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Technology, Opportunity, Crime and Crime Prevention: Current and Evolutionary Perspectives

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Crime Prevention in the 21st Century

Abstract

This chapter seeks to link technology and crime science, including situational crime prevention. It starts by briefly considering the nature of technology. It then looks at the relationship between technology, opportunity, problems and solutions. But opportunity is a more subtle concept than many in the field assume, needing further development for present purposes. It is therefore discussed in relation to both traditional frameworks of crime science and to a more integrated and detailed counterpart, the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity. But all the opportunity frameworks need supplementing by an account of the dynamics of crime, especially through the concepts of scripts and script clashes. A major section then examines the relationship between crime and technological change, covering adaptations and clashes over longer timescales, in the shape of co-evolutionary arms races between offenders and preventers. This spans both biological and cultural evolution. Then come sections on the practicalities of adopting a deliberately evolutionary approach to prevention—gearing up against crime, innovation and design—and finally some weaknesses of purely technological approaches to crime prevention. The conclusion reviews the significance of understanding technology for crime science. This enhanced understanding of how changing technology can both create and block opportunity for crime, nuisance and terrorism (henceforth, crime) is needed to help us anticipate, detect and respond to the many changes in the crime and security world we can expect to encounter during the rest of the twenty-first century.

I am grateful to Benoit Leclerc for his helpful editing, Richard Wortley and anonymous reviewers for their inputs to this chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Thanks to Richard Wortley for this point. But it is worth noting that the capabilities technology brings mean that defeat may rarely be absolute. This is illustrated by the jewel thieves who drilled through a metre of concrete to reach the safe deposit boxes of London’s Hatton Garden diamond dealers in 2015—ironically using diamond-tipped cutters.

  2. 2.

    Alternative imagery for problems/solutions includes that of ‘glass half-full versus glass half-empty’; for multiple ones Arthur uses chains.

  3. 3.

    Thanks to Benoit Leclerc for these ideas.

  4. 4.

    Thanks to Benoit Leclerc for this clash.

  5. 5.

    Thanks to Benoit Leclerc for Misrepresentation, and Ken Pease for Misbegetting.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Design Against Crime Research Centre, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, London, UK

    Paul Ekblom

  2. Department of Security and Crime Science, UCL, London, UK

    Paul Ekblom

  3. Applied Criminology Centre, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK

    Paul Ekblom

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  1. Paul Ekblom
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Correspondence to Paul Ekblom .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Benoit LeClerc

  2. Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore-Transcrime, Milano, Italy

    Ernesto U. Savona

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Ekblom, P. (2017). Technology, Opportunity, Crime and Crime Prevention: Current and Evolutionary Perspectives. In: LeClerc, B., Savona, E. (eds) Crime Prevention in the 21st Century. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27793-6_19

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