2008-11-05 P & R Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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~ 2 approaching those walls to leave their mark. Later an additional motivation developed whereby these same kids began to view blank walls as something that was ugly and in need of graffiti. It was the change in organic behaviour that drove the kids to the walls! Put another way, the walls never changed! This has two major lessons for CPTED. The first is that human behaviour is not static, it is forever evolving. The second is that human behaviour drives physical design which in turn can reinforce desired human behaviour. Any lesser perspective may fail to adapt to change or result in limited success. This has major implications given a society where the respect for property and property rights is losing its traditional influence as we will see later. Criminals who don't act according to the CPTED playbook Another limitation is the presumptive way that it treats offenders regardless of motivation or type. CPTED, through its three main design concepts, effectively makes a presumption that an abundance of natural surveillance, access control and territorial reinforcement will reduce the fear and incidence of crime. What CPTED fails to take into account is that not all offenders play by its rules. For instance, the graffiti vandals we spoke of earlier seek out highly visible locations. This flies in the face of conventional CPTED wisdom and natural surveillance in particular. Natural surveillance is a design strategy that is directed at keeping intruders under observation. Inherent to this strategy is a presumption that criminals prefer to operate in the shadows where they are less likely to be seen. How then can CPTED be expected to effectively deal with crime and criminals who fall outside its logic? The answer is simple. It cannot. CPTED practitioners in the absence of an understanding of the graffiti subculture have no way of properly diagnosing the problem. The tools are simply not there. That is why I have often observed budding CPTED practitioners potentially aggravate a graffiti problem by calling for the addition of light. What the CPTED practitioner fails to understand is that lighting these walls simply makes them more attractive in the eyes of the graffiti artists. Graffiti vandals are motivated by fame. Fame is achieved when a vandal's graffiti is displayed to the greatest number of people. This can be achieved in a couple ways including lighting up the walls. By understanding this motivation, it is easy to avoid aggravating the problem but the fact that it falls outside of the CPTED paradigm can make it difficult for CPTED practitioners to sec. The same holds true for other crimes. Bank robbery is a well documented example. In 1985 the Bank Administration Institute of Rolling Meadows, Illinois undertook an extensive six month review of how the interior design of banks affects the number oftim.es that a bank may be robbed and the manner of the particular robberies. The study involved a thorough literature review, an "archival" analysis of 204 bank robberies in the city of Seattle over a four and a half year period and an extensive analysis of 54 victimized banking institutions that accounted for 111 of the robberies. The study found that the interior elements of the bank do not seem to always be involved in the same way as different "species" of bank robbers use the settings in different ways. Significant amongst their findings were a number of conclusions that once were contrary to natural surveillance. These included: