From Crime Problems to Crime-Process Profiles

Abstract

Crime-prevention analysis commonly begins with named problems such as youth violence, gang recruitment, hot spots, recidivism, drug markets, or repeat victimisation. Such labels are useful for recognition and administration, but they do not by themselves identify the mechanisms through which a bounded crime phenomenon is generated, realised, stabilised, or reproduced. This paper develops the Crime-Process Profile as the phenomenon-side foundation of the Prevention Fit Programme. It provides a controlled procedure for translating a bounded crime-problem label into an evidence-traceable and versioned representation of the process carrying the phenomenon. The framework specifies exactly ten dimensions: process level; mechanism content; carrier and scale; temporal position; organisational embedding; stabilisation and path dependence; changeability and leverage accessibility; uncertainty and evidential status; cross-level feedback; and boundary and exclusion conditions. The paper also establishes the problem-boundary authority declaration, rival-profile testing, negative identification, independence safeguards, contextual reconstruction, profile freezing, burdening conditions, and the downstream handoff of the complete frozen Crime-Process Profile. This is Paper 1 of 6 in the Prevention Fit Programme. Its output is the phenomenon-side object inherited by all later papers. It does not select interventions or assess prevention fit.