Ronald Clarke obituary

The Guardian

26-06-2025

In 1976, Ronald Clarke, who has died from cancer aged 84, published a paper entitled Crime As Opportunity. Written with three colleagues at the Home Office research unit, it overturned the conventional view that crime is simply caused by 'criminals' and laid the groundwork for what would become known as situational crime prevention.
The concept – that opportunity makes the thief – was hardly new, but Ron's practical application of the idea was revolutionary. Rather than focusing on the offender, he turned attention to the offence – why, where, how and when – and how links in the chain which led to crime could be removed.
As with treating different illnesses, the cures were specific to their contexts: putting high value items behind the shop counter; installing window locks or better car security; improving sightlines; making stolen items traceable; or introducing cash boxes which sprayed indelible dye over money and thieves. All these remedies worked far more effectively than relying on arrests after the event.
These insights were reinforced in 1988 when, with his Home Office colleague Pat Mayhew, Ron investigated the steep decline in suicides in England and Wales between 1963 and 1975. The falls were happening as traditional coal gas containing carbon monoxide was replaced by North Sea gas, which is mostly methane. This could mean only one thing: when attempted suicides failed, many people did not try again. This prompted a raft of measures such as limiting the sale of over-the-counter drugs such as paracetamol.
Ron and his followers went on to show that improved home security did not simply displace crime to neighbouring houses; on the contrary, it created a 'halo effect', lowering crime rates in the broader area. His ideas helped explain why crime levels in general surged until the 1990s before falling across the industrialised world, in step with improved security. He also anticipated shifts in criminal behaviour: as physical crimes declined, cybercrime and fraud rose, often committed by different types of people. The burglar did not become the hacker; rather, new crimes attracted new actors.
His work drew little support from mainstream criminology, since it defied traditional beliefs that crime is mostly caused by a discrete class of inherently deviant individuals. He established that our immediate circumstances dictate our actions much more than our predispositions. Some people would always behave badly, but the ebb and flow of crime is dictated by how many others found it easy to break the rules. Thus to a large degree we can predict and design out many types of crime, and to some extent even suicide. (Suicide had itself ceased to be a crime in England and Wales in 1961, and in Northern Ireland in 1966. It was never a crime in Scotland.)
The starting point for his work had been medical, with an MA in clinical psychology (1965) at the Maudsley hospital in south-east London. For his PhD, Ron moved to social problems, investigating why Britain's network of training schools for delinquent boys had such high rates of absconding. He gave the boys batteries of psychological tests but found little difference between those who fled and those who did not. Instead he discovered hotspots of absconding at some of the detention centres. It was this insight that would inspire his later work.
In 1968 Ron became a research officer at the Home Office, where, together with his colleague Derek Cornish, he set out to identify which rehabilitative methods were most effective in reforming young offenders. The answer, surprisingly, was none. Their randomised trial showed no difference in recidivism between the different correctional approaches. In fact boys who went through any form of rehabilitation were just as likely to reoffend as boys who had no therapy at all.
At first this led to disillusionment with randomised trials, but increasingly Ron came to realise that criminology often used self-serving methodologies, and that the dominant sociological explanations were largely without foundation. These heretical views did little to endear him to his peers as he rose through the ranks at the Home Office, eventually supervising research in an era when the department was by far the country's largest employer of criminologists.
Ron's scepticism of conventional wisdom extended to crime statistics themselves. Under his leadership, the British Crime Survey was launched in the early 1980s. It revealed that actual victimisation rates were often double those reported to police, and that official crime figures sometimes moved in opposite directions from lived experiences. Today, the renamed Crime Survey for England and Wales is regarded by the Office for National Statistics as the most reliable indicator of crime trends, while police figures have lost their designation as official statistics.
In 1984 Ron was recruited to the US, joining Temple University in Philadelphia, and in 1987 went to Rutgers University, New Jersey, as dean of the school of criminal justice. Although he published prodigiously, as Ronald V Clarke, and was feted by a growing and increasingly international band of scholars, he always felt marginalised by mainstream criminology, with its focus on offenders rather than exploring ways to cut offending.
He found his natural home in the emerging discipline of crime science – a new practical and cross-disciplinary approach that I had conceived out of frustration with ideological and theory-driven criminology. Ron's work had helped inspire the notion in the late 1990s, together with that of Prof Ken Pease, who had been working along similar lines, and later the Metropolitan police commissioner John Stevens and Gloria Laycock, Ron's successor at the Home Office.
In 2001 crime science in turn found its first academic home in the Jill Dando Institute at University College London. Ron was a visiting professor there, and thereafter preferred to call himself a crime scientist rather than a criminologist.
He had already stepped down as head of department at Rutgers in 1998, but continued teaching, research and advising the police. In 2002 he helped create the US-based Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, providing guidance to officers for cutting crime, and was its associate director until his death. When in his last years he eased away from full-time work he pursued bird photography with the same intensity he had once brought to research, and turned his attention to encouraging students to tackle wildlife crime.
Born in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Ron was the middle of three children to a German mother, Barbara Gemuseus, a missionary dentist, and a British father, Henry Clarke, a highway engineer. At first he was more fluent in Swahili than English.
After the family moved to Britain in the 1950s he went to Teignmouth grammar school, Devon, and took a psychology degree at the University of Bristol (1959-62). There he met Sheelagh Carter, a teacher.
They married in 1966, and she survives him, along with their children, Henry, George and Marianne.
Ronald Victor Gemuseus Clarke, crime scientist, born 24 April 1941; died 28 May 2025