Author: Tim Prenzler
ISBN No: 978-3-031-63764-3
Review date: 10/12/2025
No of pages: 175
Publisher: Palgrave-Springer
Publisher URL:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-63764-3
Year of publication: 01/05/2024
Brief:
price
£ebook 27.99, hardback 34.99
Imagine that you need to pee while you are out and you need to find somewhere to go. Whether you are driving on a motorway and stop at a service station, or are in town and follow signs to a car park or in a shopping centre, once you find the toilet, not only do you have physical relief, as a security professional you can find comfort, or not, from the little things you see, that add up to a feeling of safety, or not. Is there toilet paper to hand, or is it strewn on the floor and dirty (a signal that the place hasn’t been cleaned lately). Is there a mirror on the wall by the wash-basins, not vandalised. Flowers in a vase, even? The security around public toilets is seldom aired; it hasn’t been in 25 years to my knowledge in Professional Security magazine. Yet, as Tim Prenzler notes at the beginning of one of his nine chapters of ‘Preventing crime and disorder in public places’, not only do public toilets meet a basic human need, ‘they help prevent the problem of public urination’.
The biggest compliment that I can pay to this book is to say that at every opportunity in coming months I shall recommend this book to those I meet, where relevant, and shall look to quote from it. To interject two thoughts of my own; when I arrived for the first time in Rome, by train at the main station, in 1987, across the square I recall the sight of a man in mid-afternoon urinating against a large (antique?) brick wall. While I had an enjoyable time in the city (who does not?) that sight rather fixed my attitude towards Italians. In covid (and Prenzler mentions the pandemic in his chapter on toilets – covid only made some people even more keen on hygiene), Cornwall council in the summer of 2020 locked its toilets, and then condemned visitors (who gave the county a bumper tourist season, because they could not go abroad) for relieving themselves on parks and around parking places.
Men and women alike (as Prenzler points out) can easily feel anxiety around using a public toilet, an intimate act. He sets out good practice around provision of toilets in this chapter like the others in terms of CPTED (crime prevention through environmental design) and situational crime awareness. To touch on other chapters: first Prenzler covers ‘designing out’ crime in terms of landscaping, and ‘target hardening’ (which also applies to public toilets – Prenzler notes the very human need for personal space in a stall or cubicle; yet that has to be balanced with not giving opportunities for predators to loiter). He goes on to business improvement districts (drawing on mainly North American and Australian examples, though BIDs in Britain, as featured regularly in Professional Security magazine in recent years, also carry out on-street patrols), ‘safe, orderly, efficient, transport systems’, alcohol related crime in entertainment venues and districts; and safe events (his book is up to date enough to mention the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel, most shockingly at the Supernova Music Festival, where hundreds were murdered, raped and taken hostage. The event was a couple of miles from the border wall between Israel and Gaza, controlled by Hamas. As Prenzler puts it (page 111): “In hindsight, it was unwise for organisers to locate the event so close to a terrorist group ….. although the high-tech border security system was reputed to be amongst the best in the world.”
As that example shows, and Prenzler’s book, for all the tech (and, more’s the point, the trust that humans put in it for their protection), ‘humans remain a physically interactive and networked species’ (preface, page vii) and we still want to engage with one another, whether as friends, or to do business; or crime. Where people congregate, so might offenders find victims. Hence CPTED and related theory, ‘to ensure safety and tranquility’. To quote two of the words in the book’s sub-title, crime prevention is also about ‘guardianship and welfare’, for example checking on the homeless when a BID patroller makes his round of the business district.
Crime prevention is also about stopping the worst wickedness that can be thrown at a free society. To return to the Supernova festival (and to recall also the Manchester Arena terror attack of 2017 on an Ariana Grande concert, and the thwarted plot against Taylor Swift’s Eras concert tour in Vienna only in the summer of 2024), the very symbol of such events, of people in the mass enjoying themselves, makes them an attractive target in the warped eyes of the terrorist. Prenzler closes with a chapter that reminds us that crime prevention is a process – and ‘programme’ is a better term than ‘project’, he suggests. However many steps you identify, or what you call them, you analyse a problem, and monitor; crime prevention isn’t a one-off. Nor is it done well or for long alone; the author notes how many of the case studies he quotes involved partnerships, ‘some kind of collaboration between interested parties’ (page 150). Prenzler concludes with what’s at stake, a well-functioning free world, no less, we can state, ‘rather than simply responding to crime and disorder events as they occur’.
If I raise one quibble, it’s only to make more plain how welcome this book is. In the chapter on ‘combining police and security patrols’, the author, an Australian criminologist, quotes ‘networked CCTV in Newcastle upon Tyne’ from an academic study in 1995 (when strictly speaking ‘networked’ CCTV was not invented, and was still, literally, closed circuit television?). Surely public space CCTV has come on greatly in the 30 years since (though publication was 1995, the actual study would have been before) to merit a more recent example. Otherwise, the scholar and practitioner alike can turn to this book with pleasure and profit. It’s short enough to take in, in one session, and if you are interested in one topic, such as ‘safe events’, you can take it in, inside half an hour (and the publisher allows you to buy single chapters electronically). While five pence shy of £20 might be dear, the e-book and hardcover aren’t much dearer. Credit to the publisher (and the series editor, the British criminologist Prof Martin Gill) for setting a far lower price than some around.
Safety on campus
Prof Tim Prenzler’s home institution is the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC), in Queensland, north of the state capital Brisbane; its website’s section on its safety and security shows that it’s a user of the SafeZone app.
