How could design help protect homes and communities against crime and antisocial behaviour? Numerous physical security measures already exist, representing an array of options that can be bewildering. In the end, while responsibility lies with individual residents, communities acting together often have the biggest impacts in lessening crime and helping people feel safer.
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In Design Out Crime’s consideration of communities and crime, Neighbourhood and Home Watch (NHW) emerged as a natural partner. It was intimately involved with various crime prevention methods. It operated in many different communities and had shown its capacity to make a difference. In recent years the Neighbourhood and Homewatch Network (NHWN), had been formed and was already looking at ways of growing the organisation. A five-year business plan for NHW’s future was seen as a strategic opportunity to embed design-led thinking.
The impact of Neighbourhood Watch
Neighbourhood Watch is one of the biggest and most successful crime prevention schemes ever conceived. Begun in the US in the late sixties, its first came to the UK in 1982 It now has 173,000 schemes covering 7.9 million households in England and Wales.
Public perception of Neighbourhood Watch
It’s perhaps impossible to talk about Neighbourhood Watch without considering public perception. The image many people have of the organisation is faded street signs and ‘curtain twitchers’. This is completely unfair in at least one respect: being the eyes and ears of the police is certainly one of NHW members’ roles and is far more effective than the prejudice suggests. But how accurate is this anyway as a picture of the organisation as a whole?
What do real Neighbourhood Watch groups actually do?
As a first step in its re-evaluation, Neighbourhood Watch had already commissioned a series of case studies on best practice across the network. They reveal an extraordinary diversity of activity. These are just some of the things groups do:
- Liaising between police and communities, with benefit to both sides.
- Advising locals on security measures and recognising various types of crime.
- Organising training sessions and disseminating information on security issues such as bogus callers.
- Securing funding for security measures from local businesses and agencies.
- Campaigning for and organising improvements to urban geography, including street lighting and alley gating.
- Holding meetings, often with guest speakers from groups like the police, the fire service and the council.
- Managing communication systems to allow members to receive and report crime and community safety issues.
- Operating key-holder and house-sitting schemes in which neighbours look after each other’s properties when they are away.
- Partnerships with councils, youth workers, housing associations, local businesses, the fire service, lifeguards, charities, trading standards authorities and other community organisations.
- Community gardening and beautification initiatives, including tree planting, running allotments and organising hanging flower baskets.
- Publishing newsletters and running noticeboards.
- Organising graffiti cleanups.
- Providing activities for young people as a way of building social bonds and providing alternatives to crime and antisocial behaviour.
- Building bridges between different community groups.
In early discussions, NHWN defined three areas they would like to work on:
Greater youth and diversity engagement
NHW groups tend to be in low-crime areas, so the areas most in need of help are getting it least. It was generally felt that there was a need to engage more young people, members of ethnic minorities and members of higher crime communities.
Resources for members
The majority of the current membership was older, which meant that communication methods were limited by members’ lack of internet access. The result was a continuing focus on traditional communication channels such as phone calls, newsletters, meetings in town halls etc. NHWN had a website, but knew it could be improved.
Improved perception
Within the organisation, NHW was seen as a strong, iconic, recognised brand. The external perception was rather different, with widespread lack of clarity about purpose and processes.
Defining the project
Based on the discussions with NHWN, Design out Crime drew the conclusion that NHW’s design needs fell into two distinct areas: service and branding and a series of needs and guidelines emerged.
- Don’t fix what isn’t broken. Members are very attached to existing ways of working and there was a need to be sensitive to this. Good practices needed to be recognised and new approaches would need to offer clear benefit in order to wean people away from less effective ones.
- Maintaining member longevity. People become involved because of a specific issue, but once it’s dealt with, interest can easily wane.
- Joining made easy. If the barrier to entry is too high, people will quickly be put off.
- Simple, clear benefits. It wasn’t clear to outsiders why one should join. There were various logos but primarily for use on the likes of street signs and stickers in windows. Do these stop burglaries? How?
- Challenge the stereotype. The curtain twitcher stereotype needed to be better understood before it could be addressed. Brand positioning needed to specifically address this, not just create a new message.
- Crime vs. community. Some members said NHW was much more about vigilance against crime, others that it was much more about building communities. This needed to be resolved in brand positioning.
- Talking crime prevention. NHW can generate some best-practice crime prevention techniques and as a community organisation it is about sharing information clearly and accessibly. It needed an appropriate tone of voice.
- Building the service. The perceived need to engage more young people was seen to be missing a trick. In fact, with most NHW members being older, the real need was simply for more under 65s. Also, working age people, especially those starting families or moving home, would probably be easier to attract than teenagers.
- Helping them help themselves. It was clear that the grassroots nature of the organisation was important to members. Existing groups needed to continue to feel that they could act autonomously, in their own local interests.
Design phase 1: Service design
Service design looks at every aspect of a service, from its end users to its infrastructure. It uses design to map the touchpoints that make up a service and the journeys through it to create solutions that meet the needs of their users as precisely and efficiently as possible.
The service design phase began by going back to first principles to see what was and wasn’t working and where the gaps were. Designers talked to a wider group of members, non-members and potential members, but also looked for inspiration from other community groups, the idea being to see what was possible in general, not just refine existing practices.
The designers mapped the new service around its users and potential users: coordinators, members and non-members. This already pointed the way towards an innovation. NHWN’s resources were focused on members and coordinators. The designers showed that giving non-members resources would be a way of increasing involvement with the organisation overall. This also brought NHWN a new level of clarity about what it was providing and for whom. This framework was used to guide inquiries into how best to meet three key challenges:
- Engaging with the next generation
- Building the Neighbourhood Watch Network
- Supporting people in challenging areas
Design phase 2: Branding and communication
Branding looks at an organisation’s values in depth, defining them thoroughly and then providing detailed guidelines for presenting them accurately and engagingly in all communications. Brands and logos are often assumed to be the same thing. Actually a logo is usually only the most visible emblem of an organisation’s branding.
Work began with brand positioning workshops held for NHWN board/trustees and NHW representative from the regions. The aim was simply to get them to express themselves in a structured way, answering a series of questions on what they thought the scope, status, ambition, values and style of NHW were or should be.
The workshops clearly showed that there should be a focus on feelings of safety, not fear of crime. By creating the sense of people coming together, NHW would also show not just that its effectiveness lies in harnessing the power of the group, but that this is really the only way it even exists.
Finally it was important to challenge the misconception that NHW is not active. In many respects, it acts on its own community initiatives to improve the neighbourhood and increase support between neighbours.
This was the brand positioning upon which all communication and design work could be based. It was the first time NHW had ever had anything as structured and formalised as this and it added a lot of clarity to the organisation in general.
Design phase 3: The new website, features and materials
Website objectives, based on the service design recommendations, included:
- Provide access for non-members to get involved
- Signpost to important crime prevention information
- Provide resources for members
- Provide tools for coordinators
At a time when government is increasingly interested in harnessing the power of community initiatives, the NHW project may offer answers to a question that perpetually hovers in the air around such hopes: to what extent can grassroots voluntary organisations that grow organically, free of central control, be engineered to increase their efficiency – without destroying the autonomy that attracted members in the first place?
Interestingly, in this case, it can be argued that designers actually increased the scope for autonomy. Key to this was the service design recommendation that a formerly closed network become open, giving individuals more freedom to engage without formally joining. Branding work, similarly, found ways to more clearly deliver the message of communities working together to meet their own needs.
As far as the aim of designing out crime is concerned, the prospects here are good. Crime has historically been seen to decrease in NHW areas, suggesting that this new platform for more efficient work can only deliver further reductions, though challenges, such as high-crime areas, undoubtedly remain.
The most immediate challenge for NHW is to take advantage of this new platform and the momentum it creates. Reaching a critical mass of networked schemes will provide the biggest opportunity to bring a new generation into the fold.
Longer term, with the rapid advances in digital technologies and the expansion of online communities, NHW will have continuing opportunities to evolve. The clear gains made in this project should give us faith in the role of design, both in helping NHW to capitalise on these opportunities and in supporting the creation of safer communities and housing in general.