Cutting crime with knowledge and power - A doorway to effective policing

 

The 2025 Problem-Oriented Policing Conference returns 

to Madison, Wisconsin

By Gregory Saville

A few decades ago, television entered what critics call the Second Golden Age. Gone were the tidy cop shows of the 1970s. In their place came gritty realism. Among them was NYPD Blue, where Detective Andy Sipowicz embodied the flawed but dedicated street cop.

In one memorable episode, Sipowicz points to three hoodlums owning a downtown corner as he mentors a rookie about what it really means to police the streets: “Them three are bad and right now they own that corner. A good cop is gonna take that corner back so that people walking by don’t have to fear for their life.”

Today, that line may sound dated. Yet in its time, the sentiment rang true. As a young police officer, I too heard versions of that same lesson: your beat is your responsibility - protect it with pride. It reflected the enduring myth of the warrior in blue—the guardian who takes back the street.

NYPD Blue - the 1990s police procedural TV drama won 20 primetime Emmy Awards and 80 nominations over its 12-year run

Of course, reality was always messier. Crime is rarely solved by a lone act of heroism. Yet the drive to bring safety and dignity to a community remains. The difference today is that we know far smarter ways to do it.

FROM WARRIOR MYTH TO SMART STRATEGIES 

Despite what the skeptics say, police can and do stop crime— but only when they use the right tools. Sometimes that involves an arrest. More often, it means creative strategies that reduce harm without relying only on force.

This is the world of Problem-Oriented Policing (POP). Conceived by the late Professor Herman Goldstein, POP has become one of the most effective, research-backed models in modern policing. Instead of reacting case by case, POP asks: why is this crime happening here and how can we change the conditions that allow it?

Over decades, POP has built a proven track record: tackling robberies, drug markets, intimate partner violence, carjackings, and more. Its philosophy is simple: don’t just respond to symptoms— use crime analysis, community partnerships, crime prevention through environmental design, and many other inventive strategies to actually solve the problems.

 

Madison Wisconsin, site of the 2025 POP Conference
- photo Wiki Creative Commons

THE POP CONFERENCE 

The annual Problem-Oriented Policing Conference is the gathering place for this work. Previous conferences introduced new strategies and concepts, such as the SafeGrowth model presented for the first time last year.

In 2025, the conference will once again return to Madison, Wisconsin after having been there in 2015. This year it will bring together practitioners, researchers, and community partners to share cutting-edge strategies and real-world results.

At the conference, you’ll learn practical tactics, such as:

• Cutting gun crime through place-based prevention and community partnerships.
• Reducing school bullying by reshaping school climates and peer norms.
• Preventing robberies by focusing on repeat victims, and situational vulnerabilities.
• Applying CPTED and SafeGrowth to redesign public spaces and reduce fear.

The conference is about equipping police and city leaders with the evidence and tools to reduce crime in meaningful, lasting ways. You can register here

The conference is run by the Center for Problem-Oriented Police headed by Michael Scott - the nexus for innovative and effective policing

FROM SIPOWICZ TO POP HEROES

Sipowicz’s message—take back the corner—was once the rallying cry of police culture. It symbolized toughness and control. But today, real heroism looks different. It’s the officer who asks why the corner became dangerous, and then works with residents to change it. It’s the leader who measures success not in arrests, but in safer neighborhoods and stronger trust.

The Sipowicz era imagined the cop as a lone warrior. POP reimagines the cop as a problem-solver, a partner, and a guardian of community well-being.

That is the spirit of the 2025 POP Conference: to give practitioners the strategies, partnerships, and confidence to reclaim not just a street corner, but the whole city and, along with it, the legitimacy and trust that sustain safe communities.

And in that sense, Sipowicz’s line still resonates. Good cops do take back the corner—but today, they do it with insight, compassion, and strategy. Those are the true heroes who guard the community.

 

Building blocks for civic commitment - the key to safety

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Reaching for livability and safety 
through civic commitment

by Larry Leach

The role of commitment in civic life is no different than the desire for a crime-free, livable neighborhood.

Do you feel emotionally tied to something? Maybe a sports team, celebrity, or politician? I do—with the British football club - Liverpool FC. The club’s unique culture is inseparable from the city’s history and tragedies. Before each match, as thousands sing You’ll Never Walk Alone, every supporter invests their own meaning. The song became Liverpool’s anthem in the 1960s, adopted from the version release by the famous Liverpool band “Gerry and the Pacemakers”. The atmosphere isn’t managed by the club—it’s owned by the fans. Why? Commitment!

Which came first, the club trusting the fans or the fans’ deep loyalty? I’d argue the latter. Commitment comes first.

