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Evaluating area‐wide crime‐reduction measures
Author(s) -
Marchant Paul
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
significance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.123
H-Index - 21
eISSN - 1740-9713
pISSN - 1740-9705
DOI - 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2005.00093.x
Subject(s) - imperfect , reduction (mathematics) , impulse (physics) , psychology , criminology , computer science , computer security , law , political science , philosophy , geometry , mathematics , linguistics , physics , quantum mechanics
When we look around an imperfect world, we feel an understandable impulse to improve matters. We may therefore decide to intervene by prescribing medical treatment or by introducing crime reduction measures. But how do we know that what we do is likely to work? In medicine the standard answer is to do a trial; not surprisingly the same is true in crime reduction. But, says Paul Marchant, the lessons learned from medical trials have not been implemented in the latter field.