By Tom McKay
I was recently invited to speak at a CANASA Event, an Association of seasoned Security Professionals. Having spent a third of a century practicing, promoting, speaking about and teaching CPTED, one would expect that such a request would be easy. This would be true if I was content to deliver an intro section covering nothing more than an overview. However, I knew that neither myself or my audience would be satisfied with such an approach. Instead, I challenged myself to come up with a presentation befitting not only my experience and those of the members of my audience, but one that did justice to the depth and breadth of all of the CPTED luminaries, that I had met and influenced me along the way.
So, with that focus in mind, I came up with a Lessons Learned approach which, for me, started with the late, great Tim Crowe. Tim had played a pivotal role in popularizing CPTED during a pre-internet era at a time when the concept was not widely known. He accomplished this as the Director and CPTED instructor of the National Crime Prevention Institute at the University of Louisville and as the author of the 1991 Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design text book (Butterworth-Heineman).
For me, I wanted this be more than just another presentation. It had to be about imparting many of the key take-aways that I developed through the years as an early, second-wave CPTED proponent and advocate both at the local and international level. So, in the interest of sharing some of these insights with a broader audience than those typically found in my classroom or presentations, I have decided to highlight three key maxims that I hold and recognize to be true which, when adopted, can assist you in developing an environment that is up to the challenge of positively influencing human behaviour as people respond to their world.
The first has to do with the idea that ”design can’t make you do anything that you don’t want to do, but it can make you not want to do it”. I first recognized the true potential of this statement when addressing a trespass problem that involved area “kids” playing on the roof of a small pumping station which was set low to the ground at the end of a residential street.
The roof was flat like those found on your typical public-school. As a consequence, it was a natural outlet for the pent-up energies and spirit of adventure contained within most kids. The problem was not so much born of the notion that the kids were trespassing, rather the concern laid with the prospect for injury and/or liability arising from their actions. So, the decision would soon be made to expand the foot print of the building, then raise the structure a number of courses of brick while replacing the flat roof with a more conventional hip roof similar to those found on adjoining residential properties.
The end result was that the kids no longer gravitated to the building as the reason for their wanting to scale it in the first place was no longer there. Afterall, every child’s home who lived on that street or in the adjoining neighbourhood had one form of hip-roof or the other on it. Yet playing on those roofs never entered the mind of a single child, as there are some conventions that people know won’t be considered as a good idea or even tolerated, so no one thinks/decides/chooses to do it without so much as being told.
The next maxim posits the idea that “CPTED (when done correctly) is capable of influencing the decision to set foot on a property”, which was demonstrated at the Trelawney subdivision. The Trelawney subdivision is located in north-west Mississauga, Ontario and features some seven-hundred homes being sited on “modular-lots” many of which were contained within pods of six homes on “hammer-head” cul-de-sacs inspired by the concept of Defensible Space.
The net result was that the criminal element “voted with their feet”[1] as the Trelawney residents benefitted from their homes experiencing 20% less break-ins and thefts form motor vehicles, when statistically compared to a more conventionally laid out sub-division of comparable sized homes made up of households with similar socio-economic factors located across a major arterial street which bisected the two developments.
The good news extended to the theft of motor vehicles, where the Trelawney residents experienced zero theft of motor vehicles as compared to eight stolen vehicles taken from the more conventionally laid-out, comparison sub-division.
This brings me to my third maxim that I have observed and documented numerous times over the years and that is that “ambiguous space should be viewed as the equivalent of “kryptonite” when it comes to how people will respond to and interact with the environment”.
Ambiguous space tends to lack “any clue who it is for, what it is for and who is responsible for it”[2] as far as the general public is concerned which make it ripe for being taken over by loiters, trespassers and other “abnormal” users for their own purposes. In the next example, the maintenance/utility area of a neighbourhood plaza was being used and routinely vandalized by area youth to the point that it would eventually have to be fenced off notwithstanding the prior introduction of a surveillance system after a spate of vandalisms which grew progressively worse over time.
So the next time that you are experiencing a problem with your site or property, please keep these three maxims in mind from an early, second-wave CPTED champion and advocate:
- Design can’t make you do anything that you don’t want to do, but it can make you not want to do it.
- CPTED (when done correctly) is capable of influencing the decision to set foot on a property.
- Ambiguous space should be viewed as the equivalent of “kryptonite” when it comes to how people will respond to and interact with the environment”.
They will lead to better CPTED applications and results.