The major aims of the Safer Cities Program are to reduce crime, lessen fear of crime, and create safer cities where economic enterprise and community life can flourish. The overall program is centrally administered by the Crime Prevention Unit at the Home Office; each individual project is locally driven, however. The staffing structure is identical for each Safer City Program, and so is central government funding. Evaluation plays a large part in the Safer Cities Program, and it operates at differing levels for differing goals and is conducted by different persons. Regarding the origin of the Safer Cities Program, it turned on the exploitation of opportunity by a motivated group of criminologists who adapted their efforts to the political and administrative circumstances in which they found themselves. Regarding the future of the Safer Cities Program, it may well be too fragile to survive, certainly in its present form. Whatever the positive possibilities Safer Cities offers in instructive and effective applied criminology, the inconsistencies and arbitrariness in its present form is likely to be squeezed out by succeeding developments. Part of the cause of its elimination will be the very success of the Crime Prevention Unit in promoting institutionalization of attention to crime at a local level, thus rendering the centralized Safer Cities Program redundant. 10 notes and 33 references