage in a community development process resulting in serious and competent community responsibility for crime phenomena. However, popular media responses to angry public voices were a strong influence in the way community crime prevention was understood and invested in. Community development processes were not well understood, and in the absence of criteria to monitor their success (resulting from policy that did not reflect community development theory), confidence in them was rarely achieved.
On the other hand, continuous improvement processes address the need in the community crime prevention sector for:
Action learning is increasingly accepted as a means by which good practice becomes a continual improvement process. Performance indicators may identify a good practice, but unless an organisation is able to learn from them and change their actions (and the concepts that they use to inform their actions) accordingly, continuous improvement process will fail to meet the needs of community crime prevention in particular. Introducing action learning as a basic competency for community crime prevention is as fundamental as expecting practitioners and policy makers alike to be computer literate.
Learning competencies are critical to achieving strategically directed learning for community crime prevention. This priority was realised many times over by the Project participants:
| Continuous improvement process … is proving to be a dynamic process for our group. The allowance for exploration and opening the mind, without the expectation of reaching the right or known answer, is already proving interesting and I believe more valuable to achieving effective crime prevention . Using a medical model analogy - we want cures for the illness, not bandaids for the symptoms. This style of learning, I believe is what brings about the sorts of actions that are often breaking new ground, insightful and much closer to the core of an issue. |
Karen May, Glebe Youth Service - Review Report Stage 5.4 |
The survey of exemplary projects carried out at the Project's formative stage identified that learning in the crime prevention sector takes three forms:
The respondents also identified that this form of learning requires particular skills such as lateral and systems thinking, leadership, sound oral and written communications, being familiar with whole-of-government approaches, conceptualisation, analysis and practical policy development. Their answers also focussed on multi-disciplinary collaboration, thinking, learning, communication and inquiry, and the meta-skills of commitment, courage and the capacity to endure a challenge.
The participants also had to change the orientation of their role to implement continuous improvement process in their strategies and organisations. This indicates that the role of practitioner as it is described in duty statements is inappropriate to the realities of good practice - an issue that Bush Law addressed in their best practice model.
The project officer role that developed from this process could best be described as facilitating community crime prevention management. In each case study, it meant bringing learning strategies into the existing role - including:
For some, this redefined role entailed only a minor adjustment; for others, it involved significant learning curves. The redefined role incorporated the tasks set out in the following table.
| DEVELOP SELF AND OTHER STAFF* | PROVIDE INFORMATION TO INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL CONSUMER GROUPS/CUSTOMERS * | POLICY DEVELOPMENT | STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT | OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT | RESOURCE MANAGEMENT* |
| On-going formalised and informal reflection on actions, to identify what has been learned and its value to crime prevention, and process changes to enable action-based on this learning | Communicate changes to beneficiaries, management and funding bodies | Relate operational to strategic and policy levels of management, identify the gaps and negotiate closure | Facilitate design and implementation by continually researching and evaluating strategies, and modifying them accordingly | Change practice from being a change agent to facilitating "agency with others" | Identify risk through considering intended and unintended consequences of strategies and their impact on resource use and regeneration |
| Learn new skills related to learning, facilitation, change management, research and evaluation | Interpret principles of continuous improvement process to suit the needs of the stakeholders and communicate them | Use the principle of inclusiveness at a policy level to improve the collaborative quality of working relationships with beneficiaries, partnerships and funding bodies | Include "training to learn" programs in strategy design and delivery | Use collaborative decision-making systems and mechanisms to enable equitable ownership of change strategies |
Facilitate acknowledged ownership of strategies by stakeholders |
| Learn about community crime prevention theory and related theories of criminology, psychology, community development and intervention | Sell continuous improvement process concepts to new and established participants in crime prevention | Incorporate continuous improvement process into staff supervision and confidentiality policies, and extend it into human and physical resource use and generation through policy | Balance task goals with relationship-building goals for strategy design and implementation | Change duty statements to reflect continuous improvement process | Orient new staff into continuous improvement process and support new staff to operate as change agents within established organisations |
| Learn about leadership that engenders creativity and motivation of others | Be clear about personal goals and principles of practice in communication processes | Redefine appropriate current operations as "crime prevention" and relate this definition back to existing policy offering rationale for definition | Develop networks and sustain relationships with "gatekeepers" or power brokers from organisations that may be critical to building effective partnerships and allocating resources for implementation | Work with most "at risk" consumer groups to build their capacity for sustainable growth potential | Use monitoring and reporting to manage closing the gap between current practice and good practice |
| *The headings with an asterisk are taken from an operational profile for community crime prevention practitioners (NACS, 1999, page 124). | |||||
The continuous improvement structure involved communication in two directions: "inward" and "outward". The good practice support group was responsible for the "inward" communication, with the management committee, consumer groups and in some instances the funding body of their individual initiatives. "Outward" communication was with other community crime prevention practitioners and across jurisdictions.
The structure for this inter-jurisdictional activity was very simple. Participants listed their contact details and committed to a set of agreements. The protocol protected them against disproportionate demands on their time from other workers, protected an initiative's intellectual property and avoided unrealistic expectations that would undermine mentoring.
The inter-jurisdictional activity occurred through teleconferences, e-mail communications and summary reports that tracked progress in developing good practice or raised questions to inform the participants about issues being addressed in the good practice support groups. The research consultants coordinated communication and assimilated information. This role could, to some extent, be overtaken by a nationally accessible web site that clearly identifies issues and related projects - although participants also expressed a strong interest in meeting each other face to face.
While the additional time and the development of peer relationships was challenging, the benefits for participants were considerable. They included professional, personal, strategic, beneficiary and political gains.
| PROFESSIONAL | PERSONAL | STRATEGIC | CONSUMER GROUP | POLITICAL |
| Affirmation of professional experience identifying themes and strategic trends | Increased personal awareness of actions |
An accessible, shared framework with which to design strategy and improve outcomes | Improved service delivery through the fine tuning of good practice | Beneficiary participation and partnership quality ensured validity of strategy minimising political risk |
| New insights through comparison and contrast, increasing professional capacity to innovate and manage risks | Increased clarity, confidence and personal direction in work | More comprehensive strategy development | Increased secondary prevention levels of intervention | Expanded development of community crime prevention initiatives and improved sustainability increasing its political influence and strength |
| Increased professional awareness of actions - another risk management outcome | Developed intellectual concepts of crime prevention | Improved collaborative, multi-agency approach, producing more resources and better community crime prevention planning, strategies and outcomes for beneficiaries | Uptake of facilitated discussions about intended and unintended consequences of community crime prevention, reducing political risk | |
| Developed research, evaluation and negotiation skills | Broader appreciation of the variety of perspectives about crime issues and their inclusion in strategy - resulting in strategies that are able to include a wider range of community stakeholding | Effectively changing the way things have been done in the past with colleagues in a manner that strengthened collaboration and extended community crime prevention into other sectors | Development of shared values for community crime prevention work, building political cohesion supporting crime prevention | |
| Improved results from strategies, with benefits to professional standing | Restored or reinvigorated strategic direction of community crime prevention initiatives, resulting in resource efficiencies and improved outcomes | Creating opportunities for consumer groups to speak for themselves, to be heard and listened to as a restorative justice strategy in itself, and as a means of making more robust preventative strategies | Where values were not shared, ensuring all concerned participated in re-negotiating to reach this point or clearly identify the divergence and the extent to which this divergence was valid, prior to committing to action - also ensuring political stability | |
| Improved facilitation skills for strategy development | Increased depth and breadth of community crime prevention activity that balanced and integrated theories with process | Greater inclusion of consumer groups in community crime prevention project design and decision-making - another restorative justice action with improvements in the quality of strategies and the sustainability of their outcomes | Ability to acknowledge and work with values variations for different groups of stakeholders | |
| Network development | Fundamental change of strategic focus to that of inclusiveness and active reflection to increase participation, viability of decision-making and effectiveness of outcomes | A shared commitment to the importance of community crime prevention as a key strategy in sustaining quality of life and justice in Australia | Improved ability to manage change, and the risks associated with change | |
| More in-depth mapping of crime issues and possible causes of crime, making strategies more operative | Creation of a shared hope that change could take place in the industry, fostering a shift in understanding of the social issue of crime and the importance of community crime prevention work |
Sharing the responsibility across a peer mentoring system was a new experience for the participants in the Project. South Australia was the only participating State with regular training and development activities for its community crime prevention sector, carried out by the South Australian Crime Prevention Unit. The opportunity to communicate across jurisdictions had not been previously available to any of the participants.
There was also the need to share responsibility within crime prevention initiatives. Co-opting voluntary and seconded human resources proved to be a very efficient way of supporting the process without diminishing community crime prevention resources. These co-opted people were able to:
The co-opted volunteers shared the load where practitioners were not given approval by their management to develop good practice as a legitimate aspect of their current workload.
Sharing responsibility is not only about communication and human resources, but also about changing attitudes. The Project used collaborative action learning strategies to create environments in which continuous improvement processes became part of existing operations. These strategies needed to operate in an environment in which community crime prevention practitioners at all levels of the hierarchy could:
Once the crime prevention workers had become familiar with the concept of good practice and translated it into strategies for their particular projects, they then introduced their management committees (or other stakeholding groups) to continuous improvement process as the Project was developing it, and gained their support for implementation.
| Those who participated in the continuous improvement process learned to question their actions, their reasons and assumptions. They made a greater acknowledgment of the need to engage and acknowledge key stakeholders in crime prevention . |
Julia Knight, Sunshine Coast Community Policing Project, Evaluation Report |
Adopting continuous improvement process is directly related to an increased ability among stakeholders to take responsibility for crime and its prevention. The good practice support group became the key mechanism to bring together several knowledge bases and responsibilities to support attitudinal change to learning and practice. The groups were the interface between all stakeholders, and between old and new ways of working. They were, without question, essential for practitioners to develop good practice.
Within the support groups, the knowledge brought into the development process included:
These participants did not duplicate or compete with the management committee's role and responsibility. Their focus was not on strategic directions or fulfilling the obligations of funding agreements, but, rather, on the way things are done to set direction and fulfil obligations. For some management committees this question was seen as the prerogative of the crime prevention worker and not the business of a management committee. It is a question of professional development, communication and measurement systems, and facilitated learning.
However, if crime prevention is to become more effective by fully considering the risks of intervention practice and capitalising on change and learning to maximise efficiency, management committees must also participate in continuous improvement processes. In many instances in the Project they did so, and in a manner that significantly benefited them.
The participants used the good practice support group structure to communicate what they were learning and how they were changing their practice, as a way of sharing the responsibility for continuous improvement process. This is another example of working towards congruency - sharing governing variables, and thereby enabling high levels of negotiation and flexibility with practice and responsibility. For example:
The Project identified that the most efficient way for crime prevention workers to share the responsibility for continuous improvement process with their management committee is for the worker to:
Once this authorisation is gained, the community crime prevention worker can adapt existing policies and strategies to take up continuous improvement processes in a way that ensures their spread across an organisation and into partnerships. The management committee also has the option of becoming more involved with the process.
As the meaning of "good practice" has evolved to reflect its wide range of operational use (as discussed in Chapter 2), so the multi-disciplinary and inter-jurisdictional activity of "crime prevention" is interpreted differently depending on the community context and the variables it involves.
The Project participants defined the context of community crime prevention, as encompassed by the Project, with reference to environmental context, relationship dynamics and boundaries of legitimate action. While it was not possible to include initiatives working in every field and jurisdiction of crime prevention, nearly all the Project participants were identified by Senior Officers as representative of "exemplary" practice in their fields of operation, and the spread that they represent across five jurisdictions and a range of professional disciplines defines the community crime prevention context that the Project was able to address directly.
A staged and consistent action research methodology was employed through the initial reflective stages of the Project, and the six-month Action Stage (the methodology is discussed in detail in Appendix 2). Through this research process, the Project participants developed an agreed definition of good practice in community crime prevention, and the key elements for continuous improvement, in reference to this definition. They defined the particular aspect of community crime prevention that they worked to, and working within their particular context, identified ten generic domains of activity in the management of community crime prevention practice. Each domain is distinctive and bounded, yet able to interact with any (or all) of the others at the operational, strategic and structural levels of community crime prevention operations, depending on the need of the initiative (and the resources available to developing good practice).
Working within the context of these domains, the Project participants created a continuous improvement process that is made up of three clearly defined elements:
The Project consultants created a draft Action Kit to put forward a practical proposition about good practice and continuous improvement process, using the participants' reflections on their current work. The Kit included many elements, but its fundamental resource was a set of generic templates or tables that described the draft domains and their internal elements.
The Project's final proposition describes a non-prescriptive, self-managed system that can generate continuous improvement of prevention strategies, the management structures that act as agencies for these strategies, and professional daily practice.
The continuous improvement process, the defined domains, the definition of community crime prevention and the definition of good practice are recognised by the participants as generic. They have already provided a common base for discussing processes of mapping, planning, dialogue facilitation, design, monitoring and evaluation relevant to a wide range of community crime prevention applications. Indeed, 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.8
The field of crime prevention would benefit from recognition of the proposal's generic value in policy. This recognition is unlikely, however, while a perceived structural gap persists, which is thought to prevent knowledge transferring from grounded practice to upper level management. Complex and unresolved issues sustain the gap and continue to thwart good practice at the local level of operation.
The participants responded to this issue by suggesting solutions and demonstrating the advantages that good practice can manifest for communities, management and funding bodies alike.
The Project participants developed a comprehensive proposal for continuous improvement and good practice in community crime prevention. The precise understanding of "crime prevention" varies greatly across jurisdictions, between disciplines and within communities. We begin this section of the Report with the participants' definition of community crime prevention and their view of what makes good practice possible across jurisdictional differences.
In relation to good practice, the participants defined the quality of "good" in non-competitive, ethical and effective terms so that collaboration developed across jurisdictional, disciplinary and cultural differences. Their definition was reached through regular reporting and reflection during six months of action research and within each participating crime prevention initiative's operation. This understanding of "good" has currency across five jurisdictions at least, and has the capacity to address a wide variety of community crime prevention issues within a variety of operational structures. Its value lies in its ability to sustain congruency of purpose yet retain flexibility of practice across jurisdictional and professional differences and in relation to specific community resources. The participants were able to adapt the agreed definition of good practice to accommodate the variations in policy that applied to their particular projects, while remaining true, in their practice, to the core values of their specific professional disciplines or roles, and maintaining high quality relationships with their clients or consumer groups. At the same time, they used this concept of "good" to develop a framework for dialogue, learning and collaboration that extended crime prevention practice across jurisdictions to other peers.
They distinguished precise domains of practice with internal elements for each, so that practitioners could 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.
At the outset, the management committee stated that the Project was to review basic definitions of crime prevention, include violent crime, exclude police activities and rehabilitation, and seek a balance between public and private crime.9
The definition of community crime prevention could only be made at the completion of the Action Stage of the Project, which utilised consistent methods of research, systematic reporting and repeated collaborative critique over a six-month period. The participants reflected on this activity during the Project's evaluation and, together with the consultants, arrived at the following statement:
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.
In their analysis of community contexts and their theories of practice, the participants identified that they brought social, psychological and developmental theories to bear in their community crime prevention interventions. They saw their intervention work as being proactive and reactive, with the object of achieving empowerment, equity and justice for victims and perpetrators of criminal, socially undesirable and/or self-harming behaviour.
