Author: Randall I Atlas
ISBN No: 978-1-4200-680
Review date: 13/12/2025
No of pages: 545
Publisher: CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
The 2012 Olympics building site in east London appears so far a sad example of how security is not designed in. Similarly in the United States, 9-11 has shown the worth of designing in crime prevention to critical infrastructure - but security can still be an expensive afterthought in a building project. A guide to CPTED takes up the cause of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design.
Miami-based Randall I Atlas is a criminologist and architect. This man has four degrees. He speaks to security and crime prevention people, and architects. At the very start he points out: “Architects worry about the fortress mentality of security professionals while security professionals are concerned about the architect’s failure to include security elements in the design of the building from the ground up.” Nor did 9-11 improve matters, apart from design of embassies and other high-security buildings, Atlas suggests. Your average architect, designing shopping malls, schools and hospitals, never learns about CPTED. If architects put an onus on security, it’s on adding technology such as CCTV. Yet you can use CPTED for normal use, to meet security goals, Atlas argues. That covers safe cashpoint machines, safe parks and car parking, and proper use of security lighting. In other words, CPTED is about more than cutting back shrubbery between the office door and the car park, to promote ‘natural surveillance’! There’s less obvious CPTED, such as in convenience stores and petrol stations; to design against workplace violence; and use of graphics and signage (just as signs with graffit all over tell their own story – of no supervision). Each chapter has plenty of references and web links.
As for reducing the risk and opportunity of violence in the workplace, Atlas writes of access control, panic alarms, visitor badgingdrop safes to limit cash on site, even height markers on exit doors to help witnesses better describe attackers later.
Arguably most important is one of the end chapters, on ‘measuring success’. As at the start, Atlas asks if fire safety has long been about compliance with inspections and regulations, why not the same for crime and terrorism prevention in the built environment? Atlas offers some ways for the architect and crime prevention practitioner to collect data, such as crime mapping, victimisation surveys, site visits and interviews. As he sums up: “CEOs want to show a return on investment and unless the security director can show effectiveness, funding and support will diminish or cease.” CPTED seems to differ from security consultancy, in practice, by the questions asked on a survey. The consultant may look at a doorway and ask, how to secure that? with a lock, a human guard, biometrics? while the CPTED person will ask what are you keeping out and in? Why have a door (unless it’s a fire door) there at all? While it’s an American book by an Florida author, there is a thumbs-up to the UK’s designing out crime movement. Atlas rounds off:”Security can no longer be viewed as an after the fact add-on feature of a facility. Rather, the real value is to have security and life safety decisions made from the beginning of site analysis and the design process.” But until security protection is made a matter of law in buildings, like fire safety, Atlas and others in CPTED can only be hopeful. As it’s a hefty book, if well-aimed it could knock some sense into builders and contractors.