More often than not, making connections between people
involves community events focused on food

What does this have to do with SafeGrowth? When it comes to building local capacity for cohesion, problem-solving and crime prevention, it means everything. Successful communities share the same backbone: history, shared experience, and commitment. 

SafeGrowth aims to help neighborhoods organize this energy and it does so by accepting that many of those people living there are the experts. As Mateja and Gregory wrote in Third Generation CPTED, it’s a holistic approach tying safety to public health, economic vitality, and quality of life—anchored in community engagement and ownership.

Maslow reminds us that our personal needs for safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization come from many different sources, but they all depend on relationships. 

Sociologist Robert Sampson clearly revealed in his landmark research about collective efficacy, how, in many places (especially high crime places), those community ties have eroded. To restore them requires personal commitment. I’ve seen it in twenty years with my Community Association: real progress happens only when people stop dipping toes and fully commit.

Psychologist Maslow's heirarchy of individual needs overlaps
with quality of neighborhood life described in 3rd Generation CPTED

When I was Soccer Association President, someone joked, “You can’t ask a coach what they’re doing for the next five years.” Yet if you want a coach who teaches life lessons and inspires kids, that’s exactly the kind of long-term dedication required.

COMMITMENT FROM THE GROUND UP

How do we build it? There are two keys:

1.     Recognize that each community must be itself—not a copy of another. New York isn’t Paris; Tokyo isn’t Sydney. Great cities learn from each other, but they thrive on uniqueness and history. Communities must do the same: discover their assets, embrace their story, and commit to the work ahead.

2.     Strong leadership draws in strong members. Projects completed together build pride and belonging. That is why SafeGrowth Livability Academies create a pool of community leaders and use problem-solving projects to start the process.

Every time I pass the youth centre where I volunteer, I’m reminded that commitment is not abstract. It’s bricks, voices, and faces. That’s the kind of belonging every community deserves to feel—and the kind of legacy we leave when we choose to stay committed. When we choose to stay the course together, we don’t just build places—we build meaning.”

A reflection on Ronald V. Clarke: Honoring a "crime scientist" and an old friend

Geneva Park Conference Center, Orillia, Ontario. Site of the 1988 conference on Research Futures in Environmental Criminology. I invited Ron Clarke as a presenter - photo Unique Properties

by Gregory Saville

I want to share a short reflection on my old friend Ronald V. Clarke—known not just as a criminologist and recipient of the 2015 Stockholm Prize in Criminology, but as a pioneering crime scientist whose humanity, curiosity, and intellectual courage reshaped our understanding of crime and prevention.

Ron passed away on May 28, 2025, at the age of 84. His death marked the end of a life dedicated not merely to studying crime, but to reimagining how we can prevent it—not through punishment or psychology alone, but by redesigning our environments and systems.

It was Clarke’s co-authored 1976 paper, “Crime as Opportunity,” that truly turned the criminological world on its head. He urged us to stop fixating on criminals and instead look at the opportunities that allowed crimes to happen—changing the offense, not just punishing the offender. From better window locks and improved sightlines to dye-marked banknotes—his vision was pragmatic, grounded, and surprisingly effective. He’d say things like, “remove the opportunity and the crime collapses.” 

Ronald V. Clarke - Professor/Crime Scientist/Friend. Also interested in
preventing wildlife crime and poaching
- photo Benefunder

I first met Ron at a 1988 conference I sponsored at a conference center in Ontario overlooking Lake Couchiching. He had arrived in North America a few years earlier from his career at the UK Home Office, where he pioneered new studies on crime opportunity. I once told him I thought treating opportunity as a root cause of crime was a step too far, unsupported by the data. When he disagreed, it felt less like an admonition and more like a steady, hand guiding me back to the point.

I suspect he preferred “crime scientist” less for the scientific rigor in criminology —which remains limited—and more because the search for offender dispositions had done little to prevent crime. It was hard to argue that! Mainstream criminology often ignored his work and he expressed his frustration with big, elaborate statistical exercises when simple, real-life situational changes kept showing clear effects.

UK Home Office - London. Clarke headed a crime prevention unit for the British government prior to his tenure as Dean of Criminology at Rutgers University
- photo CC-SA 2.0 by Steve Cadman

Ron was also a leader in the practical application of theory. He served as head judge of the Herman Goldstein Problem-Oriented Policing Award—he was my head judge when I was serving as a judge on that program—and set a tone of rigor and fairness that inspired everyone on the panel. 

