Moving beyond the rather limited and abstract concepts of competency and underpinning knowledge into a more content-rich zone, we can actually identify five distinct types of crime prevention knowledge:
(1) Know-about — knowledge about crime problems and their costs and wider consequences for victims and society, offenders’ modus operandi, legal definitions of offences, patterns and trends in criminality, empirical risk and protective factors and theories of causation.
(2) Know-what — knowledge of which causes of crime are manipulable — what preventive methods work, against what crime problem, in what context, by what intervention mechanism/s, with what side-effects and what cost-effectiveness, for whose cost and benefit.
(3) Know-how — knowledge and skills (competencies) of implementation and other practical processes, operation of equipment, extent and limits of legal powers, instruments and duties to intervene, research, measurement and evaluation methodologies.
(4) Know-who — knowledge of contacts for ideas, advice, potential collaborators and partners, service providers, suppliers of funds, equipment and other specific resources, and wider support.
(5) Know-why — knowledge of the symbolic, emotional, ethical, cultural and value-laden meanings of crime and preventive action.
Doing practical, operational crime prevention involves gaining, and applying, all five Ks. But know-how, and in particular its process aspect, brings it all together.
CRIME PREVENTION AND WHAT WE CAN KNOW ABOUT IT
in
FROM THE SOURCE TO THE MAINSTREAM IS UPHILL: The Challenge of Transferring Knowledge of Crime Prevention Through Replication, Innovation and Anticipation
by Paul Ekblom
http://www.popcenter.org/library/crimeprevention/volume_13/07-Ekblom.pdf
Abstract: Knowledge, in combination with pragmatic, cultural, organisational and conceptual factors, determines the performance of practitioners such as police, local government community safety officers and product designers. This paper addresses the serious and widespread obstacles to the transfer and application of knowledge generated by professional criminological research, development and evaluation, to the mainstream of practice in the overlapping fields of crime prevention and problem-oriented policing. The emphasis is on those obstacles inherent in the nature and form of knowledge itself. It therefore relates contentfree concepts of knowledge management to content-rich considerations of the particular qualities of crime prevention knowledge and how it is applied in practice. It covers key issues of replication, innovation, and anticipation through, for example, foresight activities. It draws on ideas from design, evolutionary epistemology, memetics, more conventional anthropological views of cultural transmission and evolution, and organisational research on diffusion of innovation. The aim is to open up new ways of thinking centring on “genotypic” principles of prevention that apply across contexts and across time — which can provide the foundations for practical suggestions for training, guidance and design of knowledge bases. So many, and diverse, connections emerge to the works of one renowned social scientist that this paper seems almost an exercise in following the Donald Campbell trail.