In working towards empowerment, the participants stated that their purpose was to enable communities of interest to use public funding to help them to take responsibility for the crime, the associated problems and their prevention in a manner that:
The participants' definition of community crime prevention is sharpened by comparing it with its opposite, as set out in the following table. This table represents a significant step towards reaching a common understanding of community crime prevention across jurisdictions.
| COMMUNITY CRIME PREVENTION IS NOT: | COMMUNITY CRIME PREVENTION IS: |
1. A prevention strategy that is generated from a source outside of a local community |
A prevention strategy that is generated from within a local community |
| 2. A strategy that is unclear about its purpose and unaccountable to its stakeholders for its purpose | A strategy that is driven by a publicly stated purpose that reflects the points of view of all affected by the crime phenomenon |
| 3. Managed by a single agent acting autonomously from other agencies | Managed by a partnership between agencies, or by a lead agency which must effect leadership within the terms of a partnership with other agencies, funding sources and groups of community members |
| 4. A strategy that works with an understanding of a crime phenomena that reflects only one perspective | A strategy that seeks many and diverse local perspectives as a means of building shared understanding of the crime phenomenon as it exists within a local community |
| 5. A practice that is facilitated within a management structure that only responds to one stakeholder group's interests | A practice that enables the values of all stakeholders (funding bodies, management and consumers) to be recognised, negotiated and brought together to create a congruent strategic framework for agreed action |
| 6. Focussed only on criminal acts by offenders | Focussed on anti-social and self-harming behaviours, as well as criminal acts by those at risk of criminality and the wider community |
| 7. Only considered successful if it stops criminal acts | Considered successful if it reduces the severity, incidence and harmful consequences of a crime phenomenon in a manner that builds social capital |
| 8. An imposed intervention | An intervention that is developed through negotiation with all those who invest human, material and financial resources to make the strategy successful |
| 9. An intervention that increases injustice and inequity within and between a community, its agencies and funding bodies | An intervention that actively seeks to restore justice and facilitate equitable relationships within and between a community, its agencies and funding bodies |
| 10. A practice that diminishes shared responsibility for all the factors that are seen to contribute to a crime phenomenon | A practice that builds funding body, agency and community capacity (including capacity of victims, offenders and the wider community) to offer equitable responsibility for the prevention of a crime phenomenon |
| 11. A practice that fails to work with cultural sensitivities | A practice that uses indicators of cultural sensitivity to implement intervention strategies so that they are accepted (and resourced) for their cultural sensitivity |
| 12. Inconsiderate of the long-term consequences of a chosen intervention for all those affected by it | Strategic in its consideration of the intended and unintended consequences of intervention for all those affected by it |
| 13. An action that in any way widens polarity between community groups, local business and authorities and increases alienation of individuals | An action that is accountable to all stakeholders for its ability significantly to improve relationships between community groups, local business and authorities without further alienating any of a community's citizens. |
Crime prevention practitioners who see their work as being congruent with the elements in the right hand column of this table may consider that they are indeed carrying out community crime prevention, and that the Project's proposition about good practice is relevant to them.
The definition of good practice in community crime prevention is a definition of a quality of practice. It is not a description of benchmarks (the results of good practice). It provides criteria that characterise practice that is considered "good" because it successfully prevents crime by building community capacity to take responsibility for crime phenomena.
This form of practice is focused on achieving behavioural and attitudinal change by offenders, victims, the larger community, agencies and funding bodies so that crime can be prevented. Facilitating behavioural and attitudinal change, both at the individual and the broad social level, must be guided by ethics to ensure that crime prevention does not transgress universal rights of self-determination and co-existence for any citizens.
Community crime prevention practice that is regarded to be "good" practice for its ability effectively to achieve crime prevention outcomes meets the following ethical good practice criteria (as distinct from the implementation principles defined within each domain), defined by the participants:
Prevention practice that meets these criteria requires a supportive environment in which to operate, and the practice of the community crime prevention worker includes creating such an environment. Meeting this requirement was a key to ensuring that the Project's good practice proposition was generic enough to be applied to system, strategy and practice.
Creation of this "good practice environment" requires the following:
In the absence of congruency between policies and methodologies at a jurisdictional level, the outstanding realisation from the Action Stage of the Project was that it is the underpinning ethics of practice that successfully crosses jurisdictional divides to sustain a generic purpose in community crime prevention.
The Project participants made their ethics of practice explicit (in the ethical criteria set out in section 4.4) to create a mechanism for inter-jurisdictional communication and benchmarking. Ethics of practice are their point of reference when importing a recognised method of crime prevention for use within a local community context, as they work through the practice of their specific disciplines to translate preventative theory into project management or service delivery.
As discussed in the previous chapter, continuous improvement processes are strategies for guiding changes to performance so that it better realises the success factors that stakeholders determine are necessary, if crime is to be prevented and social capital enhanced. Continuous improvement may be a process that is limited to the development of professional practice, it may extend to crime prevention strategy development, or it may involve a system level of integration within a whole agency. For this reason we refer here to a continuous improvement system rather than a process, which is made up of three essential and integrated elements (each discussed in the sections that follow):
These three elements of levels correspond to the three levels of application for a good practice management system as identified on page 26.
Crime prevention practice requires the capacity to integrate imported or locally devised prevention methods into local community contexts, and adapt them to local community resources, to address a crime phenomenon.12
Across the jurisdictions, prevention methods are chosen in very different ways. For example, they may be:
The criteria for assessing the value of a prevention method are also subject to local variation and practice, and depend on the priorities of the community in question.
Continuous improvement provides the systems and practices that enable workers to modify their daily practice so that they can integrate imported theories into local contexts to meet the expectations of funding bodies, management and consumers. It is a sequence of procedures that efficiently changes strategies, structures and operations by measuring change in reference to identified success factors that must be realised at critical points to ensure success. Its use in community crime prevention supports the achievement of outcomes that restore essential community value - value that is otherwise lost through crime and its underlying factors. This restoration of community value, in turn, builds the community's capacity to take responsibility for preventing crime.
To achieve this change of practice, the Project participants collectively generated the following sequence of steps, which utilise the various tools (discussed below) within the recommended structures (also discussed below):
STEP 1: Think about good practice |
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STEP 2: Think about the local crime picture |
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STEP 3: Bring together ideas of good practice and crime prevention |
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STEP 4: Implement and monitor good practice |
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STEP 5: Evaluate and communicate |
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| 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 |
A more explanatory description follows to draw together all the processes that the participants developed and used to produce their models. Details on various elements of this process (such as community value, measures, and support groups) are found in subsequent chapters.
In order to undertake this continuous improvement process, a crime prevention worker may need to incorporate the following as part of their practice:
Resources are required to achieve these changes, so crime prevention practitioners will need leadership at the policy level.
The participants used their definition of community crime prevention to break their practice down into explicit "domains". A "domain", in this context, is a generic, defined area of activity in the management of crime prevention, that has an impact on crime prevention. It comprises a pre-defined sequence of action with an identified purpose. It has an identified boundary that limits the measurable impact of the intended purpose (the boundary also provides an indicator of the extent of the action that can be evaluated). A domain must be distinct from other domains, but able to interact with them to create a comprehensive, flexible and robust practice.
The domains provide the basis and framework for analysing current practice within a strategy and defining strengths and weaknesses, and for developing continuous improvement process. This development is facilitated through the specific drivers and performance indicators defined for each domain, used within the defined sector of "community crime prevention" to move towards "good" practice.
The draft domains developed for use in the Action Stage of the Project were tested and refined during that stage. The outcome of that process was identification of ten critiqued and validated domains of community crime prevention practice, each with three supporting elements:
The ten critiqued and validated domains are as follows:
| Domain 1: Collaboration | |
| Action principle: | Including the needs, skills and cultures of others in a coordinated strategic effort. |
| Critical success factor: | Inclusiveness |
| Boundary: | The quality and extent of collaborative action can be limited by self-invitation, responses to invitation, gender issues, geography, participation culture, organisational structures, and availability of resources. |
| Domain 2: Negotiating responsibility for a crime phenomenon | |
| Action principle: | Creating and mediating between a range of responses to a particular crime issue, and facilitating participation in crime prevention in reference to these responses. |
| Critical success factor: | Leadership |
| Boundary: | Level of experience, knowledge and resources. |
| Domain 3: Setting context | |
| Action principle: | Researching, acknowledging and operating within the environmental, social, methodological and practical resources for crime prevention in a specific community of interest. |
| Critical success factor: | Authenticity 13 |
| Boundary: | Limiting factors include political influences, geographical jurisdiction, public decision-making, resources, and the capacity to respect complexity and diversity. |
| Domain 4: Change management | |
| Action principle: | Communication and exploration of a community's developing view of crime and its prevention as the crime prevention strategy is implemented. |
| Critical success factor: | Learning |
| Boundary: | Recognition of the value of change, cultural interpretation of crime and crime prevention and the various degrees of community empowerment. |
| Domain 5: Shared vision | |
| Action principle: | Using social justice principles to identify a community of interest and facilitate broad participation in envisioning a safe community. |
| Critical success factor: | Compatibility |
| Boundary: | The quality and scope of the vision is characterised by who defines the community of interest and the degree of informed choice to participate in envisioning. The vision is influenced by the historical context of crime and social justice in a local community, the level of investment in the issues being resolved and the quality of participation. |
| Domain 6: Design of action strategy | |
| Action principle: | Using a recognised crime prevention method and the local experience of crime and prevention to design an agreed sequence of events that will achieve the success factors. |
| Critical success factor: | Broad community endorsement |
| Boundary: | Action strategies are limited by resources, the degree of acceptance of the action strategy, knowledge, quality of participation, and recognition of experience, degree and share of risk and acceptance by the broader community external to community of interest. |
| Domain 7: Reducing crime and its harmful consequences | |
| Action principle: | Creating an environment for facilitating empowerment to act on individual, social and cultural responsibilities for safety and equity. |
| Critical success factor: | Commitment |
| Boundary: | The extent and quality of empowerment is characterised by power structures, resources, knowledge, skills, educational opportunities, choice, community and social definitions of responsibility, structural flexibility, short- and long-term outcomes. |
| Domain 8: Preventing crime | |
| Action principle: | Identifying how changes in attitudes that increase equity and justice in relationships between community, business and authorities take place, and incorporating this process in action strategies. |
| Critical success factor: | Justice |
| Boundary: | Shared knowledge; empowerment; equity and access, developing inter-agency relationships and resistance to crime prevention. |
| Domain 9: Proactive and reactive practice position | |
| Action principle: | Acknowledging the mandated limit of crime prevention expertise and extending capacity through learning, collaboration and human resource management. |
| Critical success factor: | Trust |
| Boundary: | Availability, willingness and ability to negotiate expectations and differences characterise the balance between pro-activity and re-activity. |
| Domain 10: Accountability | |
| Action principle: | Managing information and communication clearly and honestly with regard to internal (professional) and external (community) drivers. |
| Critical success factor: | Transparency |
| Boundary: | The extent and value of accountability is limited by confidentiality, ethics of how information is used, power relationships, access to information, abuse of information, active ignorance, and willingness to learn. |
These domains are the defined areas of practice that stimulate continuous improvement process to produce models of good practice in community crime prevention. In the Action Stage, some participants used their draft domains singly, some used a strategically selected group, some used them as a complete set, and some created their own domains using the generic template to do so. Their choices depended on their level of competency, their resourcing, and the needs of their projects.
If a participant assessed their initiative as working well with the domain of "collaboration", for example, but falling short on the domain of "accountability", the participant developed an action plan that used the generic or localised critical success factors (if they knew what they were) to improve their accountability procedures. This would become the orientation of their good practice action plan, embedded in their existing crime prevention strategy. They implemented and monitored their action plan using the process tracking and reflective reporting process (as provided to participants in the Action Kit).
They would communicate their experiences with their good practice support group and develop strategic responses, modify their professional practice or change an aspect of management structure to correct any losses in success factors (not only at the conclusion of the strategy, but as they were implementing it). At the conclusion of the action strategy, they described the model they had developed. With the assistance of the consultants, they then generated good practice statements for the benefit of their peers. In this way, the participants used the domains as a reference for orientation, mapping, review, planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating (ie continuous improvement process).
The consultants developed action "templates" that describe each domain and its internal elements. Once the participants became accustomed to using these templates, this system of developing continuous improvement process worked very efficiently. In a sense the templates replace some aspects of human resource management in a sector that does not have the capacity to facilitate good practice in this way. Following the Action Stage, the draft templates were simplified and the generic structure of these simplified templates is presented below. Diagram 1 shows the generic structure of the final templates. The details of each template (in its original draft stage and its validated revision) are provided in Appendix 3.
These final, validated templates would form the core of a revised and validated Action Kit, for which this document provides all the necessary building blocks.
Diagram 1: The generic template
Using the Project's templates to identify and guide changes in practice allows for a non-prescriptive approach without losing the strategic value of such an approach to policy development. The draft templates were developed through the participation of the original Level 1 participants, and put together by the consultants using all their data. At the Action Stage, the new parallel projects that joined the Project were required to use the templates without advice on how to do so, and their experience then informed the design of the continuous improvement system. The lack of advice from the consultants, while unpopular with the participants in some instances, ensured that the participants produced an outcome that was evidently valid. Once this was understood, the system was demonstrated to be highly effective with minimal support.
The template system enables practitioners continually to add new methodologies to their practice in a way that keeps building a shared concept of "good practice" within the agreed ethical framework that defines the term "good". This flexibility enables the field to learn continuously from its members and not to lose the benefits and resources of past experience in response to currently imported theory. The participants were able continually to modify their professional practice by:
As they were doing this, they also facilitated development within their agencies, their management committees and their crime prevention strategies.
The domains and the continual improvement process provide continuity and support in a sector that experiences high degrees of variation, isolated practice and rapid change. Because of their flexibility, they maximise the sector's resource base for preventing crime from all sources: self-generated, other local and international benchmarks.
Identifying "success" is fundamental to good practice in any industry, including community-based crime prevention. Within good practice management theory, three key groups identify success:
In crime prevention, these generic groups can be identified as:
These interpretations must be treated with care. They are not fixed in crime prevention as they might be in, for example, a manufacturing context, because of the variety of structures in which crime prevention takes place. Flexibility in defining these key stakeholder groups makes it possible for crime prevention good practice to work in environments that are unfamiliar with management concepts. For example, some crime prevention strategies identify the community as the investor; they may have producers who are voluntary workers; and the customers may include other government services such as the police (as illustrated in the Project's map, provided in Appendix 4). Each project officer will identify their stakeholders in different ways.
This flexible definition of the stakeholders makes it more difficult to identify clearly a generic set of values that can, in turn, be identified as success factors. Other constraints to identifying generic success factors include:
What is important is that three stakeholding groups (reflecting the "input, production, output" functions) together determine qualities, or values, that are fundamental to the success of an initiative. These are the "success factors" and, in community-based crime prevention, they are strongly related to social capital. They may be identifiable at an initiative's inception, during its course, and also in its outcomes.
The overall goal is to prevent crime. The success factors determine how to do this and at what (social) cost. The success factors that are shared by all three stakeholder groups, and that must be addressed at critical turning points in the strategy's lifetime, are "critical" success factors.
This term - "critical success factor" - has been widely misunderstood. It is often thought to mean the reason why an initiative succeeds - such as a local expert, a prior history, a stroke of good fortune. Critical success factors are the reason why an initiative is successful - but they do not act in this instrumental way. Rather, they are the intrinsic qualities that an initiative develops if it is developed in a direction, and implemented in a way, that is congruent with the values the community (funding body and management group) considers to be priorities - for example, safety, accountability, participation, shared responsibility, equity of access. To do this, the initiative must respond to the success factors and reflect them at critical times.
Mapping crime (crime problems and experiences of prevention) from the perspectives of funding bodies, management and consumer groups (including perpetrators, victims and the wider community) was found to be an excellent practice for identifying success factors and how they needed to be used within a prevention strategy. As a practice, this achieved several things at once. It:
This mapping process, which the participants facilitated, enabled stakeholders to evaluate the local impact of crime in terms of losses to social capital. Stakeholders would reflect, for example, on the increase in fear of crime, retribution, prejudice, alienation, labelling, media actions, inequity of access to social opportunity and intolerance. By identifying the loss to social capital, the stakeholders could identify the special quality or "value" that an intervention strategy would need to have, in order to replace this loss.
Identifying values, and using them as the success factors needed to build a community's capacity to take responsibility for a crime problem and crime prevention, can be construed as identifying qualities of practice and strategic directions that:
Trust, learning, shared risk, non-violence and valuing truth are seen to be the success factors that a community needs to use to guide the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of a strategy. They are also key elements of social capital.
The use of values as success factors informed the crime prevention worker not only about strategic objectives, but also about how to change his/her daily practice through reflection and peer mentoring, so that the implementation process itself began to restore lost social capital. Identifying the quality of preventative practice (rather than simply its goals) ensures that an initiative does not just function or reduce crime statistics at any cost, but operates within a community in a way that realises stakeholder values as it is implemented. Integrity in community crime prevention practice, for example, builds community understanding of crime prevention and its support, which increases its spread across a community and its resource base. The restoration of social capital builds a community's resources or capacity to take responsibility for crime and its prevention - the purpose of community crime prevention.
Not only do the success factors guide practitioners on how to change their practice, and how to design strategy. As "critical success factors", they provide clearly articulated and shared social values to guide an agency's management of a strategy so that it can maintain congruency between policy, management and prevention practice. It is possible to do this if the practitioner finds the same fundamental value in investor, management and beneficiary ideas regarding what would make the strategy a success. Value differences are negotiated to the point that they are either dropped because they are found to be irrelevant or inaccurate, excluded from the strategy's design by changing the design, or included as exploratory pathways to promote learning as the strategy is implemented.