He was a featured speaker at the 1986 environmental criminology search conference, and he immediately latched onto the action research method that was at the core of our work (the search conference is an action research method). It was about the direct application of theory into practice. That idea became a throughline in his later work - as it had been in his UK work - and it is still a core value we honor today in SafeGrowth.

A LEGACY OF OPPORTUNITY

Ron’s legacy is subtle but profound: he showed us crime isn’t destiny—it’s often a product of ill-placed opportunities, overlooked context, and uninspired design. And by treating the environment as part of the solution, he gave cities, planners, and communities tools that work—without trials, without ideology, but with practicality and empathy.

I honored him by applying his situational insights during our project work on homelessness —believing that when we change the settings of homelessness, we shift the narrative away from fear and blame, toward safety and support. That felt like the truest tribute to his spirit: evolving his ideas with compassion, not just application. His insistence on translating research into real-world change is woven into the DNA of SafeGrowth’s global network today—every project, training, and innovation we advance carries a trace of Ron’s vision for theory in action. 

Thank you Ron, we owe you a debt.

When minorities speak but we don't listen

Attack in farmland area at the outskirts of Ljubljana 

by Mateja Mihinjac

A few weeks ago, a brutal attack on an elderly farmer shocked the residents of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. News outlets quickly reported that the four men responsible for the attack were members of the Roma community.

In response to this attack—along with more than 15 years of ongoing incidents and threats from some members of the Roma community—residents in the farmer’s local area announced a peaceful rally to support the victim and draw attention to the unresolved tension.


Some locals even warned that if no steps were taken, they might form vigilante neighbourhood patrols. One MP went so far as to suggest that citizens join shooting clubs and acquire weapons to protect themselves.


Peaceful protests occurred supporting the victim 

These remarks were widely condemned by fellow MPs, the President of Slovenia, and the Shooting Association of Slovenia, which stressed that shooting clubs exist for sport—not self-defence.
Meanwhile, Roma representatives emphasised that the actions of a few individuals should not vilify an entire community.


This is just one of many incidents over the past two decades. What has led to this persistent divide between the Roma and the broader Slovene population?

WHAT GOT US HERE?

The Roma are an ethnic minority originating from northern India who migrated to Europe around 1,000 years ago. Today, 10–12 million Roma live across Europe, with an estimated 8,500 residing in Slovenia.
Tensions arise from a mix of historical, cultural, and systemic factors. Many Roma communities live in extended family settlements, often in informal housing lacking infrastructure. One EU report described this as “ethnic and social ghettoisation.”


European Union research on the Slovenian Roma population

Roma communities also face poor health outcomes, including high infant mortality and smoking rates among pregnant women. Education remains a challenge; a decade-old report showed that nearly half of Roma pupils had not completed primary school, often due to language barriers. This has contributed to high unemployment and ongoing reliance on social assistance, which in turn discourages social mobility.


Discrimination has also been a long-standing issue. Although progress has been made, the Roma Civil Monitor project points to persistent barriers: a lack of disaggregated data, limited institutional coordination, insufficient involvement of Roma in policy-making, and the absence of parliamentary representation.


As in other SafeGrowth projects where we confront minority-related crime and social division, these conditions highlight how deep-rooted challenges require community-driven solutions—not reactive measures.

Slovenia - a European country of scenic mountains and countryside -
rarely associated with violence 

WHAT MOVES US FORWARD?

Reconciling opposing traditions and value systems between minority groups and their broader population is not new. In SafeGrowth, we often need to reconcile many viewpoints and ideas that diverse people from the neighbourhood have, and then also find a common language between that neighbourhood community and organisations that they partner with.

Slovenia has also made some strides towards progress. 

In my next blog, I’ll explore Slovenia’s Framework, which aims to address the most critical barriers, including education, employment, and social dependency. These issues resonate in every country where we provide SafeGrowth programming. I will highlight policing strategies and multi-ethnic community policing programs that successfully reduce tensions and build trust between Roma communities and law enforcement.

I’ll share the story of one Roma village that became self-governing—a model that demonstrates what is possible when integration is built from the ground up. 

Stay tuned!

Gambling with the future

The shape of digital thinking - not always what it seems - Stockphoto 

Techno-solutionism 

(noun) tech·no·so·lu·tion·ism |ˈtek-nō-sə-ˈlü-shə-ˌni-zəm *
1: The idea that every social problem has a technical fix — a mindset that often bypasses community input, local culture, and lived experience in favor of data-driven shortcuts. 

by Gregory Saville

Do you know what’s happening in Las Vegas next month?

More gambling and fantasy — except this time, it’s not about blackjack or slot machines. It’s about our future.

