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The Role of Situation and Opportunity in Crime
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Situational Crime Prevention
In this course, Professor Kate Bowers (University College, London) explores the theory and practice of situational crime prevention (SCP). In the first lecture, we think about the role of situation and opportunity in crime, including the important concepts of rational choice theory and routine activity theory. In the second lecture, we think about the five principles of SCP – increasing the effort, increasing the risk, removing excuses, reducing provocations, and reducing rewards. In the third lecture, we look at three situations in which one or more of these principles have successfully been applied. Next, we take a step back from SCP to think about how entire spaces can be designed with the minimisation of crime in mind – a concept known as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). In the fifth lecture, we consider some of the criticism of SCP.
The Role of Situation and Opportunity in Crime
In this lecture, we think about the role of situation and opportunity in crime, focusing in particular on: (i) fundamental attribution error (Ross 1977), the tendency for people to underemphasise situational and environmental explanations for an individual's observed behaviour while overemphasising dispositional and personality-based explanations; (ii) rational choice theory (Cornish and Clarke 1986), the idea that the people who commit crime are reasoning actors who weigh up means and ends, costs and benefits, in order to make a rational choice; (iii) routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson 1979), the theory that crime only occurs when three elements converge: a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian; and (iv) crime pattern theory (Brantingham and Brantingham 1993), which considers how people's everyday activities influence their awareness of spaces, including how offenders choose where to offend, and why some areas are crime 'hotspots'.
References:
– P. L. Brantingham and P. J. Brantingham, 'Environment, Routine and Situation: Toward a Pattern Theory of Crime' in R. V. Clarke and M. Felson (eds.) Routine Activity and Rational Choice: Advances in Criminological Theory, Volume 5 (1993), pp. 259-94.
– L. E. Cohen and M. Felson, 'Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach', American Sociological Review 44 (1979), pp. 588-608.
– D. Cornish and R. V. Clarke, The Reasoning Criminal: Rational Choice Perspectives on Offending (1986).
– L. Ross, 'The Intuitive Psychologist And His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process' in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 10 (1977), pp. 173-220.
Hi, I'm Professor Kate Bowers from the UCL Department, Security and Crime Science.
00:00:05And in this section,
00:00:11I'm going to talk about the role of opportunity in preventing crimes.
00:00:11So a really good place to start with this is a little bit of psychology,
00:00:17and there's a concept known as the fundamental attribution error.
00:00:22And this says that what we tend to do as people is we overestimate disposition
00:00:27and people's personality in understanding their behaviour.
00:00:33And we underestimate the role of situations.
00:00:38So an example of this would be if you turned up for class on a Thursday morning
00:00:41and one of your classmates was really angry and cross about.
00:00:48Some think you might think all that makes sense because person A is an angry person.
00:00:52In fact, it might well be that person. They had a very sleepless night.
00:00:58They had lots of stress is on them as they got ready in the morning,
00:01:03and by the time they got into that situation, they weren't really quick to anger.
00:01:07So, in fact, the situation had a role to play in that person's behaviour,
00:01:11and this goes to show that in fact,
00:01:18everything that we do is an interaction between people and situations.
00:01:21Our behaviour is a result of the interaction of these two things.
00:01:27It therefore follows.
00:01:30But by changing situations, we should be able to change people's behaviour.
00:01:32And this is one of the fundamental principles
00:01:39that situational crime prevention is based on.
00:01:42Another important principle in situational crime
00:01:47prevention is the way in which offenders
00:01:50choose to make decisions to undertake
00:01:53particularly particular crime events or activities.
00:01:56And coalition clerk
00:02:00start thinking about this in their theory of rational choice
00:02:03and an offender decision making.
00:02:09And what they see is the offender as a
00:02:11rational decision maker in that specific space and time.
00:02:15What offenders might do, therefore,
00:02:19is way up the costs that might be
00:02:22associated with undertaking a particular piece of criminal activity
00:02:24against any benefits that might come from making act,
00:02:28that that that undertaking that crime
00:02:32and if the the benefits outweighed across the costs,
00:02:36then it's much more likely that crime incident will take place.
00:02:41So if we just think of that very simply,
00:02:47this means that we can look for opportunities for crime.
00:02:49And if we can manipulate that balance in terms of the
00:02:53degree to which sees somebody sees costs associated with taking,
00:02:57uh, taking that incidents.
00:03:00Um, and we, uh,
00:03:02and we can take those in the favour of them thinking it's
00:03:04going to cost more than it is going to benefit them.
00:03:07Then we can start to think of ways of preventing crime,
00:03:10using that understanding and that theory.
00:03:13One thing that Cornish and Clark are clear about, though,
00:03:16is that even though this is a rational choice theory, in other words,
00:03:19it's about people making these calculations.
00:03:23Not all criminal decisions are going to be completely rational.
00:03:26In other words, there bounded in terms of the rationality,
00:03:30and this means that offenders might make poured decisions on the basis of
00:03:34things like the time involved or their level of understanding or ability.
00:03:38So there's all these other factors that will
00:03:43be introduced to that decision making process.
