Developing an alternative formulation of SCP principles – the Ds (11 and counting)

BackgroundThe 25 Techniques of Situational Crime Prevention remain one of the bedrocks of research in Crime Science and play a key role in managing knowledge of research and practice. But they are not the only way of organising, transferring and applying this knowledge.DiscussionTaking the 25 Techniques and their theoretical underpinnings as our starting point, this paper presents the (currently) 11 Ds, a set of intervention principles which focus specifically on how the interventions are intended to influence the offender in the proximal crime situation. The context of this work was a project to help security managers detect and control attempts to undertake 'hostile reconnaissance' of public places by those planning to commit crimes or acts of terrorism. We discuss why we judged 25 Techniques as a model for emulation in general terms but unsuitable in detail for the present purpose. We also describe the process of developing the principles, which involved both reflection, and capture of new knowledge from theory and practice, including the security domain. The distinctive contribution of professional design to this process is noted. We then present the Ds themselves and show how, as generic principles, they relate to practical methods of prevention; how they can be further organised to aid their learning and their use; how they relate to other formulations such as the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity; and how they might apply, with expansion perhaps, to the wider field of SCP.SummaryWe discuss the process and the wider benefits of developing alternative – but rigorously linked – perspectives on the same theories and phenomena both for transferring existing research knowledge to practice and for sparking leading-edge theory and research.