Environmental Criminology

Almost all of criminology asks why someone offends. Environmental criminology asks where, when and in what situation. It looks at the event rather than the offender: tonight's burglary in this doorway, the two-in-the-morning fight outside that bar. And it finds that offences concentrate in very specific places, hours and situations, which can be studied and changed. It is a tradition with several pieces, each with its own page in this archive; this page puts them in order.

// OriginFrom Jeffery to the Brantinghams: a tradition with a name

The term was coined in 1971 by the American criminologist C. Ray Jeffery, on the last page of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, a book which held that crime can be prevented by modifying its immediate environment. It had precedents: Jane Jacobs had argued in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) that a street is safe when it has "eyes" watching it, and the architect Oscar Newman would publish Defensible Space (1972), on how the design of public housing helped or prevented its residents from keeping control of it.

The name became a field in 1981, when Paul and Patricia Brantingham brought together in Environmental Criminology (Sage) work on the geometry of crime, territoriality and residential burglary. Every crime, they argued, has four dimensions (a law, an offender, a target and a place in space and time), and criminology had all but forgotten the fourth. In those years the other pieces arrived from different origins: routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson, 1979), Ronald Clarke's situational prevention (1980) and rational choice applied to crime by Cornish and Clarke (1986). Sociologists, Home Office researchers, psychologists and urban planners came to share one conviction: crime needs a situation, and the situation is easier to change than the person.

// In the archiveCase files for each piece of the tradition

Two of these case files, Whitechapel and the Zodiac, are real unsolved crimes seen through their screen versions. Jack the Ripper, in From Hell, is the founding case of geography as a clue: the murders cluster in so few streets of Whitechapel that the density of the map suggested the killer lived in the neighbourhood. That is the ground of crime pattern theory, which explains such concentration through the nodes, paths and edges of the offender's daily life. The Zodiac Killer, in Fincher's film, illustrates routine activities: he attacks couples in secluded spots (a lonely car park, a lakeshore) and a taxi driver, targets with no one to protect them; and his dispersion across several Bay Area counties, with police forces that did not share information, shows that the map only helps if someone puts it together.

el Dragón Rojo, the "Red Dragon", chooses his victims by watching the home movies he develops at the laboratory, so his awareness space is drawn by his job, not his neighbourhood. Mr. Brooks is the calculating offender of rational choice: he plans for weeks and reduces every risk, and is undone by an open curtain, because a neighbour in the building opposite photographs him mid-crime. That is the "natural surveillance" of Jacobs and CPTED beating the best planner. Daniel Robitaille turns space into myth: a legend anchored to the Cabrini-Green towers, where a gap behind the bathroom medicine cabinet connects one flat with the next, the kind of flaw that worries Newman's defensible space.

JD

From Hell · Film

Jack the Ripper

FD

Red Dragon · Film

Francis Dolarhyde

EB

Mr. Brooks · Film

Earl Brooks

EZ

Zodiac · Film

The Zodiac Killer

CA

Candyman · Film

Candyman

From the crime pattern to defensible space: one case file for each piece of the tradition. Tap to open their case file.

// The applicationFrom the map to prevention

Environmental criminology changed practice more than almost any other tradition, because it offers testable predictions and interventions that can be evaluated. Hot spots led to concentrating patrols on a few addresses, with randomized trials in their favour. Situational prevention became a catalogue of techniques to increase the effort and risk of offending and reduce its rewards, provocations and excuses. CPTED and defensible space reached the architect's drawing board. And the study of risky facilities showed that, within each category (bars, motels, car parks), a few badly managed premises account for almost all of the problem.

It also delivered a reassuring finding, which Clarke and Weisburd named in 1994 the diffusion of benefits. The intuitive objection is that crime will "move" to the next street. Displacement studies show that it moves far less than feared, and that often the improvement spreads to neighbouring areas: if crime depends on the situation, removing the situation does not carry it intact elsewhere.

// The flawThe map neither explains everything nor is it neutral

The first flaw is superficiality: environmental criminology explains where and when magnificently, and almost nothing of the why. It can show that a corner concentrates robberies, but not what drives those who commit them, nor why that neighbourhood ended up as it is (for that you need theories such as social disorganization). Taken as a complete explanation, it leads to policies that manage the symptom without touching the roots.

The second flaw is political: maps are not neutral. Predictive policing fed with historical data inherits its biases: if the police always patrolled a poor neighbourhood more, more crimes were recorded there, and the algorithm will send more police there, a self-fulfilling prophecy with the look of mathematical objectivity. Taken to the extreme, protecting places becomes excluding people: railings, benches no one can lie down on, spaces that expel whoever "has no business" there. Its cousin, broken windows (Wilson and Kelling, 1982), shows how an idea about the state of a place can end up as zero tolerance towards those who live in it.

// Why it mattersThe city as a tool

Used well, this tradition puts prevention within reach of everyday, non-punitive decisions. Lighting a street, opening a shop on a dead corner, moving a bus stop, regulating the closing time of a troublesome bar, designing a park with visibility: these reduce crime without imprisoning anyone. There is no need to reform souls or wait for society to change; sometimes it is enough to redesign a hundred metres of pavement.