'Killing the Cubs'? Why Many Crime Reduction Projects Fail

A few years ago, my friend and colleague Professor Ken Pease, and I wrote a piece about the commonality of officers who inherit crime reduction/prevention projects from others, to essentially 'kill off' projects because they do not have the same vested interest in them as those involved in their inception.

We think this is still a frequent enough occurrence in the world of policing to warrant an update of our suggestion that crime prevention and reduction projects are most vulnerable to failing when there is a change of police officer leading them.

The following is based on an article published in Police Professional in 2020 (partially reproduced with permission).

Why do successful policing initiatives typically sink without trace? Ambitious high or middle ranking officers will set their stall out for promotion by doing new things rather than consolidating initiatives already in place, however successful, which are seen off by diktat or neglect. Consider the lion. A lion finds a lioness attractive. She already has cubs. He sees off the father of the cubs. He then kills the cubs. He’s not going to waste time and energy (‘parental investment’) nurturing progeny which do not carry his genes.

The first sign that we had hit a nerve came with a call from a colleague at another university. She had used the metaphor in a presentation to a very large police audience, and found that her audience recognised the phenomenon and were eager to provide instances from their own experience.

But sometimes the reaction has been: So what? If ‘killing the cubs’ is as widespread as we have reason to believe, it condemns innovation in policing to remain a prisoner of personal idiosyncrasy, ambition and riffs on conventional ideas.

Successful professions like medicine and engineering, advance by building on what has gone before, punctuated by game-changing innovations such as antibiotics in medicine and graphene in engineering. Progress is cumulative. In the words of Isaac Newton, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

The cub-killing metaphor implies a measure of egotism or cynicism on the part of police commanders. We sought to provoke by suggesting that for the most ambitious, the ideal strategy might be to dismantle previous initiatives, launch new ones with a fanfare of publicity, and contrive to move further up the greasy pole of career success before the merits or otherwise of their own initiatives become clear. Indeed, if their successor is equally ambitious, their own cubs will be killed as ruthlessly as they killed the cubs of their predecessor.

We insist on the role and cub-killing consequences of egotism and cynicism in policing as in other hierarchical organisations (including universities). However, cub-killing also has consequences for the actions of the most altruistic and conscientious practitioners of policing. One of us was recently privileged to attend a day conference in one force area. The programme featured two presentations by Chief Inspectors outlining their plans. There was no reference to previous work or attempts to access such work in data sources such as Popcenter. They were clearly committed hard-working people, but they were starting from scratch unnecessarily. There was no expectation that it should be otherwise. These young lions were just begetting their own cubs. As the song goes, ‘That’s just the way it is’. Initiatives are being launched with little or no reference to ‘prior art’ and are in turn discarded. One of us is currently writing a presentation for a National Policing Conference, suggesting that one aspect of Evidence Based Policing which may indeed deter those with good ideas from coming forward is the misconception that those ideas have to be unique and wholly original or they are somehow doomed to failure. They don’t. So please come forward.

When responsibility for a highly effective crime reduction initiative moved from a team of which one of us was a member, one of the writers asked why key elements had been scrapped. The reply was a contemptuous ‘We have moved a long way beyond that’. Simple measures that worked had been replaced by complicated measures that did not. The doyen of situational crime prevention, Ron Clarke, tells a chillingly similar story.

In a radio comedy from a previous millennium, an exchange went as follows:

Woman: Why have you strapped me to this operating table?

Man: Call it an old man’s whim.

Woman. Alright, why have you strapped me to this old man’s whim?

Substitute ‘BCU commander’ for old man, and the joke’s relevance to the argument advanced here becomes clear.

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There is another angle to our argument but it perhaps does not fit quite so neatly with our ‘cub-killing’ metaphor. In animal breeding programmes, it is sometimes the case that the infant of a lactating mother dies, while an orphan of the same species is in need of milk and nurturing. One technique is to take the skin or other parts of the dead infant and contrive to change the orphaned infant’s smell so that the lactating mother will take it as her own. By analogy, a police commander may want to adopt an extant scheme but will need to rebrand it to hide its origins.

By a somewhat forced analogy, sometimes the ‘cubs’ (crime reduction initiatives), exiled from the pride instead, are re-admitted under different names, on the orders of the pride leader. Sometimes ideas/initiatives are seemingly disposed of by new, senior police officers, only to be re-branded and re-introduced very soon. One of the most common returned cubs in our experience is burglary prevention initiatives.

We are currently toying with the idea of tracing what happens to ‘Tilley’ or ‘Goldstein’, award-winning crime reduction projects, after they have won. Do they continue to grow and go on to spawn/have many cubs of their own, or do they simply grow up respected, but nevertheless ‘cub-less’, elder lions? As we are undoubtedly now at the dangerous point of annoying readers with our overly exhaustive use of the lion metaphor, we will save this question for another day.

So where should we go from here? We will (if encouraged) go into specifics about two things

1. How to fashion research and evaluation styles that make for a better academic alignment with policing change.
2. Devising monitoring processes within the police service that would enable success to flourish and failure wither, so that, in our chapter title experience morphs into evidence. For the moment, we content ourselves with advocating a section within the Society for Evidence Based Policing, to be called APPYL, the Agency for the Protection of Promising Young Lions. (If you can think of a better name then answers on a postcard or in a tweet please.)

Jason Roach is Professor of Psychology and Policing at the University of Huddersfield.

Ken Pease is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at Manchester University.