The main argument is that crime prevention strategies should be based on local and temporal knowledge about crime. Instead, the vast majority of crime prevention programming is based on generalized research on the broad structural patterns of crime and control while obscuring experiences at the local level. This reliance on generalized knowledge is coupled, in England and Wales, with a history of privileging expert knowledge in the area of crime policy, which further obscures localized knowledge. The author illustrates these main points, as well as highlights the inherent political nature of crime control policies, through a case study of key crime policy shifts in England and Wales over the past three decades. The mid-20th-century regimes of rehabilitation and community development gave way to the 1980s focus on two major crime prevention strategies: primary situational crime prevention and social crime prevention. The political rhetoric on crime prevention eventually led to rhetoric on community safety; the resulting legislative and institutional outcomes are described, many of which aimed to diffuse responsibility for community safety to communities. Next, the authors turn to a consideration of the international trends in crime prevention, highlighting three comparative ideal types of crime prevention or security regimes: neoliberal security, social democratic security, and moral conservative security. The nation-state focus as the main framework for comparative criminological work on crime prevention and public safety is critiqued as being inherently limiting and superficially neat. Crime prevention planning would benefit from the supranatural, subnational, and national level of research and evaluation. In support of this argument, the authors present examples from across Europe on a range of political and cultural traditions of crime control. In closing, the authors argue that crime policies are as much about politics, economics, and cultures, as they are about rational debates concerning techniques that work. Notes, references