Summary

The Handbook builds on the basic concepts and principles reflected in the United Nations standards and norms in crime prevention and criminal justice that relate to policing  and that are outlined in other United Nations documents on the subject6 as well as in the wider range of scholarly and policy literature. It seeks to provide practitioners, including government officials, police, municipal planners and members of civic groups, especially in low- and middle-income countries, with a basic conceptual grounding in democratic policing, and guidelines on good practices so that they can successfully undertake democratic policing in the urban contexts in which they operate.

The main issues addressed here are the dimensions of urban crime problems in the growing cities of low- and middle-income countries and how collaboration between urban planners, civil society, government officials and different types of police can help to solve those problems. The Handbook also examines a variety of crime control strategies, including community-oriented policing, problem-oriented policing, intelligence-led policing, situational crime prevention, the “broken windows” theory and the strategy on crime prevention through environmental design. It also addresses broader principles of managing urban space to control crime and strategies for evaluating crime control programmes.

The Handbook includes references to efforts to control crime in an array of countries, including Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America. The overall objective of the Handbook is therefore to outline the new, innovative techniques and to explain how they have been applied to address crime problems in low- and middle-income countries. The various programmes, policies and approaches described here can provide law enforcement policymakers, front-line officers, urban planners and other city authorities as well as civil society organizations with basic information about an array of strategies and good governance practices to control crime in rapidly growing cities in low- and middle-income countries.