ABSTRACT
As the title of this book indicates, crime prevention is one of its central themes. Crime prevention is, of course, at least as old as the first door bolt; and in England, it was famously proclaimed as the primary purpose of policing at the time of the creation of the Metropolitan Police in the first half of the 19th century. However, in the last 30 years, we have seen in many countries, including Britain, the more systematic development of a set of planned and coordinated governmental activities designed to promote crime prevention activities (see, e.g., Hughes, 1998). In England and Wales, one of the central aspects of this recent policy focus on crime prevention has been a special interest in the prevention of repeat victimization, a story that has been lucidly told by Laycock (2001). Among other things, these developments
resulted in the creation, in 1995, of a “police performance indicator” on repeat victimization as one of the criteria by which the Home Office could measure the effectiveness of local police forces in the prevention of crime (see Farrell, Edmunds, Hobbs, & Laycock, 2000).
