Laserfiche WebLink
<br />t, <br /> <br />3 <br /> <br />· banks that are brightly lit and that have large window areas seem to be more <br />prone to "takeover" robberies as the high visibility also aids the offender in casing <br />the interior, and <br /> <br />· armed robbers prefer banks with highly visible teller lines and obscured views <br />from bank officers while unarmed robbers seem deterred by these conditions. <br /> <br />Of equal significance were findings that flew in the face of natural access control. Natural access <br />control is a design strategy directed at decreasing crime opportunity and increasing the <br />perception of risk in offenders. Examples of findings that contradicted natural access control <br />included: <br /> <br />· banks with single entry/exit doors are robbed more frequently by gunmen, while <br />banks with two or more doors are preferentially selected by surreptitious note <br />passers, and <br /> <br />· counter heights, depth and partition heights have a different deterrent effect on <br />different types of robbers. <br /> <br />These findings are significant because they once again demonstrate that some observations were <br />contrary to conventional CPTED wisdom and published material on security thinking. This has a <br />potential major implication for unsuspecting CPTED practitioners who could inadvertently <br />attract armed bandits to a bank by applying CPTED techniques! <br /> <br />These findings are also significant because they are yet further examples of the limitations of the <br />one size fits all approach to environmental design. Namely different offenders do indeed react <br />differently to their physical surroundings. I found support for this conclusion from a couple of <br />sources including in the readings of Drs. Martin Gill and Ronald Clarke. <br /> <br />Gill stated that "Criminoligists have tended to theorise about crime causation on a general level, <br />when in practice offences and offenders differ so markedly that offence-specific explanations <br />and profiles need to evolve". 1 <br /> <br />Clarke stated the "opportunity-reducing measures appropriate to certain offenses may not be <br />appropriate to others. This means crime prevention through environmental design must be <br />tailored to the specific problems occurring in particular settings".2 <br /> <br />Identifying CPTED's weaknesses <br /> <br />A lack of true analysis <br /> <br />CPTED's major limitations belie an even larger problem--the pretence of analysis. CPTED <br />"analysis", for all intents and purposes is nothing more than basic information gathering. <br />Timothy Crowe, author of the definitive Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design text <br />book, essentially promotes this perspective in his text by stating that "any attempts to skip the <br />basics in favour of more complex forms of information gathering or analysis often obscures the <br />picture."3. This helps to explain the lack of emphasis that analysis is given by CPTED <br />