Planning for Crime Prevention

A Transatlantic Perspective

Ted Kitchen, Richard H Schneider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134549252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Crime and the fear of crime are issues high in public concern and on political agendas in most developed countries. This book takes these issues and relates them to the contribution that urban planners and participative planning processes can make in response to these problems. Its focus is thus on the extent to which crime opportunities can be prevented or reduced through the design, planning and management of the built environment. The perspective of the book is transatlantic and comparative, not only because ideas and inspiration in this and many other fields increasingly move between countries but also because there is a great deal of relevant theoretical material and practice in both the USA and the UK which has not previously been pulled together in this systemic manner.

PART 1
CONTEXT AND KEY IDEAS

CHAPTER 1
CRIME, COSTS AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE

INTRODUCTION

For urban planners and designers, police, policy makers and a growing number of citizens, the concept of ‘quality of life’ has become increasingly important as a defining measure of the health of cities and the societies of which they are a part. In this chapter we discuss crime and the fear of crime as key factors directing the choices that citizens make and as these choices affect the quality of life in Britain and in the United States. Towards that end:

• we explore the implications that basic questions of safety have for ourselves and our families relative to urban places, the fundamental building blocks of British and American cities. We review definitions of the component elements of crime prevention planning, focusing on measures of programme success in reducing crime and the fear of crime.
• we consider the theoretical predicates of crime prevention, through origins in the classical, positivist, sociological and modern schools of criminology. In so doing, we focus particularly on offender and environment-based approaches as related to traditional and emerging models of crime prevention.
• we review the impacts that crime has had on the quality of life of citizens in Britain and the United States, noting citizens’ responses to crime and the fear of crime in residential, shopping, recreational and employment choices. Since crime is a major expense to both nations, we review some of the relative costs of crime as estimated by recent national studies.
• beyond mere statistical measures, we explore the role crime has in driving citizen choices, noting that these have important impacts on the viability and liveability of large metropolitan areas in the United States and Britain. We suggest that a primary role of urban planning is to increase the range of choices available to citizens, while crime and the fear of crime have the opposite effects. Despite that, we note that crime prevention planning has been understated in the traditional planning and urban design literature and in available coursework, even though, as we see in Chapter 2, it is consistently at or near the top of concerns stated by citizens in repeated national polls. We conclude with a summary that attempts to integrate the multiple concepts expressed in this chapter and pave the way for future research and practice.

‘IS IT SAFE?’

As every parent knows who has ever sent a child off to live away from home, whether for a day or a semester, the fundamental questions asked are: ‘Is it safe where you’ll be living? Is the neighbourhood a high crime area? Is there adequate street lighting? Are the doors strong, the windows secure? Will there be parents or guardians to watch over you?’ We put such questions to our loved ones (and to ourselves) countless times in our lives. Often, the answers we get flow from gut feelings, from casual observations, from impressions based on newspaper reports, from speaking with friends and relatives, or infrequently, from police statistics or from survey data. While those responses may be sufficient to guide the average citizen’s choices in answering the question ‘Is it safe?’, they are rarely helpful in understanding ‘How can we make places safer?’

We generally look to the police to make places safe. Until victimised, and perhaps not even after then, most citizens never consider the role that others may play – urban planners and designers, architects, environmental and behavioural scientists – in making places safer by preventing future crime. Moreover, most people never consider the linkage between the design and management of the physical environment and crime prevention. But there is a growing body of evidence to show that these are indeed connected. This book explores those connections by reviewing the theory and application of crime prevention planning to places in Britain and in the United States. Our intent is to understand where we are in the struggle to make places safer for ourselves and our loved ones.

We are particularly concerned with how much of what we believe about environmental crime prevention is based upon reasonable empirical research, and the implications of proceeding with crime prevention interventions in the absence of such validation. Our concern therefore is that the development of crime prevention policy be evidence-driven (Van Dijk, 1997), and that planners and other professionals concerned with the urban environment take more of a role in policy making and application processes.

In developing those themes, our first task is to characterise the concepts that we use throughout the book.

DEFINITIONS

The Oxford English Dictionary defines crime as ‘an act punishable by law, as being forbidden by statute or injurious to the public welfare’ (1982, page 603). Recognising that each nation defines crime differently within their criminal codes, we are primarily concerned with those crimes that national surveys in Britain and the United States tell us citizens fear the most: ‘stranger to stranger’ personal and property crimes, such as assault, robbery, burglary and car-related burglary and theft. We understand nevertheless that there are other serious offences, such as rape and murder, that citizens fear, as well as many minor crimes that affect peoples’ quality of life, such as vandalism and public incivilities. We do not address ‘white collar’ crimes, such as fraud, or the rapidly emerging field of cyber-crime. While burdensome to individuals and costly to society, these crimes have a structure that generally defies place-specific analysis as characterised here. Nevertheless, of the vast numbers of crimes in Britain and the United States – 14.7 million crimes against adults living in private households in 1999 according to the 2000 British Crime survey (Home Office, 2000b) and 28.8 million in the United States during 1999 according to the National Crime Victimisation Survey (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000) – there is a growing body of evidence that many are indeed amenable to interventions based on the environmental, place-based crime prevention techniques discussed in this text. Case studies presented in Chapters 5–8 suggest that the commission of property crimes (which in both nations constitute the vast majority of crime), as well as some types of violent crimes, are sensitive to some design or planning-based crime prevention interventions. That being said, there remain a wide variety of crimes (non-stranger-to-stranger homicides, drug possession, child abuse, many types of sex offences) and annoyances (loud music, on-street begging), not always rising to the level of crimes, that present themselves within the urban context that are not, on the surface at least, susceptible to such interventions.¹

Crime prevention has been defined many ways by many different public agencies and scholars. One such definition is:

a pattern of attitudes and behaviour directed both at reducing the threat of crime and enhancing the sense of safety and security, to positively influence the quality of life in our society and to help develop environments where crime cannot flourish (NCPC, 1997, page 2).

