Over the last 30 years, crime policy has become a central research area in criminology, and many important studies have been written. The primary focuses of many of these studies have been the so-called punitive turn. But alongside the punitive turn, there has also been a preventive turn and much of the preventive work since the late 1980s has taken presence in what is conceptualized as the community level. In Sweden local crime prevention (LCP), placing the municipal at the center of the work has been developing since the late 1990s. The belief in LCP as the kings’ way to success was confirmed in the latest government crime policy program. Through a study of a Swedish municipal, Landskrona, we analyze how a local crime policy takes form and how it is motivated and rationalized. The majority of Swedish studies on LCP primarily focus on evaluation, trying to measure potential effects. The purpose of the paper is to analyze how LCP is set within a political process and then assembled at the municipality level. The objective was to get close to the actual process of formulating and applying a municipal crime policy. Our research highlights that contrary to political belief, a prudent citizen has to be molded and shaped rather than liberated. Since LCP builds on assuming a consensus as to what the crime problem is, LCP becomes as much a moralistic venture as a crime prevention project. Harmonizing the actual crime-experience of the populace with a politicized picture of crime is a pivotal balancing-act for LCP. And due to the importance of culturally mediated understandings of crime, national problematizations seem to take precedence over local ones, and thus, LCP runs the risk of not validating neither the local populace nor local authorities sense of the crime problem.