Designing Crime Free Environments: Broadening the Crime Prevention Repertoire

• NCJ Number: 180144
• Author(s): Marcus Felson
• Date Published: July 1994
• Length: 31 pages
• Grant Number(s): 1991-IJ-CX-K021
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Survey

Annotation

Over the past two decades, actions to reduce crime opportunities have steadily grown as an area of research and policy, and such actions include crime prevention through environmental design and situational crime prevention.

Abstract

To explore the design of crime-free environments, this project interviewed a large number of people from diverse walks of life about their crime prevention experiences and compiled crime prevention ideas based on these interviews. A total of 544 individuals completed questionnaires or telephone interviews. Respondents were from a variety of backgrounds and included store planners and designers, facility managers, retail security specialists, restaurant and hotel personnel, airline officials, citizen associations, police officials, and city building managers. They provided a total of 4,258 crime prevention methods, although many respondents repeated what others mentioned. The final analysis included 380 basic crime prevention suggestions that are listed in 15 tables. The suggestions focus on parking areas, retail trade, goods and equipment management in various industries, graffiti, hotel crime, public parks and recreation facilities, hospitals, and property management. 15 tables