Author: Mark Stokes
ISBN No:
Review date: 16/10/2026
No of pages: 672
Publisher: Springer
Publisher URL:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-99840-9
Year of publication: 01/10/2026
Brief:
Designing Out Crime. A Handbook for Practitioners, Managers and the Community
price
£55.99, hardcover
Designing Out Crime: A Handbook for Practitioners, Managers and the Community is very much as the author puts it, a ‘labour of love’. For Mark Stokes was 33 years in West Midlands Police, and has since been a consultant with the police body Secured by Design (SbD) .
In a wide ranging and impressive work he talks us through how a designing out crime officer (DOCO) does more than apply CPTED (Crime prevention through environmental design), or ‘crime science’ . The officer has to be a diplomat, because architects and structural engineers and planners as professionals working in the built environment are usually university graduates, who don’t take kindly to a DOCO voicing opinions. Designing out crime, then, as Mark puts it, is about the ‘art of compromise and negotiation’ (page 21).
He shows us how good design is at work (to give only a selection) in bus shelters, cashpoint machines, shop fronts, subways, parks, places of worship and business parks. This thorough guide – the book is thick enough to do some damage if thrown in a melee and it hits you on the head – never feels heavy going, given the sheer breadth of what comes under the subject – various prickly bushes that work as barriers in ‘defensive planting’; products from laminated glass and lights to doors, and bollards (HVM, hostile vehicle mitigation).ย A designing out crime practitioner has to work with the planning system, and know about legal liability. Of the 13 good practice examples that Mark offers towards the end of the book, some are international, though many are from Britain and the West Midlands in particular, such as Edgbaston cricket ground, pictured, which Mark describes as a ‘365 day’ place for events. The West Midlands examples range as widely as a hospice, an infants school, the Brindleyplace retail and business district in Birmingham city centre, and in Manchester, Piccadilly Gardens.
To go into more detail about Piccadilly Gardens, Mark recalls that the transport interchange had become derelict by the 1990s, and was regenerated for the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Visiting some 25 years on (page 560), Mark noted the Gardens attracted the homeless and those taking synthetic drugs. Problems, Mark suggests, are due to the lack of maintenance and the British weather (grass turning to mud, due to the sheer number of people using the area). With a DOCO eye for detail he recognises that among the statues in the area are one of Sir Robert Peel, the recognised founder of modern British policing.
While designing out crime dates from the 1970s and usually has been about volume crime against property, Mark shows how it can save lives, such as ‘nets’ at bridges that have led to a reduction in suicides.
Conclusion
In a concluding chapter, Mark says that research material about ‘what works’ is vast; and yet (page 578), ‘…. it would be wrong to presume that designing out crime is well embedded within mainstream society or policing in the UK with its relatively high number of police DOCOs’. That number and of crime prevention specialists fell drastically due to public sector austerity in the 2010s. The closure of the Home Office Crime Reduction College at Easingwold in north Yorkshire also ‘sent a message’ that CPTED was no longer valued. Mark adds that there’s no evidence that as numbers of police specialists have fallen, that the number of private sector consultants in this field has risen. He gives the example of pedestrianisation of town and city centres, enforced by bollards. That vehicles are ‘banished’ from centres may lead to a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ effect that places are bustling by day, yet empty at night and people are fearful of crime. Centres need ‘safety in numbers’ at night, he suggests. Pedestrianisation happened with little thought of the effect on crime; DOCOs’ advice was rarely sought.ย Although CPTED leads to falls in crime, and (not quite the same thing) can avoid poor design leading to crime, opportunities are ‘being lost’, he writes (page 579).
It’s only the latest in the long-running and magisterial book series: Crime Prevention and Security Management,ย edited by the criminologist Prof Martin Gill.
About the author
Since 2022 he’s been Senior Lecturer on the Police Constable Development Apprenticeship at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
