Predicting the future or summarising the past?

Abstract

This paper, arose from my long-standing involvement in horizon-scanning, technological innovation and crime prevention within Home Office research. It emerged from my work to systematically/rigorously identify future crime risks and prevention opportunities posed by advances in hard science and technology (a need identified by the Police Science and Technology Strategy Group), acknowledging social-science-oriented crime prevention alongside science and technology. I developed the ‘Misdeeds and Security’ framework described here, underpinning it theoretically and practically using my Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity framework for mapping causes of crime and prevention principles. A multidisciplinary group of scientists, social scientists, engineers, forensic scientists, and police used it to review candidate innovations, identify significant ones and report to the Strategy Group. The wider purpose was to ‘alert, motivate and empower’ scientists, technologists and designers to ‘think thief’, to recruit them as ‘scouts’ to spot crime risks/preventive opportunities within their diverse fields and to inform design of new tools and technologies for preventing crime. The Misdeeds and Security framework was incorporated in the reports of the Government Foresight Project ‘Cyber Trust and Crime Prevention’ and I was invited to produce ‘crime scenarios’ for the subsequent ‘Intelligent Infrastructure’ project. The Misdeeds and Security framework now imparts ‘futures’ perspectives to the Design Against Crime Research Centre’s work, supporting its objective to empower designers to 'think thief' by identifying the broad kinds of crime risk facing their products.