Benchmarking the extent of quality-of-life crime : A study in Hong Kong’s public housing sector

Quality-of-Life (QoL) crime in public housing has attracted wide attention from the local governments and housing practitioners in many jurisdictions. For more informed policy making to combat the problem, it is necessary for the public administrators to identify the determinants of the extent of the problem in a particular housing estate or area. To this goal, benchmarking the extents of QoL crime across different areas is indispensable. However, governmental studies and scholarly works have relied heavily on figures like number of complaints or reports received by the housing authorities or polices and number of orders issued for the benchmarking purpose. These figures do not reflect the real extent of the QoL crime problem for various reasons like non-reporting of crimes and inefficiency in government's enforcement. Against this background, this chapter proposes a subjective but scientific measure of the extent of QoL crime for Hong Kong's public housing estates. The Quality-of-Life Crime Index (QLCI), a protocol for benchmarking housing estates or areas in respect of the problem of QoL crime, is developed using a multi-criteria decision making technique. Opinions of public housing residents are inputted for determining the weightings of different evaluation criteria. The QLCI can, on one hand, inform the public of the extent of QoL crime problem associated with their living environments. On the other hand, it serves as a tool for the housing authorities to prioritize their enforcement actions within their housing portfolios.