The Ai4 Conference is next month — one of the biggest gatherings of AI developers, investors, and corporate clients in the world. It’s packed with major institutional players: banks, financial giants, data brokers, and tech developers. They’re not there to sound alarms. They’re there to map the future — one algorithm at a time.

But not everyone is buying in.

One of the voices at this year’s event is Geoffrey Hinton, widely regarded as the godfather of deep learning. He’s a recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, and he resigned from Google in May 2023 — not in protest of bad engineering, but in alarm over what his own research might unleash.

He’s not there to sell. He’s there to warn.

And if even Hinton is nervous about the direction of AI — especially when it comes to ethics, autonomy, and control — we should all be paying attention.

That includes those of us working in urban safety and crime prevention.

Geoffrey Hinton at his Nobel Prize ceremony
Photo by Jennifer 8. Lee, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

AI AND CPTED - THE SILENT CONVERGENCE

Artificial Intelligence is already reshaping how cities think about safety. I described this convergence in detail during my keynote address on AI and CPTED at the 2021 CPTED Conference in Sweden. It’s happening in ways both subtle and systemic: facial recognition networks quietly expanding in public places; real-time surveillance feeding data into centralized dashboards; algorithms determining who is suspicious and who is "safe".

We’ve raised alarms about these trends before on the SafeGrowth blog — in posts like:

• What 1980s Weather Models Taught Me About AI 
• Summoning the Demon: AI in Law Enforcement 
• The Pros and Cons of Using AI to Prevent Crime 

My keynote at the 2021 conference was titled: Artificial Intelligence, Smart Cities, and CPTED. A Threat to the ICA.

Keynote address at the 2021 ICA CPTED Conference - Sweden 

Much of this unfolds behind the scenes. And yet, it touches our daily lives, our neighborhoods, and the very public spaces that CPTED  seeks to protect.

The problem? These AI tools are often built through a corporate techno-optimist lens. One that:

• Prioritizes efficiency over ethics
• Amplifies surveillance capitalism
• Ignores spatial injustice
• Replicates systemic bias in code causing algorithmic harm

If we’re not careful, we risk building cities that feel more like open-air data farms than thriving communities.

Marriotte Hotel at the Las Vegas convention Center - location of the 2025 AI conference - photo by Marriotte

THE RESPONSE? ETHICS BEFORE ALGORITHMS

That’s why the International CPTED Association (ICA) has convened a new AI and CPTED Subcommittee — a global collaboration of criminologists, computer scientists, planners, ethicists, and practitioners (myself included) working to confront these challenges head-on.

I’m chairing this subcommittee, and after months of research and reflection, the ethical questions have crept into my consciousness like invasive roots spreading beneath the roadways of our communities. You don’t see them right away. But they’re there — widening the cracks.

We’re now finalizing a white paper to guide the CPTED field — a direction-setting document for how to responsibly navigate this new terrain.

RECLAIMING SAFETY IN THE AGE OF AI

This isn’t just a matter for data scientists or tech firms. There is a message shaping up for CPTED practitioners and residents alike. To me, that message goes like this:

We must call for oversight, ethical scrutiny, and community-driven approaches over digital or predictive models that falsely claim certainty without embracing uncertainty and probability. 

And above all - techno-solutionism must not prevail. Cities are not math problems to be solved by code. They are ecosystems of people, stories, and space — deserving of care, not automation. Despite what some experts claim, sustainable crime prevention is not a simple matter of quick situational fixes. Livability too is important.

We’ll be sharing more soon in our ICA white paper.

For now, the dice may be rolling in Vegas. But the rest of us?
We’re not gambling with our future.

The mastery of tradecraft in crime prevention - Why quick fixes fail

Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia

by Gregory Saville

On this July 4 Independence Day, I discovered something worth celebrating emerging from Philadelphia. And it wasn't the Declaration of Independence. 

Last week, I was dealing with a failed air conditioner during a brutal heatwave. Calling an A/C technician was fascinating. He was energetic, hurried, and confident (overconfident – it turns out). He glanced at the unit and announced it was too old to repair. He didn’t test the refrigerant, didn’t run diagnostics. He jumped quickly to a simple conclusion - it likely had a Freon leak requiring a full system replacement. The going rate? Over $8,000!

That was declined.

The next day, I called in a different HVAC technician — someone calm, experienced, and focused. He listened carefully as I explained the background of the A/C issue, then got to work. In under an hour, he had diagnosed the real problem, tested the system, checked the wiring, bypassed a strange connection, and replaced the dirty filter. The result? Cool air again — and all for under $200.

