The motto of Mayor Dianne Watts' campaign for crime reduction was to get at the root causes of crime. That was the heart of it. It's one thing to say it, it's another thing to actually understand what that actually means, and in what context and everything else. A lot of it depends on very recent research—new things that we're learning all the time.
Dr. Andrea Curman, in 2012, published her dissertation out of Simon Fraser University, “Crime and Place: A Longitudinal Examination of Street Segment Patterns in Vancouver, BC.”, which showed that high amounts of crime happen only on a very few streets.
It's not even known yet whether those streets actually constitute a neighbourhood. That one piece of information could fundamentally transform what we think in regard to crime, both in theory and practice. That just came out two years ago. Her work is being published with Dr. Martin Andresen at Simon Fraser University, who is one of the most prolific young publishers today.
As for other causes, I may just remind everybody that the United Nations compendium does not talk only about social developmental crime prevention but also about situational crime prevention. There is a whole body of research and literature around situational crime prevention that often gets lost on the wider public, and is only in the domain of police, courts, and corrections.