The digital expertise of the German Prevention Congress for the Jubilee Congress 2020


Author: Dr Claudia Heinzelmann, DPT

For the digital expert report of the 25th German Prevention Congress, the DPT asked 17 experts for their opinion on digitalisation in the context of crime and crime prevention. The result is 68 short videos in which the experts provide information about the phenomenon of digitisation and digitalisation, current challenges, opportunities and future visions for crime prevention. Together with further background information, the videos are posted on the interactive microsite www.smart-prevention.de.

It was at the first German Prevention Congress 25 years ago, the Programme Advisory Board took up the spirit of that time and created a current focus topic. Since 2007, DPT has had an independent scientific report drawn up for each congress, which prepares analyses and scientific statements on this respective key topic. The main topic of this year’s German Prevention Congress is “Smart Prevention – Prevention in the digital world” and for the first time, this year’s expert report is not in text form but has a multimedia format.

For this purpose, DPT interviewed 17 experts from Germany on the following questions:

1. What are the relevant characteristics of digitalisation?
2. What specific challenges arise from digitalisation concerning the extent of violence and crime and the ways in which they are practised?
3. How can the new technical possibilities be used to prevent crime?

The reviewers represented expertise from six specialist disciplines: informatics, criminology, law, psychology, social sciences and education.

On the one hand, digitalisation opens up new possibilities for crime and perpetrators. On the other hand, of course, increasing digitalisation not only involves risks and poses challenges for society and the state, digitalisation also creates new opportunities. “Digitalisation brings with it the opportunity to reach more people, to address more people, to bring issues to a larger audience,” says Georg Ungefuk, Senior Public Prosecutor and Spokesman of the General Public Prosecutor’s Office Frankfurt am Main. “It also enables networking, a networking of institutions, of organisations working in the field of crime prevention. Networking these organisations, working together for something, that is something that will work much better in the future and open up more possibilities through digitisation”. Another aspect is the use of technical solutions, which the CCI project also deals with in the context of predictive policing. Finally, each interviewee gave an outlook on what the digital world of the future and the associated “smart prevention” could look like.

The videos are subtitled in English so that they are also aimed at an international audience. At www.smart-prevention.de you can view all interviews and obtain further background information on the topic, the experts and further links. To get an impression, you can watch a trailer of the expert report and find some statements on the YouTube channel of the DPT.

If you have further questions about the digital expertise of the German Prevention Congress, please contact Margo Krenz, Project Manager ([email protected]).