Design Against Crime Research Centre

Paul Ekblom read psychology at University College London, where he also gained his PhD. He spent much of his career as a researcher in the UK Home Office, centring on crime prevention. He was involved throughout crime prevention's rise from obscurity to widespread recognition by practitioners and policymakers in central and local government and beyond.

Paul initially worked on a range of individual crime prevention studies, practical demonstration projects and consultancies, including police truancy patrols, shoplifting, a feasibility study of the 'Crime-Free Car', drink and disorder in small towns, and crime on the London Underground. He then spent several years conceiving and orchestrating the industrial-scale evaluation of the impact and cost-effectiveness of the UK Government's Safer Cities Programme on burglary, whose results strongly shaped the subsequent national Crime Reduction Programme. His own contribution to that Programme was (with policy colleagues in the Home Office, the former Department of Trade and Industry and the Design Council) to plan, commission and guide a range of initiatives on Design Against Crime (including Royal Society of Arts Student Design Awards, research by Salford, Sheffield Hallam and Cambridge Universities on the state of DAC in teaching, practice and industry and a range of guidance and support material emanating from that). He also (with Prof Ken Pease) inaugurated and advised the UK Foresight panel on Crime Prevention.

Paul has had extensive international involvement with EU, Europol, ICPC and UN, and was Scientific Expert on a Council of Europe initiative on Partnership in Crime Prevention. His final Home Office responsibilities focused on horizon-scanning, advising on Design against Crime initiatives (including advising on the production of Safer Places, the government guidance on planning and crime) and supporting the development of crime prevention as a professional discipline through a rigorous and systematic conceptual framework, the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity (www.crimereduction.gov.uk/learningzone/cco.htm), and a wider, process-based schema for capturing and transferring knowledge of good practice, the 5i's (www.crimereduction.gov.uk/learningzone/5isintro.htm).

When the opportunity arose to expand his involvement in Design Against Crime by joining the Research Centre at Central Saint Martin's, Paul made the transition to academia without hesitation. He is currently also visiting professor at the Applied Criminology Group, Huddersfield University, and Associate of the UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science.

Current research interests
• Designing products, places and systems against crime, disorder, drug abuse and terrorism
• Conceptual frameworks and suites of definitions for integrating crime science, security and design (with a special interest in redeveloping the approach known as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design), and for managing general crime prevention knowledge and improving its practice
• Evaluation methods: process and impact
• Crime, evolution, complexity and design
• Crime futures: crime risk and impact assessment, crime proofing of designs

Paul is Principal Investigator on the 3-year, £366k, AHRC-funded research project 'Turning the Tables on Crime' which is about designing, implementing and (in conjunction with the UCL Jill Dando Institute) evaluating the impact on theft, of a range of bag clips for tables in bars.

Paul can be contacted on: p.ekblom@csm.arts.ac.uk