​by Gregory Saville

The writing on the shop walls and the floating billboards was Anglo-Chinese. On the street, cityspeak combined English, Chinese and Spanish, a vernacular that served the homeless, the marginally employed and the unfortunate. Pollution and environmental collapse led to constant clouds and pelting rain. The affluent traveled to off-world colonies on Mars and elsewhere, leaving the rest of us behind. Bio-engineered, human-like robots called Replicants used their artificial intelligence and rebelled.

That was the horrific world described in Philip K. Dick’s book that became the 1982 sci-fi classic, Bladerunner. I blogged on Bladerunner architecture last year. When I watched Bladerunner in the 1980s it seemed like an impossible future. And it was set for such a long way ahead – 2019!

That's next year! With only a month left, how close is that future?

​UNFOLDING AS WE SPEAK

It doesn’t take much imagination to see a Bladerunner vision unfolding. True, we are nowhere near that specific dystopia. We still don’t have flying cars (but we have self-driving ones!). Yet, one wonders...

This week I watched NASA’s exciting landing on the planet Mars. Space X CEO Elon Musk says he’ll get people to Mars within six years. How long before off-world colonies evolve?

This year I watched the fruits of some incredible advances in artificial intelligence and bio-engineering, including the world tour of the remarkable Sophie, the first thinking and speaking robot to attain citizenship. Sophie tells us not to worry; real robots are not like Bladerunner.

​Then there is the decades-long Chinese economic miracle and the environmental mess we watch with increasing regularity in hurricanes, wildfires, species extinction and climate chaos.

Philip K. Dick, it seems, was on track. How might we derail that particular future? The usual formula is to rethink geo-politics and create a new macroeconomics. Nevertheless, the maxim ‘think global, act local’ has special relevance here. Take, for example, Philadelphia!


ONE NEIGHBORHOOD’S STORY 

Over the past few years we brought SafeGrowth to Philadelphia. We now have  some great advocates working for the neighborhood association, HACE. This year they began implementing their latest 10-year 2025 Neighborhood Plan.

For years HACE and friends have been diligently working to transform the blight, drugs and crime into a greener, socially connected, economically vibrant neighborhood. Now their new, SafeGrowth-infused 2025 plan is underway and they’ve been making strides.

They installed new, clean walking trails where garbage was once strewn.

​They instituted Philadelphia’s first SafeGrowth Livability Academy, a collaborative on-going workshop with 30 neighbors and police during which they developed problem-solving strategies for their neighborhood.

The HACE plan envisions greener areas, community gardens, better resourced neighborhood hubs, safe intergenerational and affordable housing. HACE has already built over 200 units of affordable housing and leveraged over $100 million in redevelopment and improvements. A host of community-building strategies are already underway.

​For example, they, and their partners, shut down a drug infested, homeless camp along a railway underpass. That naturally displaced addicts to street level, resulting in a public outcry (after decades of inaction). Ultimately, that led to a more coordinated city response to treat drug users, expand homeless beds and increase shelters.

​There is a long way to go and resources and shelter beds are still scarce (one estimate suggest Philadelphia has 50,000 opioid addicts, many of whom end up here). But at least action is finally underway.

That is the hard community-building work that cuts crime, improves livability, and gets neighbors engaged in shaping their own future.

​BEYOND SECURITY

Too many mayors get caught up in a fear-based echo chamber that makes them vulnerable to peddlers of security technology and promises of a bright, high-tech future.

Too many city leaders act as obsequious errand-boys for the technologists, embracing the faint promise of hostile architecture, public CCTV, automated security robots, predictive algorithms seeking crime, and audio software to track gang gunfire. (Wouldn't it be better to prevent the gunfire in the first place?)

They do this with the ill-informed hope that technology will prevail. But in doing this, they snatch defeat from the hands of successful action-based community projects right in front of them. They invite a Bladerunner future.

May they fail.

​by Tarah Hodgkinson

On a recent walk in Burnaby, British Columbia, what was normally an uninteresting and car-dominated street, offered a surprise. As I turned a corner, I was delighted to see a major change since my last visit. The city had built a vertical park! A beautiful walking space including bike lanes, areas to sit, green spaces and artistic architecture. 

What was most interesting was the way in which they city had treated the neighboring houses. Along this vertical park, the city had installed decorative visibility fences. Essentially these fences are neither wooden fences with no visibility nor chain-link fences with visibility but a hideous look.

​These fences are particularly interesting because they address an important issue for corner homes and homes on edges of land-use changes, in this case, residential to commercial. Homes in these locations are often at increased risk of burglary and vandalism.

Tall wooden fences can simply block the external view of an intruder once they are over the fence, making it easier for these individuals to commit a crime. Additionally, residents cannot see if a threat exists on the other side of the fence. Chain link fencing, however, often gives the impression of “fortress” mentality and can increase feelings of fear, making the neighborhood appear hardened. Chain link fences are also quite easy to climb.

These decorative visibility fences provided visibility to both residents and surrounding eyes. At the same time, they create a beautiful linear space for folks to walk through. They are also difficult to climb.

This vertical park and the accompanying decorative visibility fences are a great example of finding beautiful ways to address privacy and safety in neighborhoods on the edges of commercial use.

​By Mateja Mihinjac

Last week I outlined why the problem of vehicular attacks on pedestrians demands thinking beyond target hardening. These incidents cannot be simply eradicated through design, but some of the alternatives below offer possibilities for reducing negative social impacts that accompany hyper-security.
​

OTHER OPTIONS

One way to avoid perpetuating fear and altering aesthetics of public spaces is to transform overt, obtrusive security to less visible (or invisible) security. Instead of fortressing our cities and increasing mass surveillance, target hardening practices can be integrated into the environment (e.g. street furniture, layout, paving styles, use of special materials).

Multiple cases of concrete bollards painted by local artists and activists show that citizens care about the appearance of their public spaces and the message they convey to their users. Other less obtrusive strategies include natural barriers such as rain gardens, ponds, bridges and Ha-Ha walls.

​Successful experiments have also demonstrated how altering pedestrian movement through playful and non-obtrusive designs such as floor markings and mirrors prompts people to use a designated safe route and foster their connection to both place and their users.

Congruent with the smart city movement, new invisible technical solutions are also possible. Sweden is now testing geo-fencing on a large scale before the country may be the first to implement this approach in a fight against heavy vehicles attacks. In the U.S., architects are designing safer schools.

Another popular option includes altering zoning practices in city centers such as special downtown zones that limit vehicle use to light-weight and slow-speed vehicles or pedestrian-only areas. Such zones have a life of their own. They provide opportunities for people to explore and enjoy them. Concurrently they help reclaim public space through reprogramming a restricted area into a positive land use. They also demand improved pedestrian infrastructure and street networks that support easy and safe movement.

The ideas about walkable and human scale design have culminated in practices such as the Barnes dance intersections. The World Resources Institute also provides a detailed overview of measures that prioritize a safe and human scale transport design.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Security professionals, designers and planners can balance security and socially-appropriate measures by providing safety and support connections as well as interactions between people. Obtrusive security measures divide and create barriers between people. There are better alternatives.

​by Tarah Hodgkinson

A few years ago, a scorned lover walked onto a public housing project and shot his ex-girlfriend. She lived but has suffered terribly with her injuries ever since. The man did not live there, so how was he able to get onto the property and shoot his ex? Was this a fluke, spur-of-the-moment occurrence that might have been prevented?

In a journal article coming out this year, myself and some colleagues describe how we used crime mapping and analysis to examine questions about such crimes in public housing. We compared the police calls for service over a 7 year period at four nearby public housing facilities of similar size and occupancy. The housing where the shooting (and many other crimes) occurred went through a massive reconstruction during this time