Increasing anonymous crime reporting for CrimeStoppers

CrimeStoppers tasked us with increasing the quantity and quality of crime reporting in high crime areas in the UK. Anonymous reporting is vital for those living in communities affected by organised criminal activity, where speaking to police can carry serious risks. 

Such a challenge required alternative thinking and for that we turned to the Bright Spots approach. This is a well-established method in behavioural and social research that focuses on identifying areas where things are working well and then analysing why. Instead of starting with problems, it looks for “positive outliers” and asks: What’s different here and can we replicate it elsewhere? We worked with CrimeStoppers to analyse their data and pinpoint two Bright Spots– areas where both crime and crime reporting were high– to uncover insights that we might apply in other high-crime communities with low reporting. 

Before visiting these two Bright Spots, we conducted an extensive literature review, particularly covering the psychology of crime reporting. This helped us to identify potential barriers and drivers to reporting, which we then explored in the Bright Spots themselves. To uphold CrimeStoppers’ promise of anonymity, we developed a ‘projective questioning’ technique, so that we could ask people about their perceptions of crime reporting in the area without requiring people to implicate themselves. We also ran a workshop with CrimeStoppers Regional Managers to refine our approach.  

Our fieldwork combined a mix of structured and informal activities across the Bright Spots. We sat down with local police, interviewed residents, visited a soup kitchen, walked the estates, met with charities, played pool in a youth centre and shared tea in a Sikh gurdwara. These moments, planned and spontaneous, helped us to build trust and uncover authentic insights into community life and attitudes towards crime reporting. 

The team at Claremont were excellent partners for this work, helping us look at a core challenge for our charity in a positive way by turning the question on its head. Throughout the process the team engaged colleagues internally, explaining their work and findings clearly.  Their skills during the field work helped us see that the communities we work with often have the solutions themselves.

-Karen Ogborn, Chief of Staff, CrimeStoppers

This research led us to two strategic approaches, which we shared with CrimeStoppers’ internal stakeholders, including the Regional Managers network, for input on the preferred direction. The chosen approach, Bridge to Change, recognises the pivotal role of influential individuals, often those personally affected by crime, who can become powerful community ambassadors for change. During our fieldwork, we met these individuals: some had lost friends or family members to knife crime, while others were long-standing community leaders who had witnessed their neighbourhoods become high-crime areas over time. What united them was a distinct drive to make a difference. 

Bridge to Change is both a proactive and a reactive strategy, which encourages CrimeStoppers to support those affected by crime by providing information, resources and opportunities to channel their experience into positive action. Our next step on this project is to co-design information packs and ongoing support for those wishing to make a difference. It is essential that these packs are sensitive, responsive and well-informed. This is why we have developed a co-design plan that includes the input of external experts like the police, CrimeStoppers’ volunteers, experts in grief and loss and, most importantly, the community figures from high crime areas who represent our target audience.