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4CHAPTERURBAN CRIME AND VIOLENCE:POLICY RESPONSESChapter 3 has described in some depth the nature of urbancrime and violence as they are experienced across the world.The purpose of this chapter is to examine some of the policyresponses to these problems, and to explore some of theavailable evidence on how successful these initiatives havebeen. It needs to be understood, from the outset, that a highproportion of these initiatives have not been fully or properlyevaluated, and that a further proportion have either not hadthe results of such evaluations made public at all or havedone this in ways that are not readily accessible. It is also thecase that much of the evidence that is available and accessiblecomes from the developed world, rather than from thedeveloping world, and it should not be automaticallyassumed that conclusions from the former context willautomatically apply to the latter. Consequently, the evidencebased on what works is much thinner than the plethora ofinitiatives to be found.This situation gives rise to one important policyrecommendation (i.e. the importance of developing a learningculture in this field) since the absence of meaningful andpublicly accessible evaluation is a major flaw with manyprojects. The absence of a learning culture has two clearconsequences. One of these is that it becomes very difficultin these circumstances to be clear about how successful aproject has been, although there are many examples ofprojects that have been declared successes without anyeffective evaluation to demonstrate the truth of this claim. Asecond is that the opportunity for both the participants inthe project and others elsewhere to learn from this experienceis undermined by the lack of effective and accessibleevaluation. This latter point is of particular importance whenthe opportunity to learn from demonstrated good practiceelsewhere is greater now than it has ever been. Both of theseissues are returned to in greater depth in Chapter 10.Although this chapter draws heavily on the base establishedby Chapter 3, it does not follow the same structurebecause in many instances the policy responses that areidentifiable represent a means of approaching a range ofcriminal activities and not each of the types that areseparately identified in Chapter 3. Two examples will serveto make this point. One of the most common responses tothe problems of urban crime and violence is through theformation of partnerships that are designed to bring togetherthe 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 greatestprominence or the cause of greatest public concern in theirlocalities. There are many things that can be said aboutpartnerships and they take many different forms; but theapproach adopted here is to discuss this phenomenon in afreestanding section rather than as a component of manyresponses to many different types of crime.The same argument applies to efforts to combatcorruption, which is of fundamental importance to thisparticular field. Although tackling crime and violence iswidely recognized as being about much more than just thework of police forces, for example, there is no doubt thatpolice work of many kinds remains central to this task.Corrupt police operations, or police operations that areperceived by the public as being corrupt, are therefore verylikely to undermine other efforts in this field. The samebroad arguments apply to corrupt processes of politicaldecision-making and corrupt planning processes. Since theelimination of corruption in areas such as these is a fundamentalpart of many attempts to tackle urban crime andviolence, this, too, is the subject of a single discussion in thischapter as part of a broader examination of how tacklingproblems of crime and violence relates to urban governancestructures and processes.The approach that has been adopted is to address thefield of policy responses to urban crime and violence inseven 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 andviolence;• institutional and community responses;• partnerships;• some emerging policy trends.The greatest amount of attention is devoted to the types ofpolicy response to problems of crime and violence since thisis the core of the chapter. In effect, the first three of thesesections are about contextual issues, the second group of