Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

4
CHAPTER
URBAN CRIME AND VIOLENCE:
POLICY RESPONSES
Chapter 3 has described in some depth the nature of urban
crime and violence as they are experienced across the world.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine some of the policy
responses to these problems, and to explore some of the
available evidence on how successful these initiatives have
been. It needs to be understood, from the outset, that a high
proportion of these initiatives have not been fully or properly
evaluated, and that a further proportion have either not had
the results of such evaluations made public at all or have
done this in ways that are not readily accessible. It is also the
case that much of the evidence that is available and accessible
comes from the developed world, rather than from the
developing world, and it should not be automatically
assumed that conclusions from the former context will
automatically apply to the latter. Consequently, the evidence
based on what works is much thinner than the plethora of
initiatives to be found.
This situation gives rise to one important policy
recommendation (i.e. the importance of developing a learning
culture in this field) since the absence of meaningful and
publicly accessible evaluation is a major flaw with many
projects. The absence of a learning culture has two clear
consequences. One of these is that it becomes very difficult
in these circumstances to be clear about how successful a
project has been, although there are many examples of
projects that have been declared successes without any
effective evaluation to demonstrate the truth of this claim. A
second is that the opportunity for both the participants in
the project and others elsewhere to learn from this experience
is undermined by the lack of effective and accessible
evaluation. This latter point is of particular importance when
the opportunity to learn from demonstrated good practice
elsewhere is greater now than it has ever been. Both of these
issues are returned to in greater depth in Chapter 10.
Although this chapter draws heavily on the base established
by Chapter 3, it does not follow the same structure
because in many instances the policy responses that are
identifiable represent a means of approaching a range of
criminal activities and not each of the types that are
separately identified in Chapter 3. Two examples will serve
to make this point. One of the most common responses to
the problems of urban crime and violence is through the
formation of partnerships that are designed to bring together
the key players involved in tackling such problems. Typically,
partnerships will seek to address a range of criminal activities,
usually focusing on those that are of greatest
prominence or the cause of greatest public concern in their
localities. There are many things that can be said about
partnerships and they take many different forms; but the
approach adopted here is to discuss this phenomenon in a
freestanding section rather than as a component of many
responses to many different types of crime.
The same argument applies to efforts to combat
corruption, which is of fundamental importance to this
particular field. Although tackling crime and violence is
widely recognized as being about much more than just the
work of police forces, for example, there is no doubt that
police work of many kinds remains central to this task.
Corrupt police operations, or police operations that are
perceived by the public as being corrupt, are therefore very
likely to undermine other efforts in this field. The same
broad arguments apply to corrupt processes of political
decision-making and corrupt planning processes. Since the
elimination of corruption in areas such as these is a fundamental
part of many attempts to tackle urban crime and
violence, this, too, is the subject of a single discussion in this
chapter as part of a broader examination of how tackling
problems of crime and violence relates to urban governance
structures and processes.
The approach that has been adopted is to address the
field of policy responses to urban crime and violence in
seven parts:
• levels of responses, from the global downwards;
• the significance of stages of development;
• urban governance structures and processes;
• types of policy responses to problems of crime and
violence;
• institutional and community responses;
• partnerships;
• some emerging policy trends.
The greatest amount of attention is devoted to the types of
policy response to problems of crime and violence since this
is the core of the chapter. In effect, the first three of these
sections are about contextual issues, the second group of