Sustaining the crime reduction impact of designing out crime: Re-evaluating the Secured by Design scheme 10 years on

Secured by Design (SBD) is an award scheme that aims to encourage housing developers to design out crime at the planning or concept stage. The scheme is managed by the Association of Chief Police Officers Crime Reduction Initiatives (ACPO CPI) while the day-to-day delivery of the scheme is conducted by Architectural Liaison Officers (ALOs) or Crime Prevention Design Advisors (CPDAs) working for individual police forces throughout the United Kingdom. The scheme sets standards for compliance that developments must meet to be awarded SBD status. This article presents the findings of research conducted over a 10-year period (1999–2009) into the effectiveness of the SBD scheme as a crime reduction measure. Utilising a variety of methods, the research aims to establish whether residents living within SBD developments experience less crime and fear of crime than their non-SBD counterparts; whether SBD developments show less visual signs of crime and disorder than their non-SBD counterparts; and finally, whether properties built to the SBD standard are able to sustain any crime reduction benefits over a 10-year period

It Looks Good, but What is it Like to Live There? Exploring the Impact of Innovative Housing Design on Crime

This paper reports on the findings of a collaborative project (funded by the Home Office and managed by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment - CABE) which was conducted in late 2009 and early 2010. The project set out to strengthen and update the evidence base on the impact of design on a range of crime types – with a specific focus upon housing developments acclaimed for their innovative design and award winning architecture. This paper presents the findings of an in-depth assessment of the impact of housing design features on crime. Utilising a comprehensive data collection exercise, the specific design features of thousands of homes were collated and assessed against police recorded crime data. The design features were based upon the key elements of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) including road layout, house design, surveillance, territoriality, car parking, communal space, management and maintenance and physical security. The unique and painstaking methodology not only provided an excellent dataset for analysis, but also highlighted the need both for greater conceptual clarity within CPTED and for crime-risk assessments to be based on the careful operationalisation and measurement of CPTED factors. As well as assessing the impact of specific (and combined) design features upon crime, the research also resulted in the production of a new data collection tool designed to address the weaknesses of existing checklists in assessing innovative contemporary developments, which are often unconventional in nature. The paper explores the degree of conflict and/or synergy between the traditional principles of CPTED and contemporary directions in architecture and design. Finally the paper considers the extent to which traditional CPTED principles remain relevant within contemporary residential developments and explores whether areas of revision are required

Parametric correlations of local density-of-states fluctuations in disordered pillars, wires and films

We present a theoretical analysis of correlation properties of the local density of states in a disordered emitter probed by resonant tunnelling through a localized impurity state. The emitter is considered to be a cylinder of length L and radius R with elastic mean free path l much less than {L, R} and the effective dimensionality d less than or equal to 3 of the emitter is determined by the relation between the typical scale over which diffusion occurs, namely the quasi-particle relaxation length L-c and the dimensions L and R. The differential conductance measured in asymmetric double-barrier structures has been used (see, e.g., Schmidt T, Haug R J, Fal'ko V I, von Klitzing K, Forster A and Luth H 1996 Europhys. Lett. 36 61) to image local density-of-states fluctuations. We give analytic expressions for the variance and for correlations of the differential conductance with respect to voltage and applied magnetic field for the limits of a bulk three-dimensional emitter, a film, a wire and a pillar, and we determine the effect of magnetic anisotropy in lower dimensions. A numerical calculation, valid for arbitrary L, is performed in order to describe the crossovers between these limits where the correlation functions are sensitive to the shape of the emitter and the position of the resonant impurity

Burglars’ Take on Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED): Reconsidering the Relevance from an Offender Perspective

Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) represents a multi-faceted approach to crime reduction that draws upon theories from urban design, psychology and criminology. Yet there remains a lack of clarity regarding CPTED’s definition and scope. CPTED has been defined by, amongst others Crowe (2000), Ekblom (2011) and Armitage (2013), and the principles upon which it is based have seen even greater discrepancy. Conscious that these principles have primarily been defined by academics and policy-makers, this research aims to rectify this imbalance. A sample of twenty-two incarcerated prolific burglars from three prisons (England), were asked to describe their response to sixteen images of residential housing. The results confirm that the design of residential housing influences burglar decision making, but that the principles of CPTED should be re-examined, with surveillance, and physical security a clear deterrent, yet management and maintenance and defensible space not considered as important in offender decision making