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Introduction
One of the earliest neighbourhood watch programmes in the U.K. was the Cheshire Home Watch programme implemented in Mollington in 1982 (Anderton, 1985). Since then the number of neighbourhood watch schemes in the U.K. has grown rapidly. The report of the 2000 British Crime Survey estimated that over a quarter (27 per cent) of all households (approximately six million households) in England and Wales were members of a neighbourhood watch scheme (Sims, 2001). This amounted to over 155,000 active schemes. One of the first schemes in the U.S. was the Seattle Community Crime Prevention Project launched in 1973 (Cirel et al. , 1977). The report of The 2000 National Crime Prevention Survey (National Crime Prevention Council, 2001) in the United States estimated that in that year 41 per cent of the American population lived in communities covered by neighbourhood watch. Considering that there has been such a large investment in neighbourhood watch, it is reasonable to ask whether neighbourhood watch is effective in reducing crime.
The results of previous reviews of the literature on the effectiveness of neighbourhood watch have been mixed. One of the earliest reviews by Titus (1984) summarised the results of nearly 40 community crime prevention programmes that included elements of neighbourhood watch. Most were evaluated by police departments or were based on data from police departments. Nearly all found that neighbourhood watch areas had lower levels of crime in the period following their implementation than in the comparison areas. However, most of the evaluations were described as "weak" in terms of internal validity. A more recent review of the literature on the effectiveness of community watch programmes selected only evaluations with the strongest research designs (Sherman, 1997; Sherman and Eck, 2002). Studies were included only if they had used random assignment or had monitored both watch areas and comparison areas over time. The review found just four evaluations that matched these criteria. The review showed that the results of these evaluations were largely negative. The authors concluded, "The oldest and best-known community policing program, Neighborhood Watch, is ineffective at preventing crime" (Sherman, 1997; Sherman and Eck, 2002).
The current paper presents the results of a recent systematic review of the research evidence of the effectiveness of neighbourhood watch. The review...