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Prologue

Susan Sim

There is no escaping the NCPC in Singapore; posters bearing its logo are
on lift doors and notice boards in lift lobbies, on walls of police buildings,
on buses and MRT trains and in stations and at bus stops. Cyberspace is
not spared either, as its public service announcements and videos pop up on
Facebook and YouTube too.
Virtually every weekend there is a crime prevention exhibition
somewhere. Once a month, there’s Crime Watch. Whenever a crime trend
spikes, Council members go on air.
Much of the heavy lifting is carried out by a small secretariat staff, aided
by police offi cers, and overseen by a board of volunteers. This book is,
however, not about celebrating their achievements or chronicling 36 years
of crime prevention education by the Council. To be honest, no one really
knows the full depth of what the NCPC has achieved as it has until recently
not been in the habit of archiving its work.
When the NCPC celebrated its 30th Anniversary in 2011, I had been
a Council member barely two years but foolhardily volunteered to write a
book to mark the occasion. Not a coffee table book, I insisted, but a history
of the NCPC no less.
As the NCPC’s 35th anniversary approached in 2016, then Executive
Director Tan Tin Wee asked me if I would write another book on its work.
As an NCPC insider and non-historian who fancied herself one, I wanted
to co-write the book with an objective observer with an inside track into crime
and law enforcement. In typical Singapore fashion, chief police psychologist
Majeed Khader and I sealed the deal over lunch. He agreed to contribute a
chapter on the theories behind crime prevention and assigned Carolyn Misir
and Han Yongni to provide evaluations of specifi c NCPC campaigns and
advise me on the psychological aspects of crime, victims and offenders. It

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