ABSTRACT
This collection of chapters provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on how far crime prevention, from a European perspective, has developed in the past 20 to 30 years, and its prospects for the future, but also to hold it up to an international mirror. 1 This chapter, for me at least, could be subtitled ‘From Easingwold to Bangkok’, in reference to the long distance that crime prevention has travelled — from the days of the lowly Home Office crime prevention training centre in England, which up to the early 1970s provided basic training for police officers, 2 to the crime prevention workshop that took place at the 11th UN Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, held in Bangkok in April 2005 (Shaw and Travers 2007). The latter demonstrated how far the notion of prevention as an intervention has moved away from a narrow policing function to a much broader inter-sectoral approach, as well as expanding to countries and cities in all regions of the world.