Something worth celebrating on July 4 - it all started with an air con

He also went a step further – he pointed to a website that ships replacement filters automatically, provided some education on how to self-diagnose simple AC problems, and made sure other parts of the system were not at risk. “That way, you can prevent future problems and self-repair when necessary.” 

That is mastery of tradecraft.

PRACTICING CRIME PREVENTION

It made me think, too often in CPTED, we meet the first kind of technician — fast talkers selling quick fixes at a high cost. What we need are more like the second — grounded pros who diagnose carefully, teach as they go, and work with the client, not around them.

Nowhere is the contrast between shallow fixes versus deep tradecraft more visible than in Philadelphia — between the neighborhoods of Kensington and Fairhill/St. Hugh.

Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood remains among the highest
crime communities in the city 

Kensington is infamous — a high-crime zone marked by open-air drug markets, encampments, and a long history of short-term government crackdowns. One of the most aggressive was Operation Sunrise, a year-long police campaign launched in 1998 that promised zero-tolerance enforcement aimed at gangs and drugs. Authorities were confident (overconfident, as it turned out).

The effort made headlines. It felt bold, but it didn’t last.

Early criminology research praised Operation Sunrise and its “place-based policing” model, highlighting short-term drops in crime and minimal displacement. But later analysis challenged the no-displacement finding and warned of widespread unintended consequences. One study concluded the operation failed to sustain lower crime rates and instead produced a “generation of fugitives” and widespread collateral harm.

Today, government research concludes that Operation Sunshine’s zero-tolerance policing and hotspot crackdowns failed to deliver sustainable safety.

The business towers of downtown Philadelphia.
Not far away, some of the nation's highest crime neighborhoods. 

MASTERFUL CRAFTSMANSHIP MISSING

There’s nothing masterful about these strategies. They are the equivalent of replacing the entire HVAC system when the real problem is a dirty filter, a lack of client knowledge and no self-capacity to resolve problems.

When you leave Kensington and travel a half mile north, you arrive at Fairhill/St. Hugh, a primarily Hispanic neighborhood anchored by the vibrant El Centro de Oro commercial corridor. 

In contrast to Kensington, the St. Hugh neighborhood has been growing and improving for a while and, while Fairhill has some crime and disorder challenges similar to Kensington, there is something very different happening. 

It is difficult to get the full picture from stats, and violent crime rates are notoriously difficult to measure, much less calculate. But by at least some estimates, the violent crime rate in Fairhill/St. Hugh is lower than in Kensington.

For example, one source claims Kensington's violent crime rate of 9.3 per 1,000 residents is 55% higher than the 5.9 rate in Fairhill/St. Hugh. Unfortunately, stats like this are bound to be imperfect and imperfect stats rarely tell the full story.

2023 Crime Density map for Philadelphia - Map from GIS Geography

Kensington and Fairhill neighborhoods overlay onto crime density map
- crime stats are notoriously difficult to calculate and tell only a small part of the story. In this version the dark red suggests higher crime rates in Kensington 

THE HACE STORY

Enter HACE, a community development corporation working in Fairhill/St. Hugh for over three decades. HACE was formed to combat disinvestment and preserve community culture. Their approach? Place-based strategies not limited to law enforcement. Instead, they use long-term investment, community leadership, neighborhood planning and strategies grounded in SafeGrowth.

Long before HACE adopted SafeGrowth, their results were stunning:

• Over $100 million in local investment
• More than 450 new housing units built
• 400+ vacant lots rehabbed and greened
• A community-run food distribution center
• Housing counseling programs that build generational wealth

Even more impressive, HACE now adopts SafeGrowth and crime prevention principles within their ten-year Goodlands 2025 plan — not as add-ons, but as core pillars of community design.

The neighborhood plan focuses on major areas of development activity, including housing, commercial corridor revitalization, improving the quality of life, and crime and safety. 

Celebrating the birthday of a Livability Academy member - a local police officer

They also train residents through SafeGrowth Livability Academies, helping locals become leaders in problem-solving, safety design, and civic engagement.

Academy classes lead local projects — clearing encampments, building safe walking trails, and working with police. Cops don’t arrest their way out of crime; communities and police build their way out, together.

PREVENTION TRADECRAFT

Masterful prevention tradecraft has a look: practical, visible, and led by the people who live there. It is grounded in self-help, local knowledge, rooted in evidence, and police are partners, not enforcers of one-size-fits-all solutions.

It’s patient work, unlikely to reveal itself to 6-month evaluations. Instead, it requires patience like slowly melting ice from frozen A/C lines. Like tracing faulty wiring until the real problem is clear.

And in neighborhoods, as in A/C systems, the difference between a temporary fix and a long-term solution is rarely visible at first glance — but unmistakable over time.