In the Project, once the success factors were defined, they were used to direct action on strategic, structural and operational levels, reinforcing at each level the rebuilding of social capital previously lost within the community. This strategy of rebuilding social capital15 was the way the participants used the pursuit of congruency as the key practice for continuous improvement process and good practice. This was done in the Project by:
Armadale Domestic Violence Intervention project, for example, worked with the success factor of "inclusiveness" in the domain of "structural change" as a way of increasing Aboriginal participation in domestic violence prevention programs. They changed their daily operations by seeking guidance from Aboriginal Elders with regard to scheduling of meetings so that the meetings did not conflict with funerals. They also sought guidance about their own practice - for example, how to change their meeting practices so that Aboriginal Elders could exercise cultural authority. They reviewed their organisation's mission so that the value of "inclusiveness" could refocus their shared understanding of what they were doing. They also brought cross-cultural training into their organisation to inform strategic directions and operational practice.
This is a fine example of how a critical success factor - inclusiveness - was worked to bring congruency between mission, structure, strategy and operations. The result was that Aboriginal Elders determined the criteria for delivering the preventative program so that it was accessible to their community and meaningful, and effective collaboration was achieved.
To assist project officers evaluate impact, the Project proposed a measurement system. This innovation enables locally relevant measures to be created in response to the generic performance indicators and success factors, so that the value of a preventative strategy can be identified in local terms. This system successfully put context around offending statistics so that they could be better understood and, as a result, supported formal recognition of the value of community crime prevention. The three elements identified as necessary for the creation of measures are:
To create their measures, the participants needed to know the value (the success factor) that they were using to make the measure. It is interesting to note that many of the participants used the term "positive outcome" or "positive benefit" to describe their successes or intentions in early documents: for example, "a positive and identifiable culture", "positive outcomes for youth". This use of the term "positive", on which so much depends, remains unmeasurable unless crime prevention practitioners are able to identify exactly what they and their stakeholders consider "positive" to be.
The Project demonstrated the many ways in which the value of community crime prevention can be expressed (and which all contribute to social capital). These include:
These various expressions of value inform practitioners about what they might wish to measure. The Project participants defined a "value" as a particular quality of an action that will restore the social capital that is lost through criminal and anti-social behaviours. These values are what makes a community safe and amenable and gives it the capacity to endure the stress of preventing crime without losing its amenity.
Each project produced many more than one form of value. To say, for example, that the Sunshine Coast Community Policing Project produced only financial value would be a gross "under-valuing" of the strategy. The participants also valued the strategy for changing attitudes, creating employment opportunities, reducing labelling and many other outcomes. Measures should use more than one value to give a full picture.
The value being measured, however, does not actually inform stakeholders of the form that the measurement should take. For example, with the Glebe Youth Service project, measuring the reduction in violence between young people and police cannot be done unless the measure is specific about the form it will take to monitor progress towards the success factors. For example:
Last, but not least, the initiative has to have regular access to reliable and consistent data on the value and the form it is taking, so that monitoring can take place throughout implementation.
For example, the North West Centre Against Sexual Assault developed a model of good practice for prevention of sexual assault, and one of the success factors they used was "responsibility". The measurement system they developed tracked the performance indicator of "referrals to other agencies" that occurred as a consequence of victims and offenders participating in their arts project. They linked into the region's agency data systems to generate the measurement throughout implementation and for six months after the Project's conclusion.
The data generated were tracked using a simple spreadsheet system (see page 66) and provided a more reliable indicator of success than had previously been achieved. The data added substantial support to the interpretation of other statistical data and guarded against misuse and misinterpretation. This system was used to inform programming, staff development, and feedback to consumer groups and funding bodies. Most importantly it allowed the real action of community crime prevention to be identified and made accountable to its stakeholders, and it enabled practitioners to learn from this.
The explicit identification of social values was a new development for the participants. They were continually working with social values, but they had not realised that other crime prevention workers were doing the same, nor had they understood the strategic use of values in achieving outcomes that are socially valued. This aspect of their work was not familiar to funding bodies or even their management committees, but it proved very powerful in developing commonality across disciplinary, cultural and jurisdictional differences.
The values, once named, were built into every internal element of each domain's template. Thus, they were worked into action strategies and implementation practice, monitored in quality checks, and traced in performance indicators to ascertain whether strategy implementation (including individual professional practice, strategic development or management structure) made a "valued difference" to the beneficiaries.
This overall process-reflecting on practice, communicating with other practitioners, identifying common elements and using them to develop systems, tools and process that sustain better practice-is continuous improvement process in action.
The Project identified three key outcome areas to demonstrate success with the overall outcome of "improved relationships" (in reference to Indigenous community interests, and relevant to all Australian communities engaging in crime prevention). The outcome areas are broad enough to accommodate the ever-changing and ambiguous nature of the field. At the same time, the three areas counterbalance each other, and addressing all three serves the important function of stabilising outcomes, so that no one area dominates at the expense of outcomes in the others. The three outcome areas are made evident by the performance indicators listed for each domain in the template system (discussed above).
The outcome areas are:
The three areas are illustrated in Diagram 2. In a sense, they reflect the generic interests of the three stakeholder groups:
Diagram 2: Key outcome areas ("SF" denotes success factors, "CSF" denotes critical success factors)
While an initiative may not be able to achieve an equal impact across all three outcome areas, practitioners who are interested in good practice are encouraged to facilitate visioning, participation and evaluation that embraces each of these areas.
A balance of outcomes across these areas builds broad and supported change, which sustains specific impacts such as reducing offending behaviours. It also averts the following risks to crime prevention:
Each of these disabling outcomes was evident in the histories of the Project participants.
The process tracking system used a simple Excel spreadsheet program in which each domain had a data entry field. The system translated the template system, which provided a conceptual reference about good practice, into a daily diary monitoring system that practitioners used to track their activities, monitor their progress, and report to their management.
It enabled the practitioner to see:
Practitioners could track their strategy and assess the value that their actions were having with regard to increasing community responsibility for crime and reducing crime and its consequences.
| In particular, we used the tracking process for working through the issues that the review raised. Doing it this way, we could understand the issues and solutions to them from our actual practice. This was a resource-efficient and very effective way of working, which had the additional outcome of raising our awareness about what we are doing… We see the best practice tracking system as important in achieving continuous improvement, as the activity of tracking strategy development through each domain focuses you on the performance indicators. |
Operation Flinders |
Diagram 3 provides an example of how the participants used the draft system in the Action Stage of the Project. "FOA" in this sheet denotes "Field of Action", and the "Value 1-5" column in this table denotes a value assigned by the practitioner, as a hunch or as drawn from consultation or surveying, depending on the need for validated assessment for each strategy and the resources available. The Project found that even a considered hunch was a very useful means of monitoring progress and identifying shortfalls at a strategic level.
The final, revised system is presented in Diagram 4.
| PROJECT TITLE | ARMADALE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE INTERVENTION SERVICE | ||||||
| FOA 3 | Generating and implementing community crime prevention strategies that work with diverse cultural histories, resources, needs and visions of the issue | ||||||
| Action Principle: |
Crime prevention responds to a culturally relevant need for justice and safety with creativity, respect and social responsibility for the long-term wellbeing of the beneficiaries | ||||||
| Date | Action Strategy | Intended Consequences | Evidence of Action | Action Value | Unintended Consequence | Actual Value of Action | Value 1-5 |
| (Aboriginal Reference Group-Project 1) December to January |
Reviewing priorities |
Setting clear achievable outcomes for the Aboriginal Reference Group and the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Project | Review meetings held, discussion on ongoing projects | Insight, cooperation | Discovered that problems encountered in setting up Aboriginal Reference Group were symptomatic of the wider organisation; that is, each individual project or committee worked in isolation to achieve their own goals, which did not necessarily contribute in a meaningful way to the set objectives of the organisation. We discovered that there was a lack of a clear, shared understanding of the purpose of the Aboriginal Reference Group. This affected its direction and, ultimately, the motivation and attendance of members. We extrapolated that this was the case in the organisation as a whole - that there was a marked difference between the "stated" and the "understood" | Excellent clear analysis of current status of organisation, leading to a definite plan of action |
5 |
| (Aboriginal Reference Group-Project 1) 10/1/1999 | Reviewing priorities of entire organisation | Clearer focus | Discussion amongst Board | Research | nil | Enhanced understanding of organisation's direction | 3 |
| (Aboriginal Reference Group-Project 1) 2/2/1999 | Strategic planning | To undertake a thorough assessment/evaluation of organisation, leading to a clear shared understanding of and commitment to the vision, goals, objectives, strategies and performance indicators of the organisation | Contacted consultant, prepare proposal for Board of Management re strategic plan | Insight, cooperation responsive-ness, | Immediate increase in motivation among staff and Board members. It was thought that this would occur only once the strategic plan was underway | Increased motivation, optimism and cooperation | 4 |
Diagram 3: Example of the participants’ use of the draft process tracking system
| PROJECT TITLE | |||||||
| Domain name: | |||||||
| Action principle: | |||||||
| Critical success factor: | |||||||
| DATE |
ACTION | SUCCESS FACTOR | PROCESS INDICATOR | KEY OUTCOME AREA | PERFORMANCE INDICATOR | DATA SOURCE | VALUE WEIGHTING 1,2,3,4,5 |
Diagram 4: Revised generic Excel page for process tracking
Using the draft version of this process tracking system, the participants could weight their development for each success factor. If a participant was asked the extent to which they acknowledged responsibility for their crime (as, for example, happened in the case of Bush Law), experience of the value "responsibility" is weighted numerically and narratively. If three sources of information are consulted (Bush Law consulted families, mentors and the young people themselves) the combined results form a substantiated claim of the extent that responsibility was experienced. They can provide the evidence, and generate data, to create a model of community crime prevention and the value that this holds for all stakeholders.
The system could be used as a planning device - looking ahead in time - or as an evaluation device - looking back after an event.
The Project participants delivered ten new benchmarks, which are listed, along with the method used to create them, at the conclusion of the case studies in Chapter 5. This places them in the context of the good practice models developed by the participants.
Early on in the Project, it became clear that continuous improvement process could not be introduced and facilitated successfully within the existing operating pressures of a community crime prevention worker's funded role. The constraints identified included:
To support the community crime prevention workers, the Project created a protocol that recommended that the worker should develop good practice only if a specialised good practice support group was in place. This support group took many forms in the various participating projects, but all shared the following important characteristics:
Some of these support groups were made up of as few as two people,16 some included participation from the community of interest17 and some were made up of the whole management committee and no-one else.18 Those initiatives that included their management committees or boards in the process enjoyed significant rewards. For example:
Where the community crime prevention worker was not able to integrate the management committee fully, the good practice support group became even more essential for their work. Each group met regularly (weekly, fortnightly or monthly) and carried out an orientation process that included:
While participants all reported significant increases in working hours to initiate the process, once the continuous improvement process had been adopted they also all identified increased efficiencies and a reduction of the initial hours back to standard hours per day. This was achieved by:
The good practice support groups achieved high levels of participation by their members through the use of collaborative action learning strategies. This participatory ethic not only sustained voluntary participation, but also provided quality data that was grounded in the participants' local experiences of crime, associated problems and preventative strategies. It also meant that the community crime prevention worker benefited from a group committed to good practice concepts and practices as a means of developing practitioners' expertise.
The rest of this section of the Report documents other aspects of good practice that the participants encountered, which serve as a background to the foreground of the Project's Brief.
The participants proposed a strategy to support the wider implementation of good practice that includes:
These strategies were seen to be essential if good practice is to be developed as a national strategy rather than as individual and voluntary efforts. This level of support depends on policy makers endorsing the participants' proposal as being valid and congruent with their views about crime prevention.
The participants saw the gap between policy and practice as a key factor limiting the quality of information that reaches policy makers and their Ministers. The gap is explained by divergent focuses of accountability between policy makers and practitioners. It has consequences for the community crime prevention practitioner's resource base, with immediate implications for good practice.
The gap raises issues that are important to the future of the sector and the possibility of reaching agreement about good practice. It is emphasised that the following list of issues is not validated by action research. While they are evident in claims made by the participants and reported in this document, they were produced at the request of the Project Management Group at the conclusion of the Project, after the research activity was completed. They are offered to stimulate reflection within the National Anti-Crime Strategy and National Crime Prevention on the context in which good practice in community crime prevention is developing:
While these issues remain unresolved, any definition of good practice will either favour one perspective against the other, or attempt to encompass them all (as this Project does through using generic language) at the possible expense of the satisfaction of any.
Who should resolve these issues, and how they should do so, are equally important questions for the National Anti-Crime Strategy and National Crime Prevention. Their resolution would open new horizons for community crime prevention in Australia, and is a necessity if we are to maintain quality of life.
Despite the Project's inability to resolve these issues (they were outside its Brief), good practice was defined and did produce measurable differences within the Project community. The form of good practice that was defined, however, reflects the experience of the practitioners involved, and this may not be recognised as relevant to policy makers at a national level. Such a state of affairs would reflect the "gap" identified by practitioners, which cannot be resolved until the related issues are also addressed.
The participants suggested five options for closing the gap between consumer groups. All need practitioner skill, management support and funding body policy. The participants' interest was to improve their working relationship with their funding bodies and to work in an environment where the value of their expertise to community safety was understood and acknowledged. Their suggestions are:
These propositions could generate significant benefits such as:
Aspects of these benefits were experienced by each participant as a result of using the proposed concepts and practices of good practice that this Report describes.
At their first management meeting the Project Management Group declared that policing practices were not to be included in the inquiry process, outside the role played by police in community-based crime prevention partnerships.
The consultants suggest that community-based crime prevention practitioners are unclear about the disciplines that inform preventative practices within police services. It is possible, for example, that some community stakeholders evaluate community-based crime prevention outcomes using the same criteria that would be applied to law enforcement as distinct from crime prevention.
This lack of clarity contributes to the difficulty that community crime prevention workers have in demonstrating the value of their practice. Clearly prevention practice is based in behavioural change, and building community capacity requires intervention methods, qualities and outcomes that are different to those used in law enforcement. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the outcomes of this Project may also have considerable value in relation to current developments in community policing. To create clearer delineation between these two forms of prevention, and better strategic partnerships between police services and community-based community crime prevention stakeholders, the consultants propose the need for further research into:
While the Project's outcomes include case studies and conceptual explications, its heart is the action that community crime prevention practitioners took under the non-prescriptive principle. The beneficial outcomes of this action are the warrant for the claims made about the nature of good practice in community crime prevention.
Project participants reported valuable benefits from employing the Project's resources in their own initiatives. These benefits included:
We are beginning to see an emerging picture about continuous improvement process. It is technical and human, educative and intuitive, concerned with innovation and risk management. It is not simple or easy. Nor, in the short term, is it cheap-it will require some investment in the crime prevention sector for a short period of time. In the longer term, however, the Project's outcomes strongly suggest that the resource efficiencies to be gained from investment in a national scale initiative are very significant.
The definitions of good practice in community crime prevention produced by this research Project were created by project officers using collaborative action learning principles. Nine projects, spanning five States, participated in the action research stage of the Project to develop the Project's validated propositions. Four of these projects had participated throughout the development of the Project, and the other five were self-nominated parallel projects which, up to this stage of the Project, had participated as external critical observers (ie. level 2 of the Project's research community). The parallel projects were included in the Action Stage to test whether the proposed continuous improvement process and draft Action Kit was generally accessible with minimal consultant support and in other contexts than those that had generated the draft proposition.
This chapter presents the accounts of five of these participants, who describe how they used the continuous improvement process within their initiative's operations. Each of the nine participants 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 Action Stage projects ranged from the concrete, such as developing an alternative outlet for graffiti artists to reduce vandalism of buildings, to the more esoteric such as changing attitudes within football clubs to accept community crime prevention as a societal issue. Some projects chose to integrate the proposed continuous improvement process framework into strategic and operational quality management activities that were already being implemented, while for others, it was their first taste of a concept of good practice in crime prevention.
Each of the narratives is presented in the voice of the community crime prevention worker, and is followed by a process map to enable the reader to track the various actions and their outcomes. The benchmarks from the Project conclude the chapter, as they bring together the various case studies into statements of practice from which others can learn.
The proposed concept of good practice has a wide range of potential applications. Crime prevention practitioners who were not directly involved in the research project indicated, through a survey, that they would find it useful in the following activities:
In this chapter, a selection of participants in the Project describe how they used the continuous improvement process within their initiative's operations for benefits such as these. Each was using the draft Action Kit and participating in peer mentoring and collaborative reflection facilitated by the consultants. Thus, a consistent research methodology was used to generate data and develop benchmarks. At the same time, the strategy supported diversity by enabling contextual factors to be integrated into reporting mechanisms.
The accounts of the participants' experiences draw on four sources of information:
The case studies describe the work of the community crime prevention initiatives over a six-month period of time. Of the initiatives described here:
These parallel projects had participated in surveys during the early stages of the Project, had received newsletters on the completion of each stage, and also had the benefit of one introductory conversation with the consultants on their receipt of the Kit. However they had very little other contact or support from the Project to inform them about good practice or how to use the Kit. They were thus essential to test:
The case studies are included in this Report as rich descriptions to illustrate how the benchmarks were developed and to demonstrate how good practice is realised and valued within specific community crime prevention initiatives. They show how the participants oriented their strategies to achieve good practice outcomes on what they describe as "macro" and "micro" levels: good practice within an agency's management structure, and good practice at the crime prevention strategy and operational level.
