Where Are We Now?

The year 2005 marks the 25th anniversary of a national commitment to crime prevention, as McGruff the Crime Dog and the National Citizens' Crime Prevention Campaign made their debuts in 1980. 

Community-level crime prevention that engaged individual citizens and community groups had begun to emerge as a promising approach to reducing the nation's crime levels during the mid-1970s, thanks to work funded through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.   The legislation that started it all, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, was based on the work of the Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, whose report was published in 1967.

In the late 1970s, work began on a campaign to educate members of the public about their roles in preventing crime and reducing risks.  What debuted in 1980 was the first communication about personal strategies to prevent crime - locking doors, leaving a light on, letting the neighbors know you'll be gone.  The trench-coated canine in these ads didn't have a name in February 1980, but on July 1 of that year, McGruff the Crime Dog officially launched his stellar career as the nation's crime prevention icon.  By 1982, the movement had gained sufficient strength that an organization focused on crime prevention - the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) - was created to host the campaign and serve as secretariat for the Crime Prevention Coalition [now the Crime Prevention Coalition of America (CPCA.)]

McGruff and his campaign took off with a roar.  An independent evaluation published in 1983 showed that a majority of Americans had gotten the message and that many were taking individual protective measures.  Ten years later, a second study showed that the character and his messages were known and trusted by a majority of adults and relied upon by crime prevention practitioners and media public service managers around the nation.  Ten years of hard work had resulted in even more people taking action and in a highly cost-effective campaign. 

In the 1970s, the public saw crime prevention as the job of the police.  By the 1980s, the public recognized that public safety was a mutual task - theirs and law enforcement's.  Toward the end of the 1980s, community-based planning coupled with action began to emerge as a powerful prevention tool. 

As the 1990s opened, the Crime Prevention Coalition of America presented the nation with 11 principles of crime prevention as an experience-based standard for shaping and guiding this important work.  In 1993, the National Academy of Sciences published Understanding and Preventing Violence, which highlighted the multiple causes of violence and the myriad areas in which communities could play critical roles in reducing causes of and opportunities for violence.  Community-based, comprehensive approaches to crime prevention gained momentum.  Costs of crime were more thoroughly documented, enabling practitioners to make a stronger case for prevention.  Community policing drew on crime prevention experience and strategies as a major source of problem solving.

As the century turned, financial crises in the nation's states, counties, and cities resulted in cuts in support for prevention.  Despite the success of prevention in cutting crime rates from the highs of 1992-1993, Americans tended to see violence as isolated in their communities, rather than as a shared problem.  Meanwhile, new crimes and new forms of old crimes emerged - methamphetamine use and production, identity theft, electronic (email and Internet) venues for fraud schemes, the persistence of gangs, looming reentry into the nation's communities of those imprisoned during the early and mid-1990s, and the realization of the threat of terrorism emerged to challenge the nation.  At the same time, a host of new tools - email communication with residents; websites with educational information and local updates, crime mapping to help apply prevention strategies more effectively - began coming to the fore as well.  In addition, support has been building for fact-based programming that draws from the best of research to design programs that can be usefully evaluated. 

Looking back from the perspective of 25 years of focused, organized commitment to crime prevention, McGruff the Crime Dog has played a pivotal role as the nation's best-known crime prevention symbol, indeed among the best-known advertising characters in the country.  The Crime Prevention Coalition of America has sustained its national and state-level partnerships. 

The challenges and opportunities ahead are exciting.  A more diverse, older, more technologically savvy nation will need basic crime prevention mixed with tailored strategies.  Electronic crimes and family violence need preventive attention, and crime prevention practitioners need to understand how to build the community cohesion that research is telling us is a key to reducing crime in all kinds of communities. 

Stay tuned for the next 25 years - the best is yet to come.