LPRC - SPECIAL RE-RELEASE: CrimeScience Episode 44 – Situational Crime Prevention ft. Dr. Ron Clarke Part 2

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

In this second episode with Dr. Ron Clarke, renowned criminologist and recipient of the Stockholm Prize of Criminology,  we will continue our conversation on opportunity reduction techniques, the scope of opportunity crime, the duty of criminologists, the security hypothesis, and much more.

Hi everyone, welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners as well as other professionals. Co-host Dr. Reed Hayes of the Loss Prevention Research Council and Tom Meehan of ControlTech discuss a wide range of topics with industry experts, thought leaders, solution providers, and many more. Today's episode is part two of our discussion with Dr. Ron Clark, renowned criminologist. We will continue our conversation on opportunity reduction technique, duty of criminologists, the scope of opportunity crime, domestic and international differences in opportunity factors, the

security hypothesis, and the rational choice perspective. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Be a leader in loss prevention by implementing integrated solutions that enhance safety, reduce shrink, and help to improve merchandising, operations, and customer service. Bosch integrated security and communication solutions span zones 1 through 4 in the LPRC zones of influence while enriching the customer experience and delivering valuable data to help increase retail profitability. Learn more by visiting Bosch online at BoschSecurity.com.

You may be aware, I mean, what we're doing is we make full use of the 24 techniques, but the big five, if you will, you know, effort and risk and reward and excuses. We're sort of using those in everyday use, you know, the term, those are modes of action, like in how a medication might work, of course. But we're spending particularly a lot of time trying to understand and articulate the mechanisms of action of a specific technique, as you probably know, and we're trying to get an idea of using crime scripting, which you have been involved in,

and how do we break these down into very usable steps and stages and aiming points. So there's a lot of good work from what you've done that's I think now coming out. And we, you know, our team, it's unfortunate. We get two to four journal articles a year. We don't live in journal world though. We live in the real world. So we're, you know, we're working on about journal articles a year. We don't live in journal world though. We live in the real world.

So we're working on about 40 projects a year. But rest assured, Ron, all your thoughts and hard work is really, I think, paying dividends in a lot of ways. But I know those that come after, both of us will do a good thing. Yeah, I believe so. I mean, I think in one of your prep things for this session, you asked, why don't more criminologists do this kind of work. It's a puzzle to me frankly why they... I mean many criminologists just don't seem to think they have a... I call it a duty to

deal with the problem. I think many, many criminologists don't believe that their role is to actually reduce crime. I think that that is their role. I don't think that if the general public were aware that most criminologists are not interested in reducing crime, I think they would be rather amazed so much money and training and university courses were devoted to the subject. You know, we're not, I don't think we're here just to, I don't think our job is just to speculate about crime and think about it. I think our main job is to deal with it. Or at least not ourselves directly,

but to find ways of dealing with it and to help people reduce the problems that crime causes. I think that's what criminologists should be doing. But that's heresy to most of them or to many of them. They just don't agree with that. So I part company with most criminologists really just for that simple reason. Well I can, where we sit, we can almost look across campus and see an incredible array

of brand new research but also clinical places for UF Health, University of Florida. Our university this year will probably accomplish over $950 million in sponsored research, but overwhelmingly those funds and that research is, some is pre-clinical, but most is clinical, whether we're talking about engineering or business or medicine and other disciplines, to use good theory and frameworks and rigorous methods, but at the end of the day, deliver value. And in our case, like you're saying, we think our obligation, our first obligation, is reduce victimization to protect or safeguard vulnerable people and places. And so I appreciate all this preclinical and secondary data research that's out there.

A lot of good comes out of it, but you feel like the emergency room docs, if there was only five or six of them and you got another 50,000 physicians over there working on cellular level research, people are hurting and dying over here. We need some help. So that's kind of where we fall out. And the thing, of course, is that many people think that these types of approaches we're

advocating are really only for sort of trivial crimes like shoplifting. Well I don't agree with that. We know that opportunity, for example, matters a great deal in homicide. The simplest example of that is the difference in the homicide rates between England and America. And the fact that America has much higher, probably still about five or six times the homicide rate of England is due to one thing, the possession of guns. That's an opportunity factor. In Britain it's extremely hard to get hold of a gun, especially a handgun. And it's handguns that are the main culprit in homicides in this country.