The good practice proposal that the Project developed can serve either or both of these levels of operation. In some instances (eg Project Hahn), the delineation between the levels is quite distinct. In other instances (eg the Armadale Domestic Violence Project), there is an indivisible relationship between strategy design and effectiveness at management and community crime prevention levels. Respecting and fostering these differences of approach to good practice, while maintaining the overall framework, is essential to the sustainability of good practice in community crime prevention across jurisdictions and within the great variety of resourcing and theories of practice.
Each case study is presented as a story describing the good practice model developed by the participant. The stories are in the words of the community crime prevention project officer and each is followed by a process map that describes the way continuous improvement process was inducted into the initiative's management strategy to produce good practice outcomes. It should be noted that some of the terminology used in these accounts reflects terms in the draft Action Kit, rather than the final agreed tools and outcomes as presented in Chapter 4.
Glebe Youth Service is a community-based youth service in inner Sydney, whose function is to provide a space and programs for local young people on a daily basis. The service particularly targets young offenders and other disadvantaged young people in the area, which is a large housing estate with a business street as its centre (Glebe Point Road).
The service attracts a large number of young people, who usually begin attending when they turn twelve years old and generally become regular users of the service for many years, often their entire youth.
This kind of attendance means that youth workers have frequent and regular contact with these young people. The young people develop a strong rapport with workers and, over time, workers develop an understanding of many young people's family situations, problems, experiences, aspirations, strengths, sensitivities and beliefs.
Glebe Youth Service provides a broad range of service and offers young people access to long-term support and advocacy, as well as personal development and education activities, and opportunities to participate in community development and change.
Such comprehensive community-based youth services have opportunities to practice different kinds of crime prevention. The service may tackle broad crime issues, such as an established local culture of crime. Alternatively, it may tackle a new crime issue concerning a particular group of young people, or it may work with individuals who are involved in or affected by crime.
Often these strategies overlap. Take the case of, for example, a young woman who is a victim of domestic violence, is also perpetrating violent crime, and is claiming to be harassed or assaulted in her dealings with police. Adequate response to her needs could involve a number of overlapping community crime prevention initiatives. The youth service could be providing support coordination for the girl, a domestic violence education workshop in a girls' program, and a police / youth relations project. All of these strategies could have an impact on this young woman and the crime issues that affect her.
Glebe Youth Service does all of these forms of crime prevention. It plays an important role in the community as facilitator / mediator / advocate between young people and agencies such as police, shopping centre security, local businesses, schools, Department of Community Services, Centrelink and others. The service has run specially funded community crime prevention projects and, at the same time, attempts to prevent crime every day through informal dialogue with young people. Sometimes the service will respond spontaneously to an issue such as a spate of graffiti, bag snatches or fights, by holding a meeting with the group of young people involved, or perhaps their families. There are many responses to prevent crime - some planned, some not, and some ongoing.
A community-based youth service is also in a position to utilise local networks and resources such as families, cultural communities, inter-agency forums, schools, police, Juvenile Justice and Chamber of Commerce. Approaching community crime prevention collaboratively is more comprehensive and more likely to be effective.
As a youth service becomes effective in a community, having established good rapport with the local young people and other networks, the awareness of support needs for young people grows. This can be overwhelming particularly in youth services such as Glebe, which has only a couple of staff and little or no room for expansion in core funding grants, such as those from the NSW Department of Community Services. Hence research and development becomes stunted, and progress with community crime prevention models that work, such as the Support Coordination model, is limited. The model cannot be operated to its full potential. For Glebe to carry a significant Support Coordination caseload, it would need at least one full-time support worker. Thus the capacity to achieve community crime prevention becomes a resource issue.
How, then, can we prove the effectiveness of community crime prevention strategies such as those used at Glebe Youth Service, both in terms of financial cost and social capital measures? Successful community crime prevention needs to be compared with the alternative - not attempting to prevent crime or just reacting to it. Which achieves the better outcome? Which is more cost-effective? Which produces long-term societal benefits?
Any research that is conducted in the youth service setting is generally action research within a dynamic learning context. In crime prevention, while its central intention - to prevent crime - always remains, the work often reveals a new perspective on a crime issue which may require adaptation of the strategy or adoption of a different strategy altogether. Flexibility in community crime prevention projects is thus essential - it should not be rejected for the sake of prescription, status quo, simple evaluation or any other factor.
For the good practice research project, Glebe Youth Service has worked on developing good practice for three community crime prevention strategies:
Our involvement in the Project has also had benefits in other areas of our work, such as the internal development of good practice for the service, including our philosophy, aims, objectives and strategic plan, reporting processes, planning processes and consumer group support processes.
Initially, we used the Action Kit to form a good practice support group, which has now become known as the Community Crime Prevention Group. This group created a context that supported adult learning about good practice in crime prevention. It was made up of people living and working in Glebe, from formal and informal networks, including:
These people have been strong supporters and allies of young people and the youth service. I approached them, giving them a brief outline of the good practice research project and its objective, inviting them to an introductory meeting. Following this, I held a meeting to begin the group forming process.
During the initial meetings I presented aspects of the good practice concept using fact sheets and overheads from the Kit. The group members were invited to respond to these concepts and, while they found them demanding and very detailed, they also expressed excitement about using them. The generic practices were seen to be valuable to the community crime prevention work they were doing with our service as well as in their own organisations.
Having absorbed some of these ideas, this Community Crime Prevention Group decided to:
One of the group's tasks was to check the congruence of our values and interpretations with those of our beneficiary group (ie Glebe young people) through a planned consultation workshop, and to design and implement action strategies in consultation with them and other stakeholders.
Taking the group through the collaborative inquiry process to form and develop understanding of, and commitment to, continuous improvement process required five meetings held over six months (including the Christmas period, which slowed things down considerably). This process, which also involved exploring issues, values and interpretations in the group as a basis for making decisions on action strategies, began to emerge as an important domain in its own right - a domain for learning.
The group has found the process to be very beneficial to community crime prevention, and has decided to continue beyond the good practice research project. Glebe Youth Service will convene the group as an ongoing community crime prevention initiative, built into the service's strategic plan.
In arriving at that decision, the group was taken by its facilitator through an intensive half-day workshop that included:
The group is now planning a consultation with young people to check the congruence of its perceptions with theirs, to re-evaluate the priorities it has determined, and to design action plans based on all this.
All meeting minutes, maps and data have been documented in a folder for the group to access.
Alongside the good practice research project, Glebe Youth Service focused on two main areas of community crime prevention work and tracked these, using collaborative inquiry, continuous improvement process and the Kit's domains to guide action strategies. These two main areas of community crime prevention were:
The domains that we used for developing our good practice models were:
We chose these domains because they were closely aligned with our service delivery and significant to some current community development projects. The choice enabled us to collect data from those aspects of our service delivery that were linked to the domains. The links between service delivery and the good practice domains were seen as follows:
The action research project on Support Coordination for young offenders, a community crime prevention strategy, focused on three case scenarios. These cases were three young women who were engaging in crime including, in some instances, violent crime. The action strategy was to offer each of these young women support coordination to:
Other management issues that we included in the strategy were:
The performance measures that we developed were:
Some strategic questions began to emerge and to influence this development significantly:
The data for these measures could be in two languages - economic and social capital - to raise mainstream and political awareness and support for such community crime prevention action strategies. Ideally we would like to have measured the financial and social cost of support interventions and compared this with the financial and social cost of punitive responses to crime, policing and crime damage. However in this project we only had the scope to do this in a limited way, showing the results of interventions and inferring some of the costs and savings of this model, financially and socially.
For example, the diversion of our juvenile case studies away from their next punitive stage, which would have been detention, represents a saving of roughly three times the $90,000 a year that it costs for each person detained. This cost is balanced against the cost of interventions over a six-month period by one youth worker on a salary of $27,000 before tax, who is also working with many other young people at the same time. This comparison does not include the long-term savings to society, or the immediate savings on policing, insurance, damage and victim support.
The majority of young people at risk of crime are also at risk of domestic violence, neglect, drug and alcohol abuse, school drop-out, and homelessness. In our three case studies, all three women were experiencing physical violence at home, all were depressed and traumatised, all were dropping out or had dropped out from school, and all were keen to take up support when it was offered to them.
Our interventions enabled these young women to be the strong and constructive individuals they wanted to be. The interventions included:
These young people are not only diverted away from serious crime, but are also supported to:
The single issue of increased literacy and employment is another huge saving to society financially and socially.
Support coordination, as a community crime prevention strategy, is an extremely efficient and effective model that brings about long-term real change for individuals at risk of crime. As a result of using the good practice approach, we achieved greater accountability in this work with clearer measures, using both quantitative and qualitative data, and we produced a more comprehensive research into the effectiveness of this strategy.
To use the Kit's quality checks in the support coordination work, we had to carry out changes and developments in our organisation. We began by working on policy and procedures for support work and training to improve service delivery and bring it into alignment with the action values.
We reworked our confidentiality policy to make sure it reflected our values in relation to consumer group privacy, and was practical for our working context. This is quite challenging in a community setting when one is frequently liaising with families, other agency workers, schools, peer networks etc. We carried out extensive research and team and beneficiary consultation, facilitated by a youth work student doing a placement with us. We developed an information sheet in more "youth-friendly" terms to explain to young people their rights and responsibilities in accessing the service.
We tightened up other areas including the storage of consumer group information, procedures for consumer group engagement, and tools for consumer group support, such as support plans, goal setting forms, hand-over forms, referral forms, consumer group permission to exchange information forms, and more.
Support workers discovered that these clearer procedures and tools promoted confidence in consumer groups to access support, increased consumer group achievement in response to goal setting, improved clarity for consumer groups about support processes, and many other positive outcomes.
The Police/Youth project took an important turn when we developed a strategy to take both groups in conflict - police and youth - separately through a collaborative inquiry learning cycle, to enable each group to make its own decisions and actions to improve relations.
By allowing each group to reach decisions by itself, and not through political or direct force (eg. penalties), we thought they would have a stronger sense of ownership of decisions and actions, which would be unlikely to breed resentment. Evidence of this was forthcoming, and included:
We used the good practice domains strategically, in an order which we felt would promote the least hostility and confrontation. We tried to work with the domains that allowed the greatest growth at the grass roots level, rather than aiming for confronting structural change. This meant allowing individual police and young people the opportunity to address the issues and make changes first. The different domains used in this project were not layered or overlapping to the same extent as those used for support coordination; rather, they provided different approaches to the same problem.
The management issues entailed facilitating the process of working with police and young people to reduce conflict, victimisation and crime, and to improve relations.
We developed our own data collection methodologies including:
Some local factors that contributed to the project's success were:
Our performance measures included:
The Police/Youth project arose as a response to an increasing number of reports from young people, parents and youth workers of incidents of hostility and harassment between young people and police, getting worse with the introduction of the new Public Safety Bill and media reporting about "zero tolerance". Workers at Glebe Youth Service witnessed police abusing their authority during incidents with young people, including an illegal strip search of a young woman in a public place, mishandling of personal property, unwarranted physical assault, verbal racial abuse, hostile provocation and intimidation. Youth workers also experienced hostility, as they were perceived by some police to be supporting youth crime.
Young people were reluctant to pursue formal complaints processes. Their lack of faith in these processes were based, in some cases, on experience, and they feared retribution. Using the collaborative inquiry model, Glebe Youth Service designed a strategy with the assistance of the previous coordinator from Cellblock Youth Health Service, to work with the young people and police separately so that they could reflect on the issues, interpret these and reach some decisions about what to do.
We conducted a storytelling session with the young people, with solicitors present to give legal advice, in which the facilitator recorded their stories on butcher's paper, with their consent. We attended discussions with the Commander and senior constable and then a group of police.
With both groups' agreement, we planned to bring a small group of police and young people together with youth workers present, facilitated by an external person. This meeting would provide an opportunity for both groups to air their perspectives and listen to each other in a controlled and safe setting. This would obviously not be without risks for those involved - retribution is a real threat.
The young people and police both agreed to the joint meeting. The young people were very brave and spoke about their experiences and feelings, in some cases confronting police officers who had abused them, face to face. This was a very intense process but it seemed to conclude with the sense that both sides had learnt something, and hope for better relations in the future, with suggestions for more similar meetings involving more police and young people.
Reported incidents did lessen and the police approached the youth service and its workers with noticeably more respect. Young people report, however, that there are still problems. As the local Commander recognised, many of the constables rotating across large local government authorities are very young, inexperienced and placed with the significant power of a uniform, weapons and authority. It will take a concerted effort over time to address underlying attitudes. Glebe Youth Service is pursuing the invitation to conduct training sessions with police and organise fun and educational activities between police and young people, such as a Theatrical Night-time Basketball event between Cops and Kids. This is to take place in the contentious new public space, involving workshops with kids, exploration of public space rules and the legitimation of young people's use of the area.
We found that long-term real change and community crime prevention did take place through education and ownership of different actions and responses. The concept of good practice that the Kit proposed provided greater structure for monitoring the effectiveness of processes and their outcomes, by checking the way results are produced. The framework increases the accountability of projects - not just to funding bodies, but also to beneficiaries, other agencies and the wider community. By far the greatest attribute of the framework is its emphasis on making values congruent through process and actions - they are factored into planning and not allowed to be lost along the way, as the checks and indicators protect their inclusion.
For young people, our model of good practice ensured their inclusion in all aspects of service delivery:
For our service, we realised the importance of community crime prevention for all our work, and we developed ways of greatly increasing the accuracy of our strategies:
The approach has increased the congruency (shared values, purpose and thus efficiency) between team members, between the team and the management committee, between our stakeholders and ourselves, and with our various funding bodies.