00:03:45But this idea of the perception of a crime is a good opportunity from
00:03:48the point of view of weighing up and costs and benefits is important principle.
00:03:53So in terms of going,
00:04:00moving from the offender situation to thinking about what it
00:04:03is that produces good opportunities in particular places and times,
00:04:08we can move on to another theory known as routine activity theory.
00:04:14And this was proposed by Felt current and Felson back after the Second World War.
00:04:20And they were interested in the fact that people started
00:04:27to use spaces differently after the Second World War.
00:04:30And they wondered whether or not these changes
00:04:34in people's activities might be one of the reasons
00:04:36for the upturn in the amount of crime that was seen after the Second World War.
00:04:40And so they thought about how we used space.
00:04:45And they proposed that there's actually three things that need to come together in
00:04:49a single place and time for a crime event to be likely to happen.
00:04:55And these are first of all, the presence of somebody who is motivated to understand,
00:05:00to undertake that crime and that there was a motivated, willing offender.
00:05:05The second
00:05:11ingredient of crime is the presence of a suitable target for crime.
00:05:13And so is there something that's worth undertaking crime against?
00:05:18Is there a person who's vulnerable,
00:05:21who can be manipulated in a situation that's the second ingredient?
00:05:23And the third ingredient is the lack of anybody
00:05:28or anything that can do something about that,
00:05:32So this is known as lack of guardianship.
00:05:35And if there is a lack of a suitable guardianship in an area again,
00:05:38this is a good ingredient for crime.
00:05:42So a little bit like the fire triangle.
00:05:44In other words, the ingredients you need for a fire to happen being oxygen,
00:05:47heat and fuel.
00:05:52And if you take one of those away, then you can't have a fire.
00:05:53It's very similar with routine activity theory.
00:05:58You need all three of these ingredients coinciding in the particular space
00:06:01and time for a crime to be to be likely to happen.
00:06:05So this is This is really useful because it means that if
00:06:10we can take one of those ingredients away from the situation,
00:06:13the opportunity opportunity for crime is then decreased then then the
00:06:17crime is not likely to happen in that space and time,
00:06:22um, so opportunity.
00:06:25These opportunity theories are really useful about explaining why it is.
00:06:28We might have crimes in specific places in specific times in environments.
00:06:32They are very much tied to good opportunities.
00:06:36But where in the environment might we see these opportunities happening?
00:06:39This is where the role of crime mapping comes in.
00:06:45It's really useful for us as crime preventers to know where
00:06:47those likely places are are going to be vulnerable to crime.
00:06:51In other words, these hotspots of crime.
00:06:56If we know where they are, then we can help, too,
00:06:58put resources that are often only going to be limited into into the suitable
00:07:01places where we know crime is going to be much more of a likelihood.
00:07:09And a third opportunity theory of crime helps
00:07:14us understand why specific places in cities,
00:07:17for example, might be places where we get these hotspots of crime.
00:07:20And this is branching and branching arms crime pattern theory.
00:07:24And what they say is that we all of us offenders, everybody alike,
00:07:28have these mental maps that we carry around in our heads,
00:07:34and they are maps of the places that we use and the places that we know about.
00:07:37So our maps are much better around our home areas around the places we work or
00:07:43go to see school around entertainment districts or
00:07:49places where we hang out with our friends.
00:07:52So we know those places
00:07:54and we also have spatial knowledge of the places between.
00:07:56Those places are transport routes between those places because they're the
00:07:59ones that we that we tread often in our everyday activities,
00:08:03and within these places there are going to be great targets,
00:08:08target opportunities for crimes, so not everywhere in those places.
00:08:13But in some of those places,
00:08:18there's going to be really vulnerable targets
00:08:19now where those two things intersect.
00:08:22This is going to be a very likely place an
00:08:25offender knows is a good opportunity for crime to happen.
00:08:27It's known to them it's accessible to them.
00:08:31They understand the area, and so this is where they're likely to undertake a crime.
00:08:34Because I've got a good opportunity has arisen.
00:08:39Now that's one offender.
00:08:41But if we imagine that these maps kind of build
00:08:44up over a city of all the different offenders,
00:08:47we can start seeing that it's going to be specific places, specific streets,
00:08:50specific entertainment districts or places that lots of people go.
00:08:54Where there's going to to be many of those offenders, offenders,
00:09:00maps and many of those targets all adding up in one place.
00:09:04And this is why we end up with these
00:09:09ideas of concentrations of crime in particular places.
00:09:11It's a good explanation for why we have specific streets,
00:09:14really busy places where crime is more likely to happen
00:09:18and tracking these crimes, tracking where these hotspots of crimes for again,
00:09:22is a really useful
00:09:27technique when it comes to situational prevention,
00:09:29because these are some of the places that we can focus our resources into.
00:09:32
Cite this Lecture
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Bowers, K. (2021, August 23). Situational Crime Prevention - The Role of Situation and Opportunity in Crime [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/situational-crime-prevention
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Bowers, K. "Situational Crime Prevention – The Role of Situation and Opportunity in Crime." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 23 Aug 2021, https://massolit.io/courses/situational-crime-prevention
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