ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews that the Police Foundation asked the author to carry out to document and assess innovatory and experimental policing projects and schemes and new methods of working. The Foundation’s concerns were political and pragmatic. It felt that much public discussion of policing proceeded from and emphasised a negative image of the police and that this needed to be counterbalanced by a more positive picture of what the police were about and what they were doing to respond to changing demands and pressures on them. The small absolute number of burglary offences on the estate in effect made it impossible to test whether burglary had been reduced there. Situational crime prevention has developed as a research-based policy response to the message of the crime prevention research which the Home Office Research Unit undertook during the 1970s. The rewards of action are short-term and decisive while those of research are deferred and potentially problematical.