| WHO | WHAT | HOW | DIFFERENCES NOTICED |
| Project officer | Received Kit with training | Feelings of excitement and possibility | Enthusiasm; anticipation |
| Project officer | Plan of introduction to a Good Practice Support Group made up of key people concerned with CP | Plan - using collaborative inquiry to form the group and foster commitment process to explore collaborative inquiry and values. Explored concepts of adult learning, continuous improvement and good practice | Reached shared meanings of community crime prevention and priorities to develop good practice and community crime prevention projects |
| Project officer, in collaboration with inter-agency and multi-disciplinary community of interest | Held several meetings over four months | Exploration and mapping crime, community crime prevention local setting and current values implicit in intervention strategies and facilitated group discussion to reach consensus | Resistance; confusion; breakthroughs; excitement; new insights; affirmation; convergence. Decision reached that good practice requires beneficiary involvement into determining:
Decision reached to continue with good practice strategy beyond the life of the Good practice research project, and to establish the Good Practice Support Group as a community action for crime prevention, in itself |
| Community of interest | Decision to take beneficiary group (young people) through process of exploration of crime prevention, crime and values | Consensus | People felt more comfortable and more in line with good practice |
| Project officer and co-ordinator of Glebe Youth Service | Set time in service planning week to plan next workshop with Good Practice Support Group and decide process for decision | One-on-one discussion, data gathering and reporting | Made the distinction between macro good practice (general project management practice) and micro good practice (community crime prevention intervention strategies) |
| Project officer | Plan workshop using collaborative inquiry and mapping | Reflection on
|
New areas of participation in service management and strategy design Tighten up shared statement of values Mapping crime issues and reaching decision about priority crime issues Mapping where the current concentration of resources exists and reasons for this distribution |
| Project officer and Good Practice Support Group | Second workshop (next meeting) | Plan of action strategy to consult with young people on perceptions Pull Good Practice Support Group perceptions together with beneficiary group perceptions Look at which domains fit with values and priorities |
New system of decision-making in reference to domains of action Analyse how congruent perceptions are derived Make changes to priorities based on this Consider quality checks and indicators and good practice Plan action strategies accordingly |
| Glebe Youth Service - Development team and project officer | Emphasise need for monitoring and evaluation process in strategic plan; format for service in our quarterly planning weeks | Developed format and skeleton of strategic plan, including philosophy and aims object | Each objective has a list of strategies with an intended outcome evaluation procedure and timeframe Team mentally exhausted but pleased Built stronger foundation from which to work |
| Project officer and Glebe Youth Service team | Revised philosophy and principles to formulate a statement Revised aims and objectives, changed and added to them in reference to reflection of last quarter |
Facilitated team meeting | More clarity and understanding Crime prevention initiatives and good practice strategies clearly defined More confidence about purpose and direction More confidence in team members' response to challenges and critique of youth service |
| Project officer | Formulated a statement to define Service's operations and philosophy | In solitary reflection derived from previous discussions | More positive feeling at work place. |
| Project officer | Took statement to team meeting | Team made comments and perfected it until we were happy | Affirmation |
| Team | Took statement to the management committee | Management committee passed the statement | Congruency between team and committee |
| Project officer and team | More development - next planning week | Project officer completed strategic plan referring the domains of action and data from consulting consumer groups and Good Practice Support Group | Elation, satisfaction and completion A quality of service management was developed and articulated for anybody to work with, designed to evolve and get better (continuous improvement) |
| Project officer and 3 case studies | Support coordination conducted with three young offenders | Project officer works individually with the young person and sometimes their family, offering supports and interventions to address crime and other issues with that young person, assisting them to access rights and choose alternative activities to crime | Young people were more secure Young people restored faith and trust in some people Young people's aggression and anguish diminished Young people made conscious decisions not to participate in crime and to return to school, TAFE or an alternative program, seek employment and participate in other activities |
| Project officer and Glebe Youth Service team |
|
Reports from young people and their families about police harassment | More trust and rapport between young people and team |
| Project officer and service coordinator | Set up meeting with commander at local police station | Phone call and face-to-face meeting | Felt like a link-in and development about the issue within Police service was possible Willingness to attempt positive change at base level of police and youth services toward structural change |
| Glebe Youth Service team | Discussions with young people More conflict with police Set up meeting with group of police |
Reflection some interpretation and decision-making to strategies action Sub-contracted a specialist facilitator with drama and action research experience to facilitate workshops to be held with young people and police separately and then together |
Unique concept of workshop facilitation Police chief admitting a problem with constables; negotiation Invitation from Chief to Glebe Youth Service to conduct police training |
| Glebe Youth Service team, young people, parents, police, and external Facilitator, other youth services | Planning, holding meetings, storytelling | Intense dynamics and discussions Both sides evaluated positions noticeably Decided to try to meet half way Both agreed they wanted improvement in issue |
Common ground reached for the first time Young people and police felt listened to Action was being seen to be taken Promoting confidence for police, young people and Glebe Youth Service to work together Young people felt assured that Glebe Youth Service would actively advocate for them to seek changes |
| Project officer and team | Still some problems So reflection on domains in dialogue with research consultant, coordinator, staff and young people |
Decision to try other approaches Identified restorative structural change, inter-agency and advocacy as key strategic issues |
Use of workshop outcomes to inform Glebe Youth Service policy Policy and procedural development, and professional development Decided to create a project to bring police and young people together - funding submission Strong advocacy in youth sector AND law and order forums |
| Support coordinator, project officer, service coordinator inter-agencies (Juvenile Justice, Education Department) students | Discuss importance of good practice model and generate decisions about good practice | Team debate Inter-agency debate Follow case studies Professional development in team supervision meetings Training opportunities Policy and procedures development Support coordinator |
Measures developed Good practice recognised as extremely important in community crime prevention action Clearer view of Glebe Youth Service community crime prevention work and its priority in overall service delivery Improve good practice element of support work More accountability through creating and improving reporting processes to funding bodies, young people and the local community Policy development through thorough consideration of values and ethics Good practice quality checks and evaluation now included in all aspects of service delivery, and young people included in each of these activities Young people clearer and more confident about their participation in shaping services, accessing support, advocacy and bringing community crime prevention issues to the Glebe Youth Service Accurate community crime prevention strategies Continuous improvement through reflection on process, equity and accuracy |
The Sunshine Coast Community Policing Partnership (CPP) was established in October 1997 as one of eight pilot programs in Queensland. Each partnership represents a tripartite agreement between local and State governments and the community. Under the agreement, the State provides funds to employ regional coordinators, while participating local government authorities provide the necessary infrastructure and operating costs. The Sunshine Coast CPP takes in the local government authorities of Noosa, Maroochy and Caloundra, with a total population of some 226,000. The management committee incorporates all three mayors (the Mayor of Maroochy is the current CPP Chairman) and representatives from the Queensland Police Service, media, business, community, youth, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and ethnic groups.
One of the intentions of the Partnership is to provide the courts with a range of meaningful alternatives to community service order tasks as they now stand. The Sunshine Coast CPP is also keen to develop a more flexible, individualised system of community service orders; one that includes training in specific skills such as work, basic life and conflict resolution skills. In developing alternative community service orders the CPP intends to:
Our strategic stakeholders are:
The crime issue addressed by our good practice project was the incidence of graffiti within the Maroochydore central business district. The management issues that our continuous improvement process addressed were:
These issues were deemed to be pertinent on a micro level for this particular project, as well as by the CPP Project Management Group in terms of success for the overall community crime prevention strategy. More specifically the committee determined that:
In the three-month period leading up to the project, the Queensland Police Service, Maroochy Shire Council and business operators had all recorded a rise in the incidence of graffiti - in particular, extensive aerosol art pieces on public buildings and business premises. Maroochy Shire Council had been spending up to $20,000 per year in labour and materials to clean up graffiti of all types. However, cleaning up of extensive aerosol art pictures had resulted in a significant rise in costs to Council in the period immediately prior to project. Whilst business operators acknowledged costs involved in clean-up, none were able to specify exact costs as they were generally rolled into general cleaning or maintenance costs.
Two university students doing workplace study with the CPP identified the following stakeholder responses to the issues of graffiti:
Whilst both groups of young people expressed an interest in the establishment of legal spaces for their work, aerosol artists were far more supportive of this concept and were far more inclined to get involved in mural projects that they heard about through their networks.
The interpretative research data reflecting the views of the community, business and local government stakeholders suggested that the community crime prevention strategy should approach local business and other potential investors to ask if the aerosol artists could decorate their walls.
Tackling the issue of aerosol artists was thought to be the best starting place for a community crime prevention strategy, in terms of:
The costs associated with the project ($350 per month) were acknowledged by Council to be considerably less than the cost of cleaning up the illegal graffiti that might be expected over that time.
The idea of legal graffiti enjoyed strong support from the community and the aerosol artists' group, who were interested and willing to be involved in some sort of project that would give them a legal space in which to do their own thing.
It was decided, therefore, to develop a strategy whereby young aerosol artists would be provided with a legal space for their work. The participants agreed to refer to processes and structures of action research to guide the project's implementation. This method actively seeks to identify and incorporate the views, ideas and resources of all individuals and groups who have a direct or indirect interest in the crime or safety issue. The participants include victims and perpetrators of the issue, who are actively engaged through facilitated adult learning strategies in the development, implementation and evaluation of strategies that seek to address the issue.
Two stakeholder groups were formed. The co-researcher group - the people with the formal responsibility to carry out structural changes that could make the outcome possible - was identified from amongst people who had already been consulted about the project. We built the group by incorporating others who had particular expertise in the issue and could be classed as "key stakeholders". Key stakeholders were seen as those individuals or groups (including parents and general community members) who had varying degrees of financial, legal and moral responsibility for the issue. This group included participants from:
The critical reference group (that is, those who are involved in, and have individual but not formal responsibility for, the issues being addressed - in this case, the illegal graffiti artists) was made up of a number of young people who had fallen foul of the law through their aerosol art work. We also included two other groups of young people:
We did not feel that mixing law-abiding young people with those who had broken the law was particularly problematic. Given that the law abiding young people did not share the same peer group as the graffiti artists, they were unlikely to be placed under peer pressure from the graffiti artists. The law-abiding young people generally admired the skills of the graffiti artists. They were really keen to see them have the opportunity to do their work legally and have it displayed in prominent places where they could also enjoy it.
Nevertheless, at our first meeting, in establishing the parameters of the project, we made it clear that whilst we regarded the artists as indeed having considerable skill, this did not then give them the right to decorate other people's property without permission. The law-abiding young people were also encouraged to provide suggestions that we could explore in relation to providing legal spaces.
Furthermore, when we first met with the young people we met as one group - the young people were not aware of who was an artist and who was not. By the time they found out, in the course of discussions, they all had a common purpose in terms of finding legal spaces for the artwork.
As facilitator, my role was to guide the overall process of strategy development using collaborative inquiry principles, incorporation of the continuous improvement process and liaison between the critical reference group and co-researchers.
Having decided to act, the participants revisited the reflection, interpretation and decision-making stages, to review and determine:
Following a series of workshops and follow-up negotiations with the co-researchers and critical reference groups, a number of issues were agreed upon regarding the overall purpose of the project and incorporation of the continuous improvement process.
The intended consequences of the intervention were to:
The following possible unintended consequences were identified:
The participants determined the following risk management strategy:
These risk management approaches, which also reflect the main issues that the project needed to address, determined the nature of the initial proposal. The groups decided to erect three billboards next to a local skate bowl park. This site was selected because the area was already essentially "owned" by young people. While the boards would be in full view of the passing public, they were not aggressively "in the face" of the public.
Artists would be invited, through advertising flyers sent out to all schools, youth groups, media releases and placement in shops and venues frequented by young people, to submit designs. Designs would be vetted only in terms of ensuring they would not unduly offend the public - for example, overly lewd representations or unnecessary inclusion of obscene language. It was decided that the boards could be painted on a monthly basis and repainted at the end of each month with a base coat to make them ready for the next group of artists. Funding was to be sourced through sponsorship from paint companies, the Local Government Authority, Jupiter's Casino Benefit Fund and any other community grants schemes available.
This proposal was then presented to the Maroochy Shire Council for approval of the site and the overall concept, and for possible financial support. Council was far more supportive than had been anticipated, and suggested that new boards should be provided each month with completed boards being displayed around the Shire. They requested that the committee re-think the proposal and come back to Council the following month with a revised version including a revision of initial project establishment and monthly maintenance costs.
The proposal was therefore revamped to incorporate the idea of erecting three frames capable of holding boards that could be replaced on a monthly basis. A budget was then prepared to take account of:
Council approved the revised proposal and agreed to fund the project for the first year. Establishment costs of $1,500 were provided from the Mayor's discretionary funds with monthly materials costs ($350) as a one-off contribution by each of the twelve councillors. Council also suggested that at the end of the project the boards could be auctioned off as part of the Maroochy Shire Arts Festival, with proceeds going towards refunding of the project the next year. It was also agreed that sponsoring councillors would have the right, should they wish, to determine the sites for the relocation of completed boards. The CPP agreed to cover labour costs involved in both the initial establishment of the project and on-going management.
A further press release and a number of radio and TV interviews were conducted publicising the support and input from council in the development of the project and provision of funding to implement it.
The revised proposal threw up a number of issues and details that had to be resolved before the project could be implemented. This was, for me, a particularly interesting time since it highlighted change management difficulties so often faced in this type of work. In our commitment to acknowledging the value of Council's suggestions and adapting the project strategy to take account of them, we failed to review the unintended consequences that such a revision would have. For example:
Whilst we managed to overcome these difficulties, they serve to highlight the fact that the success of a project can be seriously compromised by seemingly minor changes to the detail of the overall concept. It also highlights the need to be constantly applying action research with every strategy change.
The first paint was completed in December. The artists reckoned on about six hours to complete the painting, which included applying a base coat to both sides of the raw board. The area around the artists was cordoned off so that they had plenty of room to work without being impeded by onlookers. Given the location, adjacent to a very well used skate facility on the beachfront, it was inevitable that there would be a number of other young people at the site. Painting started around 9am, with a formal launch scheduled for 11am. The painting was completed by 2pm, and a second media interview with the artists was scheduled for 3pm.
From my experience, the success of many community-based initiatives is compromised due to what I call the "shrinking violet syndrome", which in severe cases is coupled with the "quiet achiever" syndrome. Whilst the media often work against the efforts of community crime prevention workers and are partly responsible for community misconstructions of crime, the media are, nonetheless, a powerful tool in terms of their ability to increase one's sphere of influence and support in the community. A greater sphere of influence may, of course, lead to increased demand for your services, and this has been cited as a reason for avoiding too much publicity.
It is thus important that the media be engaged in community crime prevention, and that they acknowledge community crime prevention participants, their work and community support. Successful, high profile initiatives with a high level of community support attract funding. It is becoming ever more necessary for community-based initiatives of all descriptions actively to market themselves and their service to as broad a cross-section of society as possible.
Our strategy did not adequately use the media, which is why we focussed on gatekeeper and strategic pathways as one of our domains of action.
As I have learnt over the past year, using the media to one's best advantage requires knowing how they work, what they like, their reporting format, and their deadlines. It is particularly useful to develop good working relationships with reporters from the various newspapers, radio and TV stations.
In the case of the Legal Street Art Project, the press was used very much to our advantage throughout both the development and implementation stages. The on-site formal launch was attended by the Shire Mayor (and CPP Chairman), the region's Superintendent of Police, the YACCA Coordinator, the local Community Policing Liaison Officer, the Councillor sponsoring that month's paint of the boards (selected on the basis of the boards being in his division) and a large crowd of onlookers. With two TV stations and the local newspaper in attendance, key stakeholders were publicly acknowledged - an important aspect of supporting gatekeepers. Having the launch take place halfway through the process of painting the boards provided the press with interesting coverage, and also gave us the opportunity for a second promotion once the boards had been completed. This ensured the artists were interviewed and received the public acknowledgment they deserved.
Publicity about the project from its early stages had created a significant level of interest in the strategy, and the coverage of the launch sparked a surprisingly high number of calls supporting the concept. We also received calls from young people wanting more information on the project. Best of all, we received two offers, one from a private resident and the other from a business, to pay the artists to complete a mural on the side of a shed, and one on the inside wall of a new business called "Street Art Wheels". As a result of the project's success, the January painter of the boards was invited to be included as part of the council's "Cut Loose" holiday program. A young graffiti artist whom we employed as a consultant to the project held a couple of two-day workshops for aerosol artists, culminating in the second paint of the boards.
In the month the first three boards were on display none of them attracted any tagging or vandalism. Whilst the aerosol artists had indicated that it was unlikely they would be damaged, adult participants in the project were not convinced. The artists had offered to touch up their work if necessary since research clearly indicates a prompt response to graffiti is one of the best defences against it.
Given the respect afforded the artwork by other young people, including taggers, the first three boards were relocated to the outside of the Maroochy Shire Council tourism building, a site regularly targeted by graffiti vandals. Since the boards have been there, the buildings have been free of graffiti. This fact has resulted in a steady flow of inquiries from community organisations and businesses to have future boards attached to their buildings. It also inspired one of the artists to approach the owners of buildings sporting the graffiti to offer to create a mural on their wall. To date he has completed two, one at his own cost and one for which he was paid. When queried about doing them free, he noted that he was just pleased to have the opportunity to practise his art. The Legal Street Art Project has changed some people's perception of graffiti and those responsible for it.
We asked that the Queensland Police Service and business operators in the area monitor the incidence of graffiti during the life of the project. Initially we found that the incidence of large pieces of aerosol art outside the project diminished as the artists now had an outlet. However, the local shopping centre reported an increase in the incidence of tagging.
More recently we have experienced an increase in large-scale aerosol art occurring in both of the neighbouring shires. In both cases the artwork has been of an extremely high quality and has been restricted to the more industrialised areas. Youth workers have identified the two culprits who have now been invited to take part in the Legal Street Art Project. Interestingly both artists noted that their choice of location for their artwork was an attempt to get their councils to establish a legal street art project within the neighbouring shires.
We are now negotiating with Noosa and Caloundra Councils to increase the scope of the project. Negotiations have been initiated with the manager of the largest shopping centre on the coast with a view to establishing a legal tag wall in the centre. The centre attracts large numbers of young people and regularly spends a considerable amount of money on cleaning up vandalistic graffiti. The proposal involves provision of a legal space, to be managed by a group of young people in conjunction with the centre's cleaning staff and the Queensland Police Service. The idea is that, once the wall is full, the youth management team will work with cleaners to repaint the wall ready to be reused.
In many senses, the Legal Street Art Project represents a good practice solution, in that it:
Thuringowa City Council has requested a copy of the project brief and recently sent me the following update:
| The Youth and Combined Community Action Group (YACCA), with the support of Lifeline volunteers, has established a legal graffiti program at the Bouncers Basketball Park. Under the program, young people are painting legal graffiti over score boards at the park using paint and materials donated by the Thuringowa City Council. |
Thuringowa Crime Prevention Partnership Newsletter, May 1999. |
The Queensland Police Service, whose members attended launches, have spoken to the media promoting the benefits of legal street art projects and encouraging the community to support the idea. After the first paint of the boards the Regional Superintendent of Police had a friendly bet with CPP Chairman regarding how long it would take before the art pieces were tagged. The superintendent reckoned "they wouldn't last a day" - so far, they have lasted five and a half months without being tagged. His bet and this fact have become common knowledge and have been used in media releases as an indication of how successful this project has been.
Community support for the project is evident in:
Business operators who have been approached by project participants looking for other legal spaces have contacted us and praised the initiative for teaching the young people how to approach businesses and ask permission to graffiti walls rather than just doing it. As a result, a certain amount of respect has been built up between the business sector, Council and the artists.