So opportunity matters for a whole range of very serious crimes. I mean, I've done quite a lot of work, for example, on aircraft hijacking. hijacking and it's clear there that opportunity played a very big part in the great rise in aircraft hijacking that took place in the 70s. Then the introduction of baggage and passenger screening sort of began to wipe it out. Then, you know, the 9-11 hijackers found ways around these safeguards that were introduced and managed to take over those four airplanes. But new measures introduced since then have pretty much wiped out the opportunities that existed at the time of 9-11. And we haven't had any hijackings, oh well, very few very oh well, very few very unrelatively unimportant events compared with the 9-11. That was simply due to opportunity reduction. So, you know, opportunity matters for every every form of crime and the sooner that we acknowledge that

and get on with doing something about reducing the opportunities, the better it will be. Yes, for mankind. And I, as you know, we couldn't agree more here and we're working with 68 major retail companies across the globe at this point. And theft and fraud and violence are paramount for

them and it could be something as simple as shoplifting but the shoplifting as you know that we deal with sometimes is highly organized and they fill warehouses full of items some of the merchandise is converted all of its converted cash some even has been been used to fund some terrorist activities. But we're also dealing quite a bit with intimidation and fear in parking lots. The retailers are in a pitched life or death battle with convenient ordering merchandise by your phone

or whatever device. So if that customer, she doesn't feel comfortable getting out of her vehicle or mass transit and making her way through your parking lot, they've got a real problem. If they don't feel safe because somebody has overdosed in your restroom, or we can think of many, many other scenarios.

So the fear of crime, we've got armed robbery, we've got burglaries, we've got active shooters. And we're working with a couple retailers on active shooting and what can we done in the opportunity area because that's the only area they've really got work on. Well I think there's a very, if for pushing this subject further in regard to the international crime drop that has occurred in most westernized countries. You know, we've got much less crime, street crime.

I'm not talking about cyber crime, just the regular crime that we've all been bothered about. We've got much less of that now than we used to have. And that is true in many other countries that crime has dropped. Now, I believe strongly that that is due to opportunity reduction. I don't, the explanations put forward for the dropping crime in America are very parochial and they mostly focus on propensity and motivation. But those explanations that are put forward for American crime, the drop in America, don't hold for other countries. But many other countries have had similar crime drops.

Yes, they have. And I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Graham Farrell and Jan van Dijk and others, who are arguing that the reason for the international crime drop is a massive increase in security. It's called the security hypothesis. Have you been reading their work? Yes, I have, Ron. And I think, you know, one thing I found that was interesting too is the how widespread that is, Ron. It's not isolated to typically from what I've read to wealthier or places with more resources, but rather even into less economically advantaged places and really across the globe.

Yes, it isn't confined just to wealthy people. What's happened is that many businesses and organizations have begun to realize that they can actually do something about reducing the victimizations that they or their clients or their customers suffer. And they realize that nobody else is going to help them do this. It requires too much specific knowledge and too much specific type interventions, which only they can do to protect themselves and that has led to a very over the last 20 years, let's say, in all kinds of spheres of life has led to an enormous reduction in ordinary opportunities to commit

crime. And that has benefited this country and many others that are like this country. Sadly, those lessons haven't yet been learned in the developed world. I went to a conference the other day, which was about crime in South America and Central America. Now the people who were speaking were very, very smart and intelligent in the sense that they could analyze the things, analyze phenomena very well. But mostly they were not looking at opportunities. They were still concerned with motivation,

motivation in the general sense. The lessons that we have learned hard about reducing crime haven't spread to the developing world yet. And the crime there is much, much worse about reducing crime haven't spread to the developing world yet. And the crime there is much, much worse than we experience nowadays in our own country. So there's a long way to go yet to get these lessons across.

Let me ask you, Ron, if I could, I mentioned rational choice perspective, your training, your background, your orientation is around psychology. So there is some of that. We're trying to communicate to people and convince people not to do something, or at least not here and now. What could you maybe do a brief description about rational choice, that perspective, and how that saturates what we try and do, all of

us, in crime prevention. Yes, okay. The rational choice perspective that Derek Cornish and I developed is actually quite complex. It sounds a simple idea. I mean, most people think it's just a sort of development of economic theory. It actually goes a lot further than Becker's ideas of rational choice and crime, and even going back further than that, the way that we laid out rational choice perspective, we had, this is Derek and I, we had a number of premises we developed. First of all, offenders, the first one is offenders

commit crimes to benefit themselves in whatever way we might think they wanted to benefit not just economically but there are dozens and dozens of different motives for crime as opposed to motivation. And the rational choice perspective seeks to identify what are the motives for very specific forms of crime. That was the first fundamental premise. Second, because of risks and uncertainties, offenders often make poor decisions. In other words, they may think they're benefiting themselves, But because there's big limitations in what they know about the results of crime and what's

going to happen to them and whether they're going to get caught and that kind of thing, means that they often make poor decisions to commit crime and they shouldn't. So we have a second premise of bounded rationality. We don't think that the offenders are highly rational. They do the best they can to make decisions that they think will benefit themselves, but they often make mistakes and don't have enough data and so on. So it's bounded rationality.

