ABSTRACT
Crime prevention is at least as old as the rst door bolt, and in England it was famously proclaimed as the primary purpose of policing at the time of the creation of the Metropolitan Police in the rst half of the nineteenth century. But, in the last 30 years, we have seen in many countries, including Britain, the more systematic development of a set of planned and coordinated governmental activities designed to promote crime prevention activities [see, e.g., Hughes, 1998]. In England and Wales, one of the central aspects of this recent policy focus on crime prevention has been a special interest in the prevention of repeat victimization, a story that has been lucidly told by Gloria Laycock [2001]. Among other things, these developments resulted in the creation, in 1995, of a “police performance indicator” on repeat
victimization as one of the criteria by which the Home O ce could measure the e ectiveness of local police forces in the prevention of crime [see Farrell et al., 2000].