Key stakeholders have noted that it has been an excellent project as they have been consulted and encouraged to have input and have felt that their views were being acknowledged.
Many members of the general community have commented on the skill of the artists and the fact that the boards are an excellent means of advertising this skill as well as providing a legal space for their artwork. Due to the way in which the project was marketed to the general community, we have received many calls from people who were genuinely surprised that the artists (who were interviewed on TV) were not homeless, drug addicted delinquents with long criminal records. The community is acknowledging that these young people were completing year 11 or 12 with aspirations to go on to university or other further education, who just happened to enjoy aerosol art. By using adult learning principles, we have successfully changed the community's perception of graffiti artists and young people in general.
Creating an environment conducive to learning and collaboration encouraged adaptability in both the development and implementation of the project.
Similarly, acknowledging the priorities of all concerned and engaging key stakeholders in a meaningful, rather than superficial, manner was crucial to the success of the project. Engagement of key stakeholders ranged from having a contact number for someone, through to developing a real working relationship based on an understanding of each other's priorities and skills. I think relationships with key stakeholders often fail to get beyond a polite recognition of their existence. We should be investing the time to see and understand the situation from a variety of stakeholder perspectives, and recognising the value and legitimacy of these perspectives. Establishing a sense of ownership for strategies is crucial to their ultimate level of success and is reliant upon the nature and depth of the relationships established in the development and implementation of any strategy.
Regular debriefing sessions allowed for a process of continuous improvement to evolve as a matter of course. Apart from discussing how things could have been done better, these sessions provided all-important time for self-congratulation, acknowledging the worth of each other's individual input and the value of the synergy created within a group. Evaluating performance in terms of the domains of action provided a focus for developing a project description that has a greater likelihood of success in differing contexts.
The participants identified the following factors contributing to the success of the project:
The performance indicators attached to the Kit's good practice domains were useful in terms of gauging effectiveness and discerning performance measures. For example, it was easy to create a measure for the indicator on establishing databases and the degree of relevance of data to other agencies.
Developing performance measures that give evidence of the value of inter-agency relationships and resources is significantly more difficult. Participants noted that the difficulty here was related to developing a measure that could be easily translated into a short, concise written concept. Clearly this is a major issue for a great deal of community development work. Participants will very often recognise that a project has been successful for a number of reasons but have difficulty expressing this succinctly to others not directly involved.
In the Legal Street Art Project the following performance measures were identified:
Maroochy Shire Council and its local government partners in the CPP have received considerable praise for being forward thinking and willing to trial the project. The Queensland Police Service, which was extremely sceptical of the project at first, is now promoting it and referring interested parties to the CPP. The media has been supportive, providing positive news coverage that promotes the young people's skills and willingness to work in with police, councils and the community. By using good practice, this project has brought the community and its services to a new way of thinking and responding to young people. This outcome increases our community's social cohesion in the short- and long-term, making it a safer community for young people and those who previously may have seen themselves as their victims.
| WHO | WHAT | HOW | DIFFERENCES NOTICED |
| Project officer | Took good practice action Kit home to read | Read and re read, sought project management help regarding Excel tracking system tool and reviewed CPP's management committee interest in participating in the Action Stage. Attention to domains of action as described in the Kit with regard to current practice Reflected on how to introduce the concept of good practice to the management committee, key players within the CPP strategy and project officer's own practice |
Critical appraisal of current practice using a standardised and uniform system; review of current strategy in the same way; strategic consideration given to consciously facilitating changed practice with management committee and other key stakeholders. Committee and stakeholders engaged with concepts of "good practice" for the first time |
| Project officer | Set up a peer group and CPP "good practice support group" and introduced the Kit to the members | Group meeting with good practice group - gained feedback about the Kit as being confusing and dense. Group decided that they could not actively participate in changing their own practice due to time and resource issues, but agreed to monitor the CPP use of the Kit and participate in debriefing sessions with other participants who were using the Kit | Support group role clarified as monitoring, learning and critique of good practice |
| Project officer | Introduced good practice Kit to 2 university students doing work place study with the CPP | Project officer facilitated their gradual induction by distributing bite-sized chunks of information, following up with face-to-face interviews. They grasped collaborative inquiry readily, but had great difficulty understanding concepts of "protocol" and "levels of decision-making". University students of the view that community crime prevention action should take place if you think whatever it is, is a good idea. Reflection and critique not interesting to them, and detail of the Kit caused confusion | The concepts of thinking about action and being accountable for it are introduced for the first time as practice, not rhetoric |
| Project officer | Identified domains of action within current work that required work | Looked at quality checks with the CPP. Their view was continued lack of interest in the detail and that the responsibility was entirely that of the project officer. The concept of "a domain" was difficult for committee members to grasp or see the relevance of regarding crime prevention. Project officer given the mandate to work with good practice, but had to do so on an implicit level - no overt discussion about good practice with the committee members | Crime prevention practice consciously, but not transparently, adopts good practice strategies and concepts |
| Students and project officer | Began determining areas of interest | Students engaged with ideas about "underlying values" within a strategy and "intended and unintended consequences" of action. Had difficulty coming to terms with "values" - project officer used examples from other projects, which help students understand. Used Kit as a reflection tool | Increased use of reflection and evaluation in community crime prevention practice |
| Students and committee | Students begin to use the concepts in the Kit to endorse initiating the good practice strategy | They document underlying values and consequences within the CPP strategy and took the information to the CPP committee for endorsement for action |
Engaged committee through informed decision-making - greater attention being paid to community crime prevention values in decision-making |
| Students | Students begin to identify participants and domains of practice for the good practice strategy referring to collaborative inquiry concepts to do so | Project officer had to take time again, explaining language and unpacking concepts. Legal Street Art project identified, student worked with co-researcher group for the Project (those responsible for the issues of graffiti and youth services) to identify the critical reference group (those who participate in graffiti or who suffer its consequences) |
The community crime prevention strategy is designed in terms of change potential and responsibility for action, rather than representation of others. There is also equity between stakeholders, based on decision-making and action potentials |
| Good practice support group | Agreed to join Legal Street Art co-researcher group | Group discussion to arrive at possible and valuable working relationship with good practice concepts | Decided on a "learn as you do" strategy, using the Kit as a quality check and information source - to be used as needed by the action of the good practice strategy |
| Project officer and project group including good practice group | Introduced reflection to the Street Art project group to identify underlying values and consequences of the project strategy |
Used domains of action to identify values and determine the steps needed to be taken to include the domains in the strategy's implementation and evaluation | Project design carried out using generic elements of good practice system. Project group engages with continuous improvement concepts, builds them into project strategy and begins to use diary notes in the absence of a tracking system that is compatible with their computer programs. They identify that a new domain regarding "learning" is needed for the good practice approach.25 Reporting structures determined to report on access to the Kit, project development and details to replicate good practice approach elsewhere |
| Project group | Strategy development and implementation stage | Had difficulties maintaining participation of local government participants - interested in strategy development and evaluation but not implementation (learning from action) | Group adopted continual process of reflection and interpretation referring to the domains of good practice and the Project's ability to take account of them |
| Project officer | Taking the good practice approach beyond the Project group | Regular reporting about Kit application to the management group - still having difficulties with language and concepts. Re-introduced the Kit to Youth Crime Prevention network | Project officer able to explain concepts as a result of using the Kit; far more interest in good practice expressed by Youth Crime Prevention network; interest also being raised from workers not immediately engaged in community crime prevention - but representing other community service partnerships |
| Project officer and community service network | Consideration about how to induct other players into the continuous improvement process | Problems with Kit and framework noted, solutions arrived at | Simplicity of model identified as:
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| All participants | Evaluation of Street Art project | Evaluation conducted from perspectives of co-researchers, good practice support group and critical reference groups with regard to:
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A major issue identified was the failure of funding sources to value qualitative outcomes However, data that has been collected regarding qualitative outcomes has satisfied funding sources to date The strength of the good practice model using collaborative inquiry structure and processes means that there is a wealth of qualitative data |
| Project officer | Extending the use of the good practice Kit and framework | Having completed this first exercise, the project officer reflected on her use of the Kit and its potential to extend her own management and facilitation practice | Flexibility of the Kit to create new and more locally relevant domains of action noted Project officer's ability to use framework this way was self- assessed. Issues with:
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| All participants | Evaluate the value of the good practice concept and Kit |
Consensus decision-making | Framework definitely added to the success of the Project by:
This quality of reporting greatly assists with transferability due to the attention paid to consequences and the business of managing change |
Having entered the Project some weeks after other projects, we had to adopt the domains as they were, with little time to consider fully whether the area of domestic violence might require a domain of its own. However, we discovered that the domains that we chose suited our community crime prevention practice, which is focussed on private (domestic) settings rather than public or community settings such as wilderness, recreational centres, business centres and school communities.
Although a number of the domains were equally relevant, we were struck that one was about precisely what we were seeking to do, via two projects that we had been planning. "Diversity in community crime prevention strategies" exactly identified the issues we had to address.
We had been concerned for a number of years that our Community Intervention Project was not involving Aboriginal people or those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in an effective way, despite much effort and planning to achieve this. Therefore, we found the domain and the good practice research project to be of immediate value and relevance as it provided a mechanism for planning and reviewing our strategies.
We commenced our use of this domain in conjunction with adult learning principles as advised in the continuous improvement strategy for the project. We used the domain as a tool for reflection, to evaluate the actions that we had already undertaken. This was and continues to be extremely useful as a method by which to analyse what was and is done. The method gives a detailed breakdown of each specific step or action, which focuses us as practitioners on the outcomes of our work, directing us to reflect on the consequences, both intentional and unintentional, the value of the action, and the evidence of action.
This is of significant value, for the data this process produces are much more detailed and useful than those produced by the often cursory review of actions that occurs in many work settings. The pitfalls of the common approach are that detailed reflection or evaluation normally takes place at infrequent intervals (for example, at a planning day) and therefore, each small action along the way is not reflected upon and evaluated on its own. This is often seen as time wasting and preventing one "getting on" with the real job of "doing something".
This common approach fails to recognise that every small action taken adds to, detracts from, or offers nothing to the community crime prevention aim or the principles aimed for in the intervention strategy. It leaves a worker more inclined to fall back on old assumptions about what does or does not work, as she/he is not testing their work every step of the way. If each step is not tested along the way, it is not clear what exactly went wrong when finally, several steps later, it is realised that the community crime prevention principle is no closer to being met or fulfilled.
The continuous improvement process offered by the Project ensures that each action is measured against the domain being addressed, and its action principle, thereby keeping action focussed on the goal and measuring the outcomes in a detailed and regular way.
After using the framework for a short time to reflect on actions taken, we began to use it as a hands-on planning tool. Before we took any action, we used the domain template to predict possible outcomes.
We identified the following intended consequences:
With regard to unintended consequences, on reflection we list the following:
This was very useful, as it was again a method by which to evaluate not just actions taken, but also actions planned. Actions that were therefore not likely to contribute to the goal could be adapted or scrapped before they were undertaken. This created, in an effective way, a cyclic practice - action reflection action reflection, and so on.
Our model was and is one of inclusiveness where we seek to involve, in an equal way, Aboriginal people and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in the decision-making processes of the organisation. This means not just consultation, but sharing power.
This is important in the area of domestic violence, as Aboriginal people, while statistically a group with the greatest need for domestic violence services, are in practice one of the least likely groups to use services (including police and the justice system). We created action strategies and presented them to the key stakeholders, who were:
The action strategies that we developed with this group, using principles of inclusiveness, were:
It has been an aim of our organisation for several years to increase participation by Aboriginal people in our decision-making bodies as well as the use of our services. However, there has been little success in achieving this goal.
Through the use of this domain, it became evident at an early stage that we needed to ensure that this inclusiveness extended to each part of our strategy actions. For example, Aboriginal people need to be involved in all aspects such as planning meetings; but it transpired that the day when a meeting was held was a common day for Aboriginal funerals, resulting in a low turnout.
Our aim for Aboriginal people was the same as with people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, that is, to increase participation in all levels of the organisation. However, our methods were different due mainly to the availability of funds. A small grant of $5,000 was made available to us to improve access for people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, while we knew of no funds available to achieve the same for Aboriginal people at that time.
The availability of funds gave us the opportunity to put some resources immediately into increasing participation from culturally and linguistically diverse communities. The small amount granted meant that careful consideration was needed of how to best use this money. As other domestic violence regions had been granted the same money, we decided to pool funds with at least four other regions to maximise all our funds. We would use this money to employ a worker, who would employ, train and support part-time bi-cultural workers from five culturally and linguistically diverse communities. This resource was created with the domain helping us to analyse each step and to plan effectively each succeeding step.
With the Aboriginal group, it was necessary to engage significant Aboriginal workers and community members by inviting them to an initial gathering to talk about domestic and family violence. This was successful, with a good attendance, and agreements were made about the need to end domestic and family violence, to attend future meetings and to elect representatives onto the regional committee.
Like all groups, the Aboriginal reference group has waxed and waned, but it has continued to meet, and has become clearer about its aims and strategies. Therefore, the original aim of increasing Aboriginal participation is being fulfilled. The group's progress was and is continually reported to the Board, who remain committed to supporting the group.
Creating performance indicators was problematic for the board as this was seen as "white standards" being applied to an Aboriginal group. It was therefore agreed that the Aboriginal Group itself would set its own performance indicators with assistance from the coordinator, who would inform the group about the domains and their tables. As a result, the process of formulating indicators and strategies was still underway at the time of writing this report.
Through use of the continuous improvement process, we were able to reflect on and analyse the weaknesses of each action, and we achieved some extremely valuable results. We realised by using the reflection tool offered by the domains that what was happening in the fledgling Aboriginal reference group was symptomatic of our organisation as a whole. The analysis of the group led us to see that there was little direction apart from the general aims; that there was no-one, ourselves included, who had a clear understanding of where the group could proceed to. This lack of clarity and understanding of the issues led to a marked drop in enthusiasm and attendance. We were able to see that this was taking place across the organisation, and that the Aboriginal group was symptomatic of, and hamstrung by, the wider problems of the organisation.
One of the good practice solutions was to review the entire organisation to clarify our aims and strategies and ensure that they are understood by all members of the organisation. This valuable realisation is evidence of the effectiveness of the continuous improvement process.
The review of the organisation is still occurring, with funds for an independent consultant being sought. Some in-house reviewing has taken place at Board level, with some short-term goals identified (eg. to focus on improving the response to domestic violence by the local police).
However, a comprehensive regional domestic violence plan is needed to replace the outdated plan that exists and, since there is only a half-time worker, external resources and expertise are needed to meet this need.
Performance measures were different for the Aboriginal Reference Group and the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Project.
The indicators for the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Project, and progress in achieving them (at the time of writing), were as follows:
For the Aboriginal Group the indicators will be:
Primarily the outcome so far has been the increase in clarity about where the organisation as a whole is failing, particularly in the lack of understanding and agreement about its aims and strategies. We have created more detailed planned actions and reflections upon those actions.
By using the continuous improvement process, we have created a much clearer mechanism for solving community crime prevention problems, which can be used in all areas and levels of our organisation.
| WHO | WHAT | HOW | DIFFERENCES NOTICED |
| Project officer and placement staff | Engaged with concepts of good practice | Received the Kit, tried to read it - confused - engaged in more discussion to gain clarity Informed the Board about participation in the Project Identified the domains that were most applicable to our project Selected "diversity in community crime prevention strategies" domain only, due to time restraints as this best reflected the core function of two current projects we need to address: an Aboriginal Reference Group and a project to increase participation of people from culturally & linguistically diverse communities |
The continuous improvement process attended to domestic violence issues as well as other crime in community settings Participatory Action Research (collaborative inquiry) was used to develop action strategies to achieve the goals of the two projects outlined above A `good practice support group` was identified as the ADVIP Board Of Management itself |
| Project officers | Problem solving re poor Aboriginal participation in domestic violence group | Planned a first meeting; poor turn out; used good practice domains as reflective tool and Excel reporting system to analyse the problem | A deeper analysis of the problem |
| Project officers | Problem solving | Reflected on current working practices using the good practice domains as criteria to identify weaknesses and incongruencies of current practice with fundamental values of the organisation | Reached agreement about inclusion of target group participants in all aspects of the Project including ideas formation |
| Project officers | Monthly reporting within the continuous improvement process | Used the monthly reporting as hands-on learning tool | Began to think about consequences and unintended consequences before we took action |
| Project officers and members of the target group | Develop a model of good practice | Engaged significant and respected Aboriginal workers and community members in another meeting with the aim of sustaining a level of participation and commitment | Used the value of "inclusiveness" in the diversity domain to create opportunities for target group having choices around participation Increased commitment from Aboriginal participants to the Project |
| Project officers and organisational management | Clarity about organisational purpose | Reflected on learning from Aboriginal working group to identify that the problem was systemic - not just an issue for the working group Engaged the whole organisation's staff to reflect on our purpose and intended outcomes to produce clarity |
Clarity about our purpose and future Realisation that each aspect of our operations is related to the whole Determination to design domains of action using the continuous improvement process, to develop our organisation |
Operation Flinders Foundation takes young offenders and youth at risk on an eight-day trek in the far northern Flinders Ranges of South Australia. The program aims to provide young people with self-esteem and self-confidence, enable them to accept responsibility for their actions and take directions from others, and have them learn to work as a team.
