Abstract
Despite the growing relevance of public health approaches to crime prevention, the conceptual problems that arise from their adoption have not been explored in sufficient detail. More specifically, questions around epistemic authority, with whom this is located and how conflicts around it are negotiated and managed have been somewhat overlooked, obscuring struggles over what counts as valid knowledge within these approaches. We put forward three types of knowledge: the professional knowledge of practitioners; the local knowledge of community members; and the lived knowledge of those affected by interventions informed by public health principles. While co-production is extensively used to bring these together, the often-observed unequal power structures within which these practices unfold need to be acknowledged more openly. Finally, we draw on Arendt's work to imagine how the hidden negotiations and conflicts over meaning within these approaches could be brought out in the open in a deliberative, democratic space. We also suggest that failing to fully acknowledge the messy, contested, and political aspects of crime prevention, both in theory and practice, means that the potential for meaningful change offered by public health approaches to crime prevention is yet to be fully appreciated.