Next thing I think is that this is very important. Offender decision-making the crime. This is a very important premise, the premise of crime specificity. Crimes, we tend as criminologists, criminologists tend to be overgeneralized about crime. In fact, there is enormous specificity. So just to illustrate this, I often give the example of car thefts. So there's many different kinds of things that can be called car thefts. For example, stealing hubcaps for resale or badges for collections, you know, badges of Mercedes badges or something. Breaking into cars to steal items left inside. Breaking into cars and stealing radios and other fittings that they can sell and joy riding by by juveniles where they just take the car

drive it around and dump it taking a car for temporary transportation stealing a car for use in another crime stealing and keeping a car, stealing cars for chopping and sale of their parts, stealing cars for resale, stealing cars for export overseas, and carjacking. Now that's just a rough list of how many different forms of crime can be called car theft. And each of those different forms of crime are really quite different and have to be analyzed carefully, separately, to see what is the opportunity structure for each. And you know, just a little thought shows you that the people involved in stealing cars for shopping and sale of the parts are very different from joyriders, joyriding juveniles, completely different groups of people. The opportunity structures for those two different forms of car theft are worlds apart.

And we need to, if we're going to address these crimes properly, we have to acknowledge that fact that specificity is extremely important. So that's another basic premise of the rational choice perspective, specificity. Then we, Derek and I thought, well, decisions about involvement in particular kinds of crime are quite different from the decisions relating to a specific criminal event. You have to have different models for both. And if you take involvement decisions there's three different stages of involvement. That's initiation, getting into that kind of crime, habituation, carrying on with it and desistence, stopping doing it. All those things are different.

And lastly, I think our last premise was that every decision involves, event decisions, sorry, event decisions, that's the decisions taken in a particular criminal event, involve a sequence of choices made during preparation, target selection, commission of the act, and aftermath. All the Muddhas' oper operandi has to be unpacked. So the rational choice perspective is much more complicated than most people would imagine and it implies a very detailed approach to thinking about crime prevention than most people would imagine. Most people can't give rational choice. Well, the offender is committing a crime.

He's weighing up the chance of getting caught. Therefore, all we need to do is induce the penalties. Well, rational choice perspective doesn't believe that punishment or doesn't advocate punishment because most of the punishment, that is most of the punishment theory is not being supported by research. Punishment doesn't work very well. So anyway, that's rather a long answer to your question about the rational choice perspective, but I'm really just trying to show that it's a very complex way of looking at crime. However, we have to do it, we have to do this, we have to get, we have to become specific and detailed and think hard about the opportunity

structures of any specific kind of crime if we're going to do anything about it. of prime if we're going to do anything about it. And we take up that mantle as you know Ron and with the practitioners from all these retailers and law enforcement that we're working with. We use the framework, we try and help them break down what you were just talking about into diagnostics as well as now we can be more focused. We're obviously very purposeful. And now we can have more accurate measurement to see what kind of effects do we get from the treatments or the options. So it's huge.

I know my father's physician would tell us there are over 50 reasons your head hurts and you might wanna know why your head hurts. And that's where you're going. That it could be you're hungry, you're under stress, it could be much more serious. So we can't treat anything if we don't know what the problem is, and that they're so different.

Well, it's good to hear you're doing that. Well, I know you're doing that sort of detailed work. It has to happen. It does pay off in the end, but it looks so different from most people's ideas about reducing crime that it's hard to persuade people that this is the way to go. Yeah. That's our collective challenge. And I think what we'd like to do is kind of roll, wrap things up here.

You know, what do you recommend? People coming into the crime prevention, criminal justice, but in our case, the criminology field or crime science field that really would like to make a difference, that really want to make people in places a little safer and more secure. What's your advice? Well, my advice is to become very familiar with environmental criminology and crime science.

That's the simplest advice I could give. Forget most of what is taught in criminology degrees and take with a pinch of salt what is often offered in crime prevention thinking. All this stuff provides young people with a very clear route for doing their work. a route for doing their work. It's a model that works. And it's crucial in science to have a decent theory. I think that environmental criminology and crime science is a good set of theories that helps people, you know, really make a difference. So that would be my simple answer to your question.

Well, that's a great answer. And Ron, I want to thank you so much for coming on the Crime Science Podcast. It's heard around the world by all types of people, academics and practitioners alike. And I really look forward to, as you and I mentioned before the podcast, kind of conferring, brainstorming, sharing ideas in the UK and England late this summer at ECA. So-

I think you'll enjoy it very much. I'm really looking forward to it. It's finally an opportunity to get involved with ECA. So I wish you all the best and again a huge thanks for all you've done and continue to do in the field of protecting people through crime science and crime prevention. Yeah and at the moment just to my last word is I'm now thinking about protecting animals. Excellent. Excellent. So, you know, environmental criminology means shaping the environment to influence decisions.

In your case, it also means doing that to protect the environment. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. So brilliant work. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you, Ron.

You have a great one. Thank you so much. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Laws Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more Crime Science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org.

The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Office of Prevention Research Council.