This book explores multi-year community-based crime prevention initiatives in the United States, from their design and implementation, through 5-year follow ups. It provides an overview of programs of various sizes, affecting diverse communities from urban to rural environments, larger and smaller populations, with a range of site-specific problems. The research is based on a United States federally-funded program called the Byrne Criminal Justice Initiative (BJCI) which began in 2012, and has funded programs in 65 communities, across 28 states and 61 cities. This book serves to document the process, challenges, and lessons learned from the design and implementation of this innovative program. It covers researcher-practitioner partnerships, crime prevention planning processes, programming implementation, and issues related to sustainability of community-policing initiatives that transcend institutional barriers and leadership turnover. Through researcher partnerships at each site, it provides a rich dataset for understanding and comparing the social and economic problems that contribute to criminality, as well as the conditions where prosocial behavior and collective efficacy thrive. It also examines the future of this federally-funded program going forward in a new Presidential administration. This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with an interest in translational/applied criminology and crime prevention, as well as related fields such as public policy, urban planning, and sociology.

This book provides an original cross-thematic and wide scope review of crime prevention processes in urban areas that are explicitly based on the cooperation between different scientific and professional fields. Focusing primarily on environmental and community-based crime prevention, this book compiles a peer-reviewed collection of papers and prospective essays that explore how, and to what extent, multi-disciplinarity can be used as a cornerstone for achieving safer cities. Relying on the input from specialists, researchers, decision-makers, and practitioners from around the world, it covers the various stages from theory to implementation, by discussing theoretical stances, interpreting policy and planning guidelines, uncovering unique educational experiences, and narrating insights and lessons learned from innovative research and practice. Hence, it provides vivid discussions and invaluable insights into processes of partnership building, planning, and management, oriented towards establishing successful mechanism for preventing crime and reducing feelings of insecurity in urban areas.

Using a variety of criminological theories that focus on social structure and urban settings, this study aims to identify crime risk and protective factors and proposes an assessment protocol for risk and protection for urban crime problems. In addition, an attempt is made to identify the key stakeholders including the government and criminal justice sector (governance, law enforcement, and judicial and correctional systems); and the primary social institutions (economy, social, community and social capital, and family) at the neighborhood. community, district and city levels in demanding resources for effective urban crime prevention.