Situational Crime Prevention Analysis

The methods outlined by Clarke in this table (Table 1) can be utilized through problem-oriented policing, private security or the managers of businesses, hospitals, schools, transportation, government buildings, or even private citizens. The strategy is accomplished through assessment of risks and the manipulation of the environment. For instance a homeowner could remove crime opportunities for a criminal to hack into his home’s Wi-Fi by examining the five mechanisms, choosing the mechanism “increase the effort” and then moving down the column and choosing the crime inhibitor “control access to facilities”. The homeowner could choose to control the access by changing the default password to his wireless router to one that is not easy to
Clarke outlines a number of considerations that must be made in order to manipulate the environment to produce the desired results. The manager that implements situational crime prevention must take necessary actions to reduce opportunities for crime, focus on specific crimes, understand how that crime is committed, utilize the recommended action research model and consider a wide variety of solutions (Clarke, 2018). Situational crime prevention strategies require problem solving techniques be used and careful research be done before implementing environmental changes to ensure the best outcomes without producing negative side effects. Well executed situational crime prevention strategies have shown through numerous studies to be very effective and at times resulted in positive side effects known as diffusion of benefits and anticipatory benefits. On rare occasion there were findings of displacement. Guerette and Bowers (2009) studied 102 situational crime prevention projects and found that 75% of those projects had effective results with only 12 % deemed non effective. Within that same study, they assessed diffusion of benefits and displacement occurrences and found that crime does not simply move to other locations. Displacement rarely occurred and in some observations, it was more likely that efforts resulted in a diffusion of benefits rather than
Diffusion of benefits as noted, occasionally occur when changes to the environment have been implemented, but potential offenders do not understand the scope of the change. Offenders then overestimate the implementation’s capabilities or reach. The result shows positive crime results in areas that may be adjacent to the change or at other similar targets. Anticipatory benefits. Clarke (2018) noted that several incidents of anticipatory benefits had occurred where announcements of future implementation of strategies had resulted in a reduction in crimes even before the change was made. Criminals were deterred from committing crimes as they believed the changes had already occurred. Criminals often believed equipment that had been installed was functional before they actually were. Displacement of crime. Displacement of crime occurs when actions or manipulation of an environment such as crime prevention, causes crime to occur through six different types of displacement when the crime occurs: at another place (spatial), by choosing a different crime (offense), by choosing another target (target), at a different time (temporal), through a different plan of action (tactical), and when current offenders move on and new ones take their place (offender) (Guerette & Bowers, 2009). Displacement is often a criticism of situational crime prevention and other crime prevention tactics. As noted by Guerette and Bowers (2009) this does not often occur often