Designing out Crime: Building Safer Communities

“As environmental criminologists we actually use these patterns to understand how offenders chose their targets, carry out their crime and then ultimately make their escape, so what we are interested in is much less about criminality about why people turn to crime in the first place and what makes them tick and much more about blocking off opportunities to commit crime, we want to know how can we make it more difficult for offenders, more time consuming, more risky and even less rewarding to commit crime, so that they simply don’t bother. One way of making it more difficult for offenders to commit crime is to design out crime in buildings, in neighbourhoods so that these opportunities are removed. This is best handled at the design stage when architects are first thinking about building layouts. If done well this can make a real difference to peoples’ lives. Not only does it give them protection it also reduces their fear of crime.