An evaluation in 1995 found that young people who attended an Operation Flinders Foundation exercise had, upon return, offended less and sought further education or employment at a greater rate than a comparable peer group.
We began using the continuous improvement process from the back forwards. As an organisation we were interested in good practice from the beginning but we were already committed to Total Quality Management (TQM). Initially we found difficulty in understanding and applying the framework. The Kit's key performance indicators were the starting points for us: we used them as a description of where we wanted to be and worked backwards to where we currently were, to decide how we would get there.
As we were going through TQM (setting ourselves up), we experienced a steep learning curve in integrating the continuous improvement process, which gave us solid outcomes to focus on. We did more than simply identify our strengths and weaknesses, we also determined the strategic importance of strengths and weaknesses and set priorities on that basis.
We began with the domain about accounting for our use of stakeholder resources. This is a domain that we consider to be strong in our organisation. It is also critically important, because it gives us the ability to modify and create strategies that enhance our contacts with and reporting to stakeholders. We used the domain to create a strategy by using the Kit's tracking system to:
We then moved on to use the domain about attitudinal and behavioural change to build individual capacity to create an action plan on:
We have set up a program to report results on teams to the organisation that has sponsored them. This was monitored to determine results from our sponsor organisations. To date response has been excellent and we are using collaborative inquiry to revamp as required. The program includes face-to-face meetings and formalised reporting.
We detailed an evaluation program for all aspects of what we do. We used the collaborative inquiry model only as a trial measure to see how it shaped up against the TQM model (the two are similar but the collaborative inquiry model requires the use of performance indicators and we see this as positive). We had created performance indicators, and these were already in place. All staff and volunteers have completed a written evaluation of our effectiveness in marketing and public relations. We found that we rated highly in feedback from staff and volunteers, but our Board of Management rated us well below the rating given by these two groups.
We determined that the domain, "diversity in community crime prevention programs", is a particularly strong domain for us and of high importance. We created action plans (sheets) to meet the requirements of this field. We already dealt with culturally diverse people, including Aboriginal peoples, for whom English is not their first language.
We started working on a model to ensure that we met the criteria we had identified, particularly in regard to research on our consumer group needs. Our action sheets identified issues that our consumer groups assessed as not meeting our set criteria. They evaluated the factors that caused us not to reach the standard, and then put in place on the action sheets remedial processes to improve the result. We found that some of our consumer groups, specifically our staff, felt that they were not receiving sufficient information on the administration activities of the Foundation. The organisation's magazine was seen as being too broad. An "Executive Director's Newsletter" is now distributed every two months to staff and volunteers, and covers technical issues and operational news important for them to know.
Our approach was to integrate Total Quality Management with the good practice model. We learned how to do this by actually doing it - in true action research style. Initially we selected the domains that suited us, adopting those we thought fitted, but the further we went, the more we adopted. While we changed terminology (eg. "gatekeepers" became "the network" or "persons of influence"), it would be fair to say that we used all the domains. We found them excellent for amending ineffective strategies or actions: they enabled us to see clearly on paper what did not work, and why.
In particular, we used the tracking process for working through the issues that the review raised. This enabled us to understand the issues and discover solutions to them through our actual practice. It was a resource-efficient and effective way of working, which had the additional benefit of raising our awareness of what we are doing. We modified the tracking system by adding a timeframe and identifying who was responsible.
We found it important to link our project clearly to the good practice process and use the process tracking system until the completion of the project. We also found it essential to identify the member or group responsible for the solution and set timeframes. Return of paperwork was an issue, particularly the evaluation questionnaires, which agencies are responsible for having the program participants complete either before or after the program. We now identify an officer at each organisation and speak with him/her, setting timeframes for the return of the questionnaires. I then visit the agency some six weeks after the program with a list of paperwork not received and either collect it then or determine what the problems are that prevent completion.
A survey of our stakeholders and, in particular, our funding bodies found that they wanted to contribute to the future of the Foundation, but felt that they were not given enough information to enable them to make long-term commitments. We included them in our annual planning process and review of our business plan. We discovered that their criteria, while differing in detail, all included similar accountability issues that needed to be addressed. We now identify these issues and include them in applications for on-going funding, and we find that a number of our funding bodies are now offering to fund us for a number of years instead of on an annual basis, giving us some security and the ability to plan ahead.
As discussed earlier, we have a detailed evaluation program for all we do, with evaluation instruments that are used by all personnel (including the young people participating in the program). For example, at the end of their field experience, everyone who participates in the program completes a written evaluation and attends a debrief session. The written evaluations are compiled, results rated, and then compared to earlier results. These written debriefs are linked to key performance indicators established by the Field Operations Committee, a sub-committee to our Board of Management.
We have used these written evaluations as a management tool by making them performance indicators in themselves. In particular, we use the data they provide to involve all of our stakeholders in our decision-making process. This has given stakeholders the sense that they are helping to create the programs, and that they have something to contribute.
Some of our funding bodies require accountability for grants. As part of our marketing we now ensure that we include the information on the accountability to the funding body. We are conducting an internal evaluation of this to see the effects.
We learned that the two systems - total quality management and good practice - are not mutually exclusive but interact readily. The TQM model enables systems and continual improvement process to be put in place, while the good practice model focuses attention on the nine domains within each aspect of TQM. What we have learned and are still learning is that the continuous improvement process considerably enhances the TQM model. The domains have proved an efficient way for checking whether we are on a good practice line, and showing us what we are doing and, in particular, what we are not doing.
The compatibility of the two systems is due to the fact that they have completely different areas of focus. The continuous improvement process, unlike TQM, is a system to be adapted to a particular enterprise. This difference is of particular value to us because it broadens the base of what we are doing. The TQM model focuses strongly on what you do and how you do it. The good practice model gives a set of criteria and indicators which, when implemented, give precise information about what you are doing, and how, within the terms of good practice in crime prevention. Both systems incorporate continual improvement as a way of managing change through learning. We see the good practice tracking system as important in achieving continuous improvement, as the activity of tracking strategy development through each domain focuses one on the performance indicators.
We are working to identify how we can provide "hard evidence" of the effectiveness of the program. The data are available, but the sourcing and interpretation of results has until now been beyond our resources. We are in the process of creating new tools to evaluate the effectiveness of what we do (circuit breaking). We have created follow up evaluations with the aid of a number of partners (as diverse as CSIRO and Education) and set up a control group so that we can quantify and enhance what we do.
Using the framework, however, has resulted in dramatic change. We have changed our culture in a very short period of time. For an organisation that was very efficient in our field program but weak in other areas, the benefits have been enormous:
Our good practice model is based on integration of TQM and the national research project model. The major integration is at a formal level, in key performance indicators and the domains of good practice. Informally, we have involved all our stakeholders in what we do, and they therefore have a sense of ownership in the changes and processes. Our model is based on involvement, continual improvement processes, outcomes and striving for excellence. Our next step is to benchmark ourselves against other organisations.
The major outcome for us has been a change in the way we do things, which has arisen from a widening of our thought processes to encompass broader horizons. The increased involvement of all our personnel has also resulted in improvements simply through the greater range and diversity of input it has generated. Our culture continues to change as we learn and adapt. We are nowhere near a final position and think that we may never be because we are continually learning and adapting, but we now have tools to accommodate this.
| WHO | WHAT | HOW | DIFFERENCES NOTICED |
| Foundation Director and project officer | Engaged with good practice concepts | Received Kit, read and discussed together |
Could see that the domains fitted our operation and that the system was compatible with TQM |
| Project officer | Developed a strategy for integrating TQM with good practice model | Identified performance indicators as being our desired outcome Worked backwards to where we currently were in each domain Identified strengths and weakness and strategic value of such Created action plans across all areas |
A system of review that is accessible and efficient A system that easily adapts to our program A strategy that allows us to start at the practical level and work into conceptual and strategic thinking |
| Project officer | Created new systems across all areas | Used evaluation outcomes to create performance indicators for new systems Included all stakeholders in the process and the outcome Designed action sheets for each area identifying key values, timelines, outcomes and who was responsible Used tracking system to understand issues and create grounded responses Established review processes across all areas Created operational and strategic measurement tools in all areas |
Increased stakeholder commitment to the Foundation Improved reporting systems to funding body Increased range of input to develop the program Increased understanding of issues Increased range of possible solutions Increased professional awareness of practice Changed ways of thinking and doing Changed culture, the result of addressing our weaknesses |
| Project officer and Director | Completed integration of good practice and TQM | Achieved this by carrying out the above activities and reviewing the congruency between the two systems | A better TQM Effective continuous improvement |
The North-West Centre Against Sexual Assault (NWCASA) is a community-based organisation located in Burnie, Tasmania, and covering a large region of the northwest corner of Tasmania. The region is characterised by its rural, mining industries and its isolated geography. Its population is scattered, made up of people "born here", people born overseas, and workers (both established and itinerant) from other parts of the State. NWCASA services this relatively large area by providing counselling, advocacy, support and education to those who have experienced or are concerned about sexual assault and violence. We also offer community education and training programs to professional and non-professional individuals, groups and organisations, in the area of sexual assault and violence.
Big hART is also a community-based organisation which carries a national profile, working with predominantly marginalised and "at risk" young people (and their communities) in rural Australia. Some of the issues affecting young people that Big hART addresses involve employment, juvenile justice, victims and perpetrators of violence, single young parents, and sexual assault. Two project workers from interstate who established themselves in this unique (often described as isolated and rugged) north-west Tasmanian community manage the organisation. The project was funded to educate the community about violence, particularly (but not only) sexual violence. The workers both have backgrounds in community arts: one is a film-maker, the other has worked with marginalised urban young people.
The idea of the partnership between the NWCASA and Big hART stemmed from the lack of referrals. The referral numbers for the West Coast were not consistent with referrals from other communities. In an informal discussion with one of the Big hART project officers, I pointed this out and we discussed how these unacknowledged and unaddressed issues of sexual violence and assault could be dealt with.
The main goal of the partnership is to motivate communities and their young people to accept social responsibility for issues of sexual violence and assault, and collaboratively to develop strategies that can address the issues and also become a legacy for the community.
My involvement at the outset was to utilise a collaborative consultation model, which sought to encourage and strongly invite participation and support from the community in order to begin looking into these issues. We looked at various sectors of the community including industry, business, tourism, local government, existing community services organisations and community groups such as Rotary. We developed a consistent and regular feedback mechanism through meetings, reports, informal coffee sessions, and group discussions involving the young people.
My continuing involvement with Big hART entailed working with them to develop a product, in conjunction with the young people, that would bring to light or "lift the lid" on the issues of sexual violence and crime that had an impact on their lives and their communities. I did this by providing a mentorship, support and educative role with the workers, in order for them to cope better with issues arising from working with young people who were affected by issues of sexual violence and crime. This enhancement of workers' coping skills would, in turn, enhance the quality of the project's outcome.
At the outset, the performance piece that marks the arts component of BIG hART had not been decided. This and the content for the project were drawn from the information from individual and community experience of life on the West Coast. Great care was taken and respect shown to ensure the gathered data was reflective of that experience. The young people's experiences of violence became the script for the films and these same young people undertook the film-making process under guidance from the project worker. The performance outcomes were a play, which toured hotel venues throughout the region, and ten short films with a theme built around portraiture. The active learning came through participation and sharing of information as the performance pieces were put before an audience.
To engage in good practice, I initially re-structured the arts project activities within the framework's generic domains to understand the processes being proposed. By doing this, I was able to see what stood out as priority domains and from that realisation I was able to discuss the process with BIG hART stakeholders.
I then examined the potential strengths and weaknesses within each individual domain to determine what was working closest to the principle of each and where there were unintended consequences. It seemed to make sense to examine the unintended consequences, as much as what was working well, in order to identify good practice. It seemed imperative to check and recheck what I learned or thought against the ideas formulated by the project designers, the learning by project workers and finally against the BIG hART model.
Rather than alter the domains, in the first instance, I used them to examine and assess our project's development and the learning outcomes. The review that I carried out resulted in the following conclusions:
I determined that the good practice domains that warranted closer attention appeared to be those linked specifically to the project workers and their professional supervision and support, rather than the details of the community crime prevention strategy itself - though these two levels of operation were inextricably linked. As a consequence, we examined the domains that related to "diversity in community crime prevention interventions", and "risk management". In reference to the BIG hART project, in order to meet the action principles, the workers encountered unintended consequences of personal and professional stress in order to realise the intended consequences. The implementation of a supervision plan became an imperative.
We generated strategic questions to guide our supervision plan design:
Following through the flow chart of the draft information Kit helped formulate an incorporated view of workers as participants, which led to the formation of a new domain, using the continuous improvement process as a blueprint. The new domain is as follows.
Title: Creating professional support for the intended and unintended consequences of professional roles in working within community crime prevention projects. Action principle: Including quality supervision for professionals engaged in delivering community crime prevention responses in communities in all planning, resourcing, implementing and evaluation decisions. Quality checks:
Performance indicators:
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We used the quality checks in the new domain to structure fortnightly supervision sessions, a process which offered a solution to the unintended consequence of elevating stress levels for workers.
The performance indicator requiring evidence of "culturally inclusive participation" was met through regular meetings, workshops and consultation with, respectively, the Advisory Group, young people and community agencies.
Living in the community provided a further source of community history. As discussed above, the personal and community histories of the young people became the scripts for the ten short films produced by the Project. In providing young people's experiences of justice and change within the setting of the issue, the workers created safe and trusting environments to "unveil the secrecy of violence". Due to the sensitivity of the issue and the personal narratives of violence, workers heard disclosures and were constrained by their position descriptions in activating appropriate interventions. The community crime prevention program was designed to draw on experiences, but the limitations of appropriate counselling and support services together with the issue of confidentiality resulted in project workers feeling overwhelmed. Not all disclosures occurred in a working group context where peer supports would have assisted in reducing the sense of isolation identified by individual participants. The young people in the "unveiling secrecy" process educated the community. This was the essence of the project.
The supervision plan involved two levels of intervention. The first concerned practice issues and included:
Group work was also discussed and built on the experiences the workers had of the community and the working group of young people. The workers reflected on group dynamics such as leadership, and devised group program content to raise shared issues of concern.
The second dimension to supervision was challenging "bleed through" or transference issues. Workers acknowledged that the "unveiling of secrecy" and the role of violence in Australian society challenged their own belief and value systems. The overall process was one of professional development and personal growth.
The Project resulted in a range of gains:
There are no losses associated with this form of good practice. It actually opens up more learning and enhances service development.
| WHO | WHAT | HOW | DIFFERENCES NOTICED |
| Project officer | Engage with good practice concepts | Read Kit, and used domains to review arts project to understand concepts and tools Discussed good practice process with project's funding partners |
Realised priority areas for good practice approach |
| Project officer | Identify good practice strategy | Used framework to identify strengths and weaknesses and unintended consequences of community crime prevention project and measure against project sponsor's model |
Identified staff stress levels increasing as a result of project data about sexual assault and violence Determined that staff support strategy was needed |
| Project officer | Assess learning from the community crime prevention project | Generated a description of the host organisation in reference to the good practice domains, as activated in the community crime prevention project |
Identified which domains to use to design good practice strategy Confirmed decision about staff support and supervision |
| Project officer and staff | Design of supervision plan | Worked as a group to generate strategic questions to gather data, and designed a new domain of action following the continuous improvement process with which to guide our supervision plan | Used a generic template to create a good practice strategy, which would engender better practice in crime prevention |
| Project officer and staff, Advisory Group, young people and community agencies | Supervision sessions | Used good practice quality checks and performance indicators to monitor stress levels and carry out staff support processes Ran regular meetings, workshops and consultations to monitor community crime prevention project's ability to maintain culturally inclusive participation |
Two levels of supervision created:
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The participants generated benchmark statements from their case studies and process maps. These statements are carefully structured along the lines of Spendolini's work (1992), which identifies the following elements (amongst others26) as being necessary for a benchmark statement:
The statements have been grouped into generic domains, drawn from the definition of community crime prevention that the participants created. These domains are:
The statements are created from reported action as documented and critiqued in the research project. They are substantiated by the case studies in this Report, which only include data that refers to action strategies that have been actually implemented and evaluated in a community crime prevention initiative. In other words, the case studies and the following statements are not made up of rhetorical concepts or theories borrowed from imported methods. These benchmarks are demonstrably evident within the socio-economic realities of community crime prevention across jurisdictions as they are currently operating. They are within the professional range of practitioners and they are demonstrably effective in preventing crime.
