What makes one place a hive of crime and another secure?
It’s not just a matter for the security manager – whether it’s a leisure centre or car park, one puts off customers, the other doesn’t. A Government guide suggests that a site might be in for crime and trouble – or free of it – even while on the architect’s drawing board.
Designing out crime and designing in community safety should be central to the planning and delivery of new development, the document says. It quotes section 17 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 which requires local authorities to be aware of crime and disorder and to do all they reasonably can to prevent them. That’s in line with a Government aim of making sustainable communities. What’s more commercially of interest to private security is the next statement: “Planning out crime also makes sense financially. Once a development has been completed the main opportunity to incorporate crime prevention measures will have been lost. The costs involved in correcting or managing badly-designed development are much greater than getting it right in the first place.” Planning, then, cannot prevent crime alone; and a plan that works in one place may not in another; but council planners ought to at least consider community safety.
The guide offers some attributes of ‘safer places’, with case studies from housing to town centres of all sizes (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Gravesend, Stroud), a distribution park, a Sunderland municipal park (closed at dusk, and with park rangers by day, pan and tilt CCTV with infra-red lighting, ‘and mobile contract security teams at night’), a college, car park, and Birkenhead bus station. Those attributes are:
Access and movement, ‘places with well-defined routes,spaces and entrances that provide for convenient movement without compromising security’.
Structure, ‘places that are laid out so that crime is discouraged’.
Surveillance, ‘places where all publicly accessible spaces are overlooked’.
Places that promote a sense of ‘ownership, respect, and territorial responsibility’.
Places where ‘human activity is appropriate to the location and creates a reduced risk of crime and a sense of safety at all times’.
And not forgetting ‘management and maintenance’ of a site, to discourage crime.
Throughout, the reader is encouraged to ‘think criminal’. Is a site or part of it a potential ‘honeypot’ (places where people congregate and linger) and ‘hotspot’ (places where criminal and anti-social behaviour is concentrated)? For example: “Poorly sited street furniture (including street equipment owned by utility companies) can increase the opportunity of criminal and anti-social behaviour, such as vandalism, being a climbing aid or impeding vision.” Or: “Criminals can attract notice if there are no good
reasons for them to be there. Benches or low walls near cash-points, for example, provide places for potential robbers to loiter waiting for a suitable target.” In retail, The Bridges Centre, Sunderland, is praised for its “wide, straight uncluttered lines, much like Stroud ’s traditional High Street” that allow natural surveillance, so that criminals are more likely to be spotted by building users and passers-by. The ‘private security presence’ at the Bridges shopping centre – by contract guarding company OCS – is also praised. As the guide sums up: “The presence of security staff can provide enough of a human deterrent to permit more imaginative and attractive planning and design solutions, but must be sustainable economically.” The Bridges also has 160 CCTV cameras.
The @t-Bristol car park (featured in our December 2000 edition) is praised, for having ‘many of the characteristics of safe car parks, including:a high degree of surveillance and illumination; a minimum number of vehicular entry and exit points; on-going maintenance; and clear signage’. It has suffered only a handful of crimes.
Much of the guide draws on existing work – the specification in ACPO’s Secured Car Parks Award Scheme, for instance (an award held by @t-Bristol).
Interestingly, the guide does not argue for security at all costs – for example, well-lit spaces can reduce fear of crime, and poorly-lit areas can be dangerous even by day; but lighting ‘should provide security without resulting in glare and compromising privacy’. Again, @t-Bristol is praised. Nor are ‘target hardening measures’ – security doors, windows and gates – automatically good, if the design is not appropriate to the building and the crime risk faced; not integrated;
not properly installed; or not properly used.
For instance, gates and grilles can be made to look less unwelcoming, if treated as public art and maybe used with hedges. Physical security can have side-effects, the guide suggests: “Roller-shutter blinds provide a high level of security,
but can have a negative effect on the street scene, are susceptible to graffiti and do not reflect light in the way that windows do. Alternatives such as open grilled
designs or internal shutters should be considered.” CCTV cameras may be suitable for a street scene- as in Stroud town centre – disguised, as ‘vintage street lights’; elsewhere they may be more effective as a visible deterrent.
As for CCTV, it gets the thumbs-up, as part of a package of measures. “CCTV is most effective when combined with good lighting and designed to counter a set of offences, and supported by management, continuous monitoring and adequate response. CCTV should not be considered as an alternative to getting the design right in the first place but retrospectively can be used to compensate for poor design. The way CCTV systems are designed and used should be influenced by their intended purpose. For example,will it be monitored and used to direct police or other security personnel in the case of an incident,or will it be recorded in the hope that the pictures will help to identify and prosecute offenders?”
As for ‘ownership’ of the built environment, gated communities are a controversial response – as debated at a Designing Out Crime Association meeting (featured in our March 2003 edition) and at a Landor conference on safe neighbourhoods in London on September 24. Gates, barriers and entry-phones may keep drug dealers, say, out of a car park or flats – and be welcomed by poor or rich alike – but is it good for society? The guide sits on the fence (pardon the pun): “Gated communities may increase the sustainability and social mix of an area by making housing more attractive where problems of crime and image could otherwise lead to the development’s failure. The Government believes, however, that it is normally preferable for new development to be integrated into the wider community and that the gating of developments should only be considered as a last resort …” A barrier, the guide adds, need not be a physical one, but might be paving, surface texture and colour, landscaping or signage, to give a message to the law-abiding and criminal alike. An inner city housing case study is Cromer Street in Camden, London, refurbished with fences, lighting and CCTV; there the Metropolitan Police man on the spot is Calvin Beckford, committee member of the Designing Out Crime Association (www.doca.org.uk) and interviewed in our May 2002 issue.
Mixed uses of building can deter criminals, by keeping a site busy over 24-hours. The guide quotes Parrs Wood Technology College in Manchester, redeveloped with a leisure centre and a hotel on the same site: “Security for the three facilities is strategically co-ordinated.” To give more detail: the college opted against ‘obvious defensive measures’ such as gates and fences. Instead, protection was put in place “at the building envelope. Ground floor openings were minimised and one main entry provided. This has a security guard on 24-hour duty and a monitoring point for the CCTV cameras covering the inside and outside of the school.”
On the planning side, the guide calls for planners to be aware of crime risks, and to use tools like crime pattern analyses, and risk assessments. The guide quotes cases, such as at Wakefield, where police architectural liaison officers have been seconded to the local authority planning team; or, in Bradford, a planning officer has been seconded to West Yorkshire Police. Councils praised are Westminster for their ‘Guide to Siting Security Cameras’ and Birmingham for supplementary planning guidance on shop front security. However, as the guide admits, putting security into plans can be mere words. And it’s admitted that even planning applications with a crime aspect – a pub and club, or at a known crime hot-spot – have other factors. It may be appropriate to impose conditions on a planning scheme – that CCTV or shutters should be installed, or locks to a specified standard. Such obligations are ‘Section 106 agreements’, under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, for example to order commercial developments to include neighbourhood wardens or CCTV, in the name of creating ‘a safer environment’.
Among the case studies, Newcastle City Council In 1996 became one of the first places to employ a city centre manager, currently David Usher. The guide admits: “Crime and anti-social behaviour problems — including vagrancy,street vending, drunkenness and football-related incidents — have been a cause for concern.” Responses have included upgraded CCTV, and less obviously security measures such as ‘quality paving and lighting’.
To sum up, the guide argues against a cook-book or one size fits all approaches to planning out crime; rather, the guide suggests a “consultant with all principles at his or her fingertips, ready to configure and adjust on the fly, in specific circumstances”.
The document drew on a ‘sounding board’ of designing out crime folk including West Midlands Police Insp Mark Stokes; and Tim Pascoe, then of the Building Research Establishment, now part of the consultancy Perpetuity. A member of the steering group was Association of Chief Police Officers Crime Prevention Initiatives (ACPO CPI) man Alan McInnes.
Safer Places: The Planning System and Crime Prevention. ISBN 0 7277 3261 7. Download from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister ’s website.
