Displacement Essay

Is displacement a likely outcome of any situational crime prevention initiative? The short answer to this question is no. I will illustrate this answer in more detail by drawing upon three required readings.
In his paper, Eck (1993, pp. 527) explicitly indicated that “there is no evidence of greater than 100% displacement and that full displacement is unlikely.” By summarizing pioneers’ works on the displacement, Eck listed six types of displacement: temporal, spatial, target, method, crime type and perpetrator displacements, and among which, spatial displacement was the one which had the most advocates, especially those who believed in traditional criminology. Eck was fonder of rational choice theory, which considered crimes were the outcome of the bonded rational choice made by the person with the consideration of both risk and award, and therefore, displacement might not happen if criminal opportunity could be eliminated. Eck made a systematic review of the 33 empirical researches on displacement and suggested that “there is more reason to expect no
They argued that since the “specific characteristics of places and the development of human connections to place discouraged the displacement of crime (Weisburd and Telep, 2012, pp.145)”, and this discouragement was especially reasonable since the crime hotspots were not only concentrated in the micro-environment but also stayed stable over time. Besides the displacement, this study also discussed the diffusion of benefits like the other two, and illustrated that the situational crime prevention strategies would not only influence the potential criminals’ psychological judgments and real actions, but also motivate informal social surveillance, which could discourage the potential criminal actions. So, displacement was not likely to happen