Each statement reflects a defined success factor (in bold) that the participants used to create the developmental focus for good practice in a specific domain of community crime prevention. The measurement of success is in each key outcome area.
The benchmarks provide models for addressing constraints and identifying success. They are not the ultimate description of the current extent of innovation, nor are they necessarily applicable to all forms of crime prevention. They are Australian benchmarks, and are points of departure for others (inspiration), not arrival (replication).
The national research Project has 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 and fund the next stage of development in good practice. This may include developing and funding an apolitical, cross-jurisdictional partnership; upgrading and promoting the Action Kit; developing mentoring networks; and giving a clear indication of the value of good practice at the funding and policy-making levels.
As a relatively new concept in crime prevention, good practice and continuous improvement process may be met with suspicion and confusion. Time and resources are required to create a grounded good practice strategy with a framework that builds practical inter-jurisdictional collaboration. Such a framework can facilitate the development of a national crime prevention community that values learning, builds partnerships, gains operational efficiencies and works with a shared vision. A national community of this nature will deliver effective (and adaptable) community crime prevention outcomes with Australian local communities.
The national research Project has demonstrated that continuous improvement process can be implemented within individual community crime prevention initiatives with beneficial results - but this is only a starting point for developing good practice across community crime prevention. The next steps are to consider how continuous improvement can be maintained amongst Project participants, and how the concept of good practice can be extended beyond the limitations of the Project.
Project participants have used the tools and systems developed by the Project to produce benchmarks and propose validated concepts of good practice in community crime prevention. Endorsement of these outcomes by the National Anti-Crime Strategy is the necessary next step for further development. Such endorsement will only prepare the ground for future development. What direction could this development take? What opportunities could be generated? Who should carry it?
This chapter sets out the participants' response to these questions, and the key ideas that emerged in this response as a possible basis for the next stage of development.
The participants proposed that a national association devoted to establishing good practice in community crime prevention in Australia be developed.
The association would be built from invited membership as nominated by Senior Officers and through peer referral. It would aim to build a critical mass of participating initiatives (a critical mass for collaborative action learning is about ten per cent of a total organisation or sector). Once this is achieved, its role would change from development to maintenance.
The association would facilitate change by promoting an ethic of equitable and open relationships between all participants across hierarchies and jurisdictions.
Its key roles would be to establish good practice and continuous improvement processes in community crime prevention, and make them accessible. It would:
The first task for the association would be an audit of existing services and agencies, to ascertain their investment in community crime prevention outcomes. The audit would identify gaps, promote whole-of-government approaches and build resources for holistic responses to crime and the problems associated with crime.
Having identified the potential range of stakeholders, the association would develop mentoring networks, which would be used for intensive marketing of the Action Kit and the range of the association's activities. Participants believe that the Kit should be broadly marketed using industry publications and supported by a 1800 number; and it should be accompanied by information on the range of good practice services available, including the good practice mentoring network and professional development training.
Funded, ongoing professional development and training would be assessed for compatibility with the range of roles and goals for community crime prevention professionals. Accreditation in good practice would be available to a variety of participants including:
Practitioners would develop training programs and deliver them to peers, their community stakeholders and policymakers, moving from top-down to bottom-up learning at local, State/Territory and national levels. The training process would enable a fundamental "mind-shift", to establish continuous improvement process and action research as valid ways of generating good practice in crime prevention.
The training and use of the Action Kit would be facilitated through a coordinated network for peer mentoring, built through referral systems. Professional mentors would take good practice into the field, facilitate its development in specific project areas, and maintain the network. They would support the use of the Kit as a working document through phone consultation and feedback. The application and ownership of good practice by individual practitioners would be a measure of the Kit's success. The mentors would link developments across networks and across jurisdictions to enable long-term approaches to be included in short-term applications.
Mentoring networks would become a State/Territory and Federal responsibility. They would feed into field work and would also become part of the training initiatives ("train the trainer").
The national professional association would further the development of the good practice tools and benchmarks by operating a simple and accessible web site. Eventually, it could walk people through the process of developing good practice, at their own pace and in their own environment, by developing interactive tools which would be available with the Kit.
The association would overcome "turf protection" and foster true collaboration by disseminating information about good practice and developing good practice support structures within government departments. Crime prevention workers in departments beyond Police and Attorney-General's would be supported to provide mentoring networks within their own offices to promote and market the Kit actively in community and business settings. They would be requested to make good practice generally available to community services departments and agencies, including Police and other associated departments such as Juvenile Justice and Sport and Recreation.
The association would host events to facilitate inter-agency collaboration across jurisdictions and would disseminate information through newsletters, its web site and other media. It would be accountable to the field through an affordable annual report or State/Territory forums.
The beginnings of this networking and professional development structure already exist in South Australia's project officer training program within the Crime Prevention Unit (SA CPU). This program could be extended to participants not funded by the SA CPU, and to include the concepts of good practice developed by the Project.
Development of good practice in crime prevention will require a high level of commitment at the policy level in crime bodies and government. Policy makers would use the national association as a resource for designing and setting funding criteria, and the value of such criteria would be enhanced if the policy makers were involved in negotiating how the criteria would be implemented within specific initiatives. This would mean policy makers would develop effective criteria that linked the political value with community crime prevention processes while maintaining intellectual rigour and vigour in the field. The national association would foster interdependence between levels of government and the jurisdictional fields of practice.
On a broader scale, the participants suggested that community crime prevention needs to encourage non-adversarial systems. They wanted to see more mediative approaches across the criminal justice system.
They identified a number of areas where they believed current practices reduce the community's capacity to meet its responsibilities for crime and the prevention of problems associated with offending. One area of concern was the trend towards the use of private security firms to protect community safety. They saw these firms as fuelling media-led fear as a strategy to increase their financial returns.
They also wanted to see community crime prevention take the lead in working towards creating communities that understand and value civility. The concept of civility was perceived as critical to improving quality of life at community levels and achieving sustainable community security.
The following sections of this chapter draw from the participants' vision for the future of good practice in crime prevention.
Clearly some actions need to be taken if good practice, as developed by this Project, is to be made available to all community crime prevention initiatives.
The participants were of the view that the Kit should not go into the field "cold", without human resource and technical support. Instead of achieving this support through a professional association (which, while desirable, would require considerable resourcing at this early stage), it may be possible to achieve similar outcomes through a partnership established for the purpose between NACS and NCP. The partnership would be the basis for:
The draft version of the Action Kit was designed as a research tool, based on principles and practices drawn from the field of crime prevention. It was developed to help practitioners change their processes of decision-making and operations to produce better outcomes as they implemented continuous improvement process in their own strategies during the Project's Action Stage. It thus includes an early version of the concept of good practice, and tools to support continuous improvement processes.
The participants' use of the Kit has generated a number of recommendations to develop it from a research tool into a practical manual for continuous improvement process and good practice.
Suggested changes to the Kit include:
A one-off, three-day training program for practitioners and policy makers together could be designed for implementation through a partnership between SA CPU and National Crime Prevention.
The training program would:
The training could be offered within jurisdictions, within disciplines or within crime problem categories.
A second training program, following the first, could be made available to participants supported by their management to work as peer trainers. It would use the issues raised in the good practice training sessions as a focus for "train the trainer" information. This program would enable community crime prevention practitioners and policy makers to design their own training programs suitable for peers, other colleagues and stakeholders and communities. It would use a case study/scenario-based process to introduce participants to:
The Project participants recommended that training of this nature should be accredited to increase management committee recognition of the value of professional development to management committee interests.
Training would be followed by each trainee establishing a pilot project within their strategy to begin changing practice and infrastructure towards good practice. This course of action is congruent with action learning principles.
Reporting processes at this stage would include:
Trainees could access a web site to place their reports for their network. This may need to be facilitated by a coordinator to identify shared issues and problem-solve across networks. Issues could also be identified in an electronic chat room facility, which requires little or no specialised coordination. If an issue continued to be unresolved:
None of these approaches requires specialist coordination and they ensure that only those issues are addressed that are critical and of concern to many. If initiatives cannot release their workers to develop and deliver training in an unfunded capacity, training could be made a commercial enterprise.
The Project participants thought that a CD-ROM and interactive video would also assist with developing good practice, particularly in sharing ideas and concepts of good practice with a wider community and professional audience. The range of options and cost for this form of technical support and its market requires further investigation.
| It would be very useful to have computerised information - a web site would be great. Some source we can go to. We are small, limited, we do many things other than community crime prevention - a source that can lead on to other things would be great. This is a very worthwhile Project. It is good to focus on what best practice means - it is a hackneyed term but all relevant sectors need to understand what it means. |
Keith Simpson, Interview Survey 12.97 |
Professional mentoring, while an attractive idea, is unlikely to become a reality unless issues of resources and responsibility are addressed. A decision on this is related to an overall decision that NACS and NCP need to make regarding the use of good practice generally. This issue is addressed later in this chapter (Implications for community crime prevention stakeholders).
Mentoring could be on a one-on-one basis, or one mentor could work with a small group who are concurrently developing good practice in different locations. The mentor's role would last for a specific period of time, be scheduled and budgeted with specific and regular obligations, and there would be defined criteria for both mentor and mentored to maintain the standard and ensure comprehensive evaluation.
Peer mentoring is a possibility within the constraints of time and the cost of long-distance communications. Mentoring depends on one person who has more experience being able to problem-solve with one who has less. This capacity could be developed within the peer-mentoring network as a natural consequence of the training program. The process would be enhanced if mentoring were to be formally included in the practitioners' job descriptions, and remunerated within community crime prevention budgets.
Alternatively, community crime prevention practitioners who have completed work in an initiative could be co-opted into this role and funded at State/Territory level.
The greatest benefits would be achieved if mentoring were built into the policy maker's role (something, in practice, that already happens to an extent). The policy officer role would need to be reshaped to include facilitation, mentoring and co-learning activities. Their relationship with practitioners would be on an equitable and transparent basis. This would enable policy makers to be highly informed by practitioner experience and for policy and practice to be congruent with each other. It would close the perceived gap between policy-maker and practitioner while fostering political understanding of community crime prevention effectiveness and community experience.
Any of these options would be best served by a third training program for mentoring skills, protocols and evaluation.
The options for mentoring of professional crime prevention workers are:
| [Keep] the mentoring role in future Projects. Mentorship is about personal and professional development and also about supporting and meeting project needs. |
Vicki Russell, North West Centre Against Sexual Assault, Evaluation Report |
Good practice requires an initial and sharp increase in workload that diverts practitioners away from their core business for a short period of time. This diversion is reduced as the continuous improvement process becomes increasingly a part of core business, replacing other functions such as meetings, reporting and direct intervention. There are two approaches to the issue of funding criteria:
To address the first issue, it is noted that implementing good practice and maintaining continuous improvement requires additional time.
In the Project it was found that additional time was needed to:
Project participants suggested about 80 hours of additional work were required over the six-month Action Stage. This time would be reduced to some extent (say by ten hours) with the Kit being re-worked for easier access. This amounts to an additional (and approximate) $2,000 per annum. To enable good practice to be included in funding criteria, then:
As well, the criteria that funding bodies use to manage their applications could include good practice requirements. For example, the performance indicators could be used to inform practitioners on how they should be managing their strategies. Policy makers could then be confident that the criteria could link grounded practice to policy without any inconsistency.
It is not known to what extent such a development would require changes to policy maker practice. To determine this, research should be carried out to:
| How [can we enable] funding bodies to understand that the learning and the change experience of the participants is valuable? The best practice issue is the ability to reflect community need and experience. How do you account and measure for differences that fall outside of funding criteria? What is the impact of continuous improvement process if it is not taken up on a policy level across the board? … If you start talking about community development together with community crime prevention then there has to be adjustments in order for this relationship to be a best practice one. |
Vicki Russell, North West Centre Against Sexual Assault, Evaluation Report |
The quality and effectiveness of collaborative partnerships is a critical element of community crime prevention. They are essential to enable holistic responses to crime problems, bringing a range of human, financial and material resources into crime prevention. They broaden the potential impact of a strategy.
Partnerships operate on different levels and in different sectors. They link agencies, jurisdictions, hierarchies, locations, disciplines, investment and responsibilities. Making them work, however, is acknowledged by policy makers and practitioners alike to be fraught with difficulty. Competing intentions, competition for resources, incompatible values, inaccessible language and poor experiences all contribute to incompatible and therefore inoperable partnerships.
The continuous improvement process developed by the Project proved itself many times over as having the ability to overcome the problems in developing valuable partnerships. This ability rests in the inclusion of and focus on:
The generic framework and definitions provided helpful devices to achieve better understanding and commitment to community crime prevention within collaborative partnerships. Using this form of good practice, supported by the structures for continuous improvement process that are included in this Report, partnerships will be able to work through the liabilities that threaten their foundations. This will require that:
| The Family and Youth Services Senior Social worker is starting a major project in an Aboriginal Community, looking at utilising action research and the best practice domains to develop the Project with the community. Last feedback it was moving along very slowly but purposefully and starting to see real movement forward with the community, especially in their level of ownership of the Project. I would certainly describe this as a change towards best practice. |
Debbie Devlin, Bush Law, Evaluation Report |
The Project participants' view is that the prevalence and consequences of adversarial justice continually undermine their work. They see this response to crime as reducing social capital and the capacity for communities to take responsibility for crime problems and prevention; and they see political vulnerability to the popular media and American concepts of community crime prevention as influences that are dangerous to Australian security.
The concept of good practice that this Project developed offers a number of avenues of approach that address this issue, through:
If NACS endorses the good practice proposed by this Project and tested by the participants, the ground will be prepared for some significant changes in orientation between community crime prevention agencies and the public. The participants' vision indicated the need for the following changes:
The good practice and continuous improvement process that the Project participants developed have the potential to create resilient and secure communities.
| There should be one agency responsible for providing a centre point for the collection and dissemination of a comprehensive range of local, national and international material relating to crime prevention. Perhaps this function could be conducted by the private sector or tertiary institutions for example. |
Bob Gee, Queensland Police Service, Interview Survey, 12.97 |
The Project resulted in cultural change within community crime prevention initiatives, project officer practice and, to some extent, within the Project Management Group's understanding. The change process could be summarised as follows:
The process of this cultural change could be described as:
Cultural change of this order can take place through incremental, "natural" dynamics, or it can be strategically designed.
The incremental option would involve the smallest resource output in the direct sense. The updated Kit could be marketed and disseminated to practitioners. There would be no training, no networking and no authorisation for its use from funding bodies. It would still generate improved outcomes for those initiatives that were prepared to put the time and effort into working it into their operations, and it would build good practice into partnerships at the grass roots level. This approach would not, however, overcome the described gap between practice and policy. The extent to which practitioners could take on good practice would therefore be limited to individual, voluntary commitment, the extent of the problems initiatives were addressing, and the willingness of their management committees to include good practice and continuous improvement in their job descriptions. Its development would take place at a grounded practice level and the extent of its success would depend on word of mouth and evidence of outcomes. Its outcomes would also have no direct channel to policy. If this process were adopted:
Alternatively, NACS and NCP could decide on a leadership strategy that would enable coordinated development and strategic support for this process at a policy level. The Project found that when management committees endorse good practice, all levels of operations became significantly more effective. This same strategy when applied on a national level would bring policy makers and practitioners into partnerships to develop more effective criteria, strategies and mechanisms. This would involve the NACS and NCP partnership in:
The set of action principles developed by the Project participants have already been presented, in Chapter 4. The principles underpin the domains for good practice in community crime prevention with regard to the participants' local initiatives. They may also provide a basis for inter-jurisdictional communication between practitioners and policy makers to facilitate the development of good practice at a national level.
Each principle is supported by actions to promote communication and partnership development of this kind, and this section presents those action. As they have not been reviewed, they remain propositional only.
The introduction of a new idea will inevitably destabilise the existing system to some extent. The proposed concept of good practice has been developed directly from current Australian practice specifically to minimise the extent of such destabilisation at a practitioner level, and to maximise the potential for sustainability. Nevertheless, simply identifying that an Australian definition exists will create some response and some destabilisation, and this can produce valuable outcomes for a range of stakeholders.
Those with most to gain from the Project are community crime prevention practitioners, for whom this Project has answered many questions. Funding bodies and community participants, however, will also notice positive differences in the way crime is perceived and addressed.
Many needs that community crime prevention practitioners have identified in the Project are addressed in developing and applying good practice as proposed by the Project. A survey of the external observers at the conclusion of the fourth stage of research identified the following benefits for practitioners: