The Role of Situation and Opportunity in Crime

Hi, I'm Professor Kate Bowers from the UCL Department, Security and Crime Science.

And in this section,

I'm going to talk about the role of opportunity in preventing crimes.

So a really good place to start with this is a little bit of psychology,

and there's a concept known as the fundamental attribution error.

And this says that what we tend to do as people is we overestimate disposition

and people's personality in understanding their behaviour.

And we underestimate the role of situations.

So an example of this would be if you turned up for class on a Thursday morning

and one of your classmates was really angry and cross about.

Some think you might think all that makes sense because person A is an angry person.

In fact, it might well be that person. They had a very sleepless night.

They had lots of stress is on them as they got ready in the morning,

and by the time they got into that situation, they weren't really quick to anger.

So, in fact, the situation had a role to play in that person's behaviour,

and this goes to show that in fact,

everything that we do is an interaction between people and situations.

Our behaviour is a result of the interaction of these two things.

It therefore follows.

But by changing situations, we should be able to change people's behaviour.

And this is one of the fundamental principles

that situational crime prevention is based on.

Another important principle in situational crime

prevention is the way in which offenders

choose to make decisions to undertake

particularly particular crime events or activities.

And coalition clerk

start thinking about this in their theory of rational choice

and an offender decision making.

And what they see is the offender as a

rational decision maker in that specific space and time.

What offenders might do, therefore,

is way up the costs that might be

associated with undertaking a particular piece of criminal activity

against any benefits that might come from making act,

that that that undertaking that crime

and if the the benefits outweighed across the costs,

then it's much more likely that crime incident will take place.

So if we just think of that very simply,

this means that we can look for opportunities for crime.

And if we can manipulate that balance in terms of the

degree to which sees somebody sees costs associated with taking,

uh, taking that incidents.

Um, and we, uh,

and we can take those in the favour of them thinking it's

going to cost more than it is going to benefit them.

Then we can start to think of ways of preventing crime,

using that understanding and that theory.

One thing that Cornish and Clark are clear about, though,

is that even though this is a rational choice theory, in other words,

it's about people making these calculations.

Not all criminal decisions are going to be completely rational.

In other words, there bounded in terms of the rationality,

and this means that offenders might make poured decisions on the basis of

things like the time involved or their level of understanding or ability.

So there's all these other factors that will

be introduced to that decision making process.

But this idea of the perception of a crime is a good opportunity from

the point of view of weighing up and costs and benefits is important principle.

So in terms of going,

moving from the offender situation to thinking about what it

is that produces good opportunities in particular places and times,

we can move on to another theory known as routine activity theory.

And this was proposed by Felt current and Felson back after the Second World War.

And they were interested in the fact that people started

to use spaces differently after the Second World War.

And they wondered whether or not these changes

in people's activities might be one of the reasons

for the upturn in the amount of crime that was seen after the Second World War.

And so they thought about how we used space.

And they proposed that there's actually three things that need to come together in

a single place and time for a crime event to be likely to happen.

And these are first of all, the presence of somebody who is motivated to understand,

to undertake that crime and that there was a motivated, willing offender.

The second

ingredient of crime is the presence of a suitable target for crime.

And so is there something that's worth undertaking crime against?

Is there a person who's vulnerable,

who can be manipulated in a situation that's the second ingredient?

And the third ingredient is the lack of anybody

or anything that can do something about that,

So this is known as lack of guardianship.

And if there is a lack of a suitable guardianship in an area again,

this is a good ingredient for crime.

So a little bit like the fire triangle.

In other words, the ingredients you need for a fire to happen being oxygen,

heat and fuel.

And if you take one of those away, then you can't have a fire.

It's very similar with routine activity theory.

You need all three of these ingredients coinciding in the particular space

and time for a crime to be to be likely to happen.

So this is This is really useful because it means that if

we can take one of those ingredients away from the situation,

the opportunity opportunity for crime is then decreased then then the

crime is not likely to happen in that space and time,

um, so opportunity.

These opportunity theories are really useful about explaining why it is.

We might have crimes in specific places in specific times in environments.

They are very much tied to good opportunities.

But where in the environment might we see these opportunities happening?

This is where the role of crime mapping comes in.

It's really useful for us as crime preventers to know where

those likely places are are going to be vulnerable to crime.

In other words, these hotspots of crime.

If we know where they are, then we can help, too,

put resources that are often only going to be limited into into the suitable

places where we know crime is going to be much more of a likelihood.

And a third opportunity theory of crime helps

us understand why specific places in cities,

for example, might be places where we get these hotspots of crime.

And this is branching and branching arms crime pattern theory.

And what they say is that we all of us offenders, everybody alike,

have these mental maps that we carry around in our heads,

and they are maps of the places that we use and the places that we know about.

So our maps are much better around our home areas around the places we work or

go to see school around entertainment districts or

places where we hang out with our friends.

So we know those places

and we also have spatial knowledge of the places between.

Those places are transport routes between those places because they're the

ones that we that we tread often in our everyday activities,

and within these places there are going to be great targets,

target opportunities for crimes, so not everywhere in those places.

But in some of those places,

there's going to be really vulnerable targets

now where those two things intersect.

This is going to be a very likely place an

offender knows is a good opportunity for crime to happen.

It's known to them it's accessible to them.

They understand the area, and so this is where they're likely to undertake a crime.

Because I've got a good opportunity has arisen.

Now that's one offender.

But if we imagine that these maps kind of build

up over a city of all the different offenders,

we can start seeing that it's going to be specific places, specific streets,

specific entertainment districts or places that lots of people go.

Where there's going to to be many of those offenders, offenders,

maps and many of those targets all adding up in one place.

And this is why we end up with these

ideas of concentrations of crime in particular places.

It's a good explanation for why we have specific streets,

really busy places where crime is more likely to happen

and tracking these crimes, tracking where these hotspots of crimes for again,

is a really useful

technique when it comes to situational prevention,

because these are some of the places that we can focus our resources into.