Cities and towns confront new demands for collaborative approaches to crime prevention and public safety programming. This is met through the evidence-based framework of DICE™. It’s co-produced crime prevention and place-based risk governance.

OVERVIEW

From the EXECUTIVE SUMMARY of the DICE™ eBook: available for free download from Simsi Press: simsi.com/dice-ebook
Rutgers University partnered with Simsi to make DICE™ readily available to communities throughout the United States and around the world.
Crime is a symptom of complex problems that involve interactions of people with their environments. Problems that preempt the emergence of crime and persistent opportunities for criminal offending at particular places require multiple resources to adequately address them. This requires analytics that shed light on the issues influencing places and that drive actions to address the core elements of problem places. Crime analysis with Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) provides this context.
RTM diagnoses settings that attract criminal behavior so you can disrupt opportunities for crime by focusing on environmental conditions that attract illegal or disruptive behavior and victimization. RTM analytics “drive actions” by making connections between crime incident location patterns and features of landscapes in ways that empower multiple local stakeholders to change environments to impact behavior. This delivers better policing and enhances public safety through place management. This is achieved through DICE™.
DICE™ serves as the backbone of a comprehensive public safety program that mobilizes existing local resources to share the burden of crime prevention. No one single resource or stakeholder can adequately address all elements of criminal behavior. DICE™ empowers multiple community organizations to become co-producers of public safety and crime prevention strategies tailored to local problems and contexts. Law enforcement is only one part of this effort.
Data analysis is a key component of DICE™ but, in addition, the human element makes the analytic outputs relatable and the place-based intervention activities pragmatic and impactful. This guarantees broader benefits to community health and wellness and builds trustworthy relationships that foster sustainability of the efforts initiated.

DICE™ addresses social justice and economic inequality, elements often overlooked by other approaches to public safety. DICE™ is not about selecting just one strategy to prevent crime. It’s about the process for data sharing and problem-solving with inputs and actions from many perspectives. DICE™ differentiates “law enforcement” from “public safety”, and demonstrates how a process for (1) diagnosing crime patterns with RTM, (2) forming risk narratives to guide responsive actions, and (3) coordinating multiple stakeholders can be structured and repeatable. Making communities safer succeeds when the strategy is multifaceted and focused on a collective goal of public safety that brings people and resources together around places. It empowers communities to find ways to address crime by means other than law enforcement and policing. DICE™ is easily facilitated with Simsi software and training. 
Key Takeaways for Implementing DICE™

Focus on places, not only people, to prevent crime.
  • Rather than continuously labeling the same places as “hot spots”, identify the built environments that enable and perpetuate the undesired behaviors in those locations, and other vulnerable areas.
  • Fix the “hot spots” and create safer spaces through place-based risk governance.

Use Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) and other place-based methods for crime analysis.
  • RTM breaks down large crime trends into smaller, location-oriented problems that are easier to understand and manage for intervention purposes. Targeted multifaceted and multi-stakeholder prevention strategies can focus on individual elements of the crime problem at key places.
  • State, county, and municipal departments with specific domains, purposes, and resources are brought together to address different aspects of larger problems. This can be done without relying on police to perform actions outside of their core duties and training. Similarly, community-based organizations with funding for their own mission-oriented services are encouraged to bring additional expertise and resources for problem-solving. All involved stakeholders stay within their agency’s mission while providing a necessary piece to a comprehensive intervention strategy.
  • Results from RTM analysis highlight the settings that the most appropriate departments or organizations can directly impact, maintain, or influence.
  • DICE™ is a best-practice for place-based public safety programming without being too prescriptive. It enables local control, empowering local vested interests to be part of a process that drives data-informed actions for crime prevention and other public safety outcomes.

Adopt DICE™ as a data-informed and community-focused program for local public safety.
  • DICE™ enhances existing resources while meeting local needs and expectations. This allows multiple stakeholders to coproduce public safety through coordinated actions intended to disrupt situational contexts and opportunities for crime (e.g., disrupting risk narratives).
  • DICE™ enables stakeholders to communicate and source ideas and plans for crime prevention activities that are informed by data and analytics.
  • DICE™ encourages coordination of existing resources at small priority focus areas in ways that can make a big impact on the entire jurisdiction by reallocating resources over time.
  • DICE™ brings more people and perspectives to the table, allowing for clearer expectations and comprehensive problem solving.
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
123 Washington Street, Newark, NJ 07102 USA
Copyright (c) All Rights Reserved | Joel M. Caplan, Director