Author: Edited by Richard Wortley and Lorraine Mazerolle
ISBN No: 1-843922-80-0
Review date: 13/12/2025
No of pages: 320
Publisher: Willan
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
A book on crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) by a practitioner was among those reviewed in the August issue of Professional Security. As a kind of follow-on, here is a collection of essays on similar lines.
The chapters are more theoretical, though between them they cover most of the ideas about analysing crime. If you stop to think about it, plenty of crime that lands on the security or site manager’s plate – from the theft of a shopper’s (Tory leader David Cameron’s?!) bicycle, to theft of a handbag from a pub chair, or from a cash in transit courier, to counterfeit banknotes and petrol station drive-offs – all are avoidable; or to put it better, the maker of the product or service could make it harder for the criminal. Or as the editor of the series of books, Prof Gloria Laycock of University College London, puts it in an introduction: “Crime opportuhities are everywhere if you are looking for them, as many of the more prolific offenders are, but they are also there to fall into, as young people can readily testify. We need to ensure that in our societies such opportunities are brought under some sort of control; that we do not creat crime waves by mistake.” This book will let students get to grip with subjects like crime mapping, the ‘broken windows’ theory (that literally if broken windows are left untended, it invites more breakages and disorder); problem-oriented policing; and indeed CPTED.