Another definition of crime prevention conceives it as ‘the anticipation, recognition and appraisal of a crime risk and the initiation of some action to remove or reduce it’ (NCPI, 1986), and yet another envisions it as efforts ‘to reduce the risks of criminal events and related misbehaviour by intervening in their causes’ (Ekblom, 1997, page 251). While useful, none of the above definitions clearly grapples with what has emerged in recent years as a powerful doctrine applied to almost all private endeavours and to most tax-payer financed programmes on both sides of the Atlantic: the focus on the results of activities, as distinct from processes and intents.

No matter how laudable programme goals or strivings are, politicians, administrators, and citizens have in the last decade increasingly demanded that agencies actually deliver on promises to make life better and, in the case of crime prevention, to make places safer. As noted by practitioners and scholars for over almost two decades (Poyner, 1983; Sherman et al., 1997), we have been awash in the widely publicised good intentions of crime prevention programmes in institutional settings ranging from communities to criminal justice agencies,² yet we often lack the most basic verifications to support the claims being made.

Perhaps because it has been difficult to separate the reality from the ‘hype’ there is widespread public cynicism about crime prevention measures. However, contrary to popular sentiment, there is growing international evidence that many types of crime prevention interventions actually work, and that they are more cost effective than conventional, ‘punitive’ measures (UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, 1999). In spite of this, many crime prevention programme results have often not been assessed against crime reduction goals, or are simply not measurable. This is the case despite the emergence of relatively powerful analytical tools and techniques in recent years, and renewed interest by British and American policy makers in the value of crime prevention planning, especially as related to places.

For these reasons, we propose an amended version of Ekblom’s straightforward definition above, suggesting that crime prevention is ‘efforts to reduce the risks of criminal events and related misbehaviour by intervening in their causes so as to effect measurable changes in crime occurrence or the fear of crime.’

We consider ‘places’ as important since they are a fundamental component of both the criminal event³ and the environment of cities. According to Paul J. and Patricia L. Brantingham, the architects of environmental criminology:

A crime is a complex event. A crime occurs when four things are in concurrence: a law, an offender, a target, and a place. Without a law there is no crime. Without an offender, someone who breaks the law, there is no crime. Without some object, target, or victim, there is no crime. Without a place in time and space where the other three come together, there is no crime. These four elements – law, the offender, the target, and the place – can be characterised as the four dimensions of crime (1981, page 7).

The physical environment in which crime occurs, and places in particular, historically has been overlooked as a focus of crime prevention by citizens and academics, with much more attention directed to offenders, to community economic and social conditions, and to the criminal justice system. But the relation of place to crime has become increasingly important: recent research demonstrates that in many cities relatively small numbers of places account for disproportionate numbers of crimes and that we can predict these ‘hot spots’ based on past calls for service by the police (Taylor, 1997; Sherman, 1995). In this context a leading American researcher has suggested that since ‘future crime is six times more predictable by the address of the occurrence than by the identity of the offender, why aren’t we doing more about it? Why aren’t we thinking more about ‘wheredunit’, rather than just ‘whodunit’?’ (Sherman, 1995, pages 36–7).

To assist us in that regard, we adopt a modified version of Eck’s (1997) characterisation, and define place as ‘. . . a small area containing a relatively restricted range of functions, potentially controlled by a single owner and often identifiable as a distinct physical entity within the community’. In this concept, places range from small (micro) scale environments, such as a street corner or a bus stop, to medium (meso) scale areas, such as a shopping centre or industrial park, to large (macro) scale areas, such as a neighbourhood. They do not include cities. Rather, places are the building blocks of cities and as such, are – or should be – of central concern to urban planning and design. While modern planning in Britain and the United States includes social, political and economic dimensions, it has a long-established interest in the spatial and physical environment of cities that argues for the importance of places as a legitimate focus of study.⁴ The responsibility to make some sense of the vast numbers of discrete places that together comprise a city falls to planners and urban designers, patching together the puzzle through plans that aim at ‘rationality and comprehensiveness’ (a Sisyphean quest at best). In the struggle to do this, planners learn the importance of moving between physical scales – from the smallest place to the entire city – and balancing the political, social and economic interests that attend to each.

Although many competing definitions of planning exist, we prefer Friedmann and Hudson’s version as ‘centrally concerned with the linkage between knowledge and organised action’ (Friedmann and Hudson, 1974; Friedmann, 1987) adding our own coda, that it is aimed at influencing future activities and events that measurably improve the quality of life.⁵ Urban planning is thus a forward-thinking process compatible with our notion of crime prevention that is, or should be, results-oriented to the maximum extent possible.

Moreover, planning and urban design professionals in Britain and the United States have public benefit criteria at the core of their ethical commitments (Royal Town Planning Institute, 2000; American Planning Association, 1992) and are obligated to safeguard the public health, safety and general welfare, a charge made explicit in the United States through legal precedent as well as common consent. In this sense, we conceive of safety as encompassing citizens’ rights to be free from crime and the fear of crime, as well as their being protected against flood, fire, disease or injurious land use changes. That being said, we are well aware of the problems of measuring the impacts of crime prevention and planning applications...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF TABLES
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1: CONTEXT AND KEY IDEAS
• PART 2: POLICY AND PRACTICE
• PART 3: COMPARISONS AND KEY ISSUES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY