The Four Main Rules Of CPTED

The four main rules of CPTED are natural surveillance, natural access control, territorial reinforcement, and maintenance and management. These rules classify all CPTED behavior into four categories that are easy to understand and follow. The first one is I think the most important, natural surveillance. Natural surveillance would be cases in which areas can be kept guard in a sense by people going about their daily business. For example a mall is highly protected by all of the people in it. If a crime were to happen then it would easily be seen by a lot of people and this would act as a deterrent for future crime. If a lot of areas have natural surveillance then crimes would be difficult to be committed. There would simply be too many witnesses.
Now let’s take this a step further and realize what this does for the economy. With natural surveillance you don’t need to have a lot of paid labor to be patrolling areas. It wouldn’t be necessary because people are already doing it without even knowing it! Free of charge as well! This sounds like a bargain to me. With free natural security then you can focus on other things such as upkeep of the place which falls under the fourth rule. This seems to be all coming together to form the community policing I mentioned above.
Now the second rule is natural access control, what this means is plain and simple doors. Doors are a way to control access to areas but it is not the only one. Only the most basic. There is also things such as fencing, shrubs, and psychological things such as how things are made, for example the patterns/ colors of tiles used and such. Psychological barriers like mentioned above let the person know that this is where one thing ends and another begins and marks the property up in a way that is stylish and it gets the job done without obtrusive fences sticking out every which way. Something important about this rule is that there shouldn’t be obstructions that impede movement. So the fences sticking out marking every property line in public places would be very obtrusive and look rather ghastly so it’s important to keep that in mind. Rule number three is territorial reinforcement which is when a person’s property can be clearly identified from their neighbors. This is important because people like taking care of what is their own so if it is easily identified then there won’t be anything going bad in their property because it is theirs and theirs
only. Now the last rule is maintenance and management which is focused on people’s pride of their belongings.
They want their property to look good so in order to do this they have to maintain it and everyone knows that property that doesn’t look good could be a host for criminal activity, this prevents that. Now with all these rules put together then you have the CPTED system which is vital in keeping crime down. With these rules you might wonder, “Well how are they implemented?” and the answer to that is that there is a 3-D approach to it. There are three D’s and those are designation, definition, and design. These are used to determine how a specific environment is doing in following the four rules above. Let’s look at the first one, designation. This is what the purpose of the design originally was, if there is a conflict with what it is and what it was intended to be. The second rule is definition which is how is it defined? Are there things marking it in a way that show that it is someone’s property? And the last one is design which asks how well was the intended object designed? Does it fulfill its purpose correctly or does it leave more to be wanted? These conceptual principles are used in conjunction with the four rules above in order to make CPTED possible and the most effective
possible. Without these rules and principles CPTED wouldn’t have come as far as it has since the 1970’s and crime might have not been as low as it has been since it’s been implemented all over the world. It’s astonishing how something so simple can have such positive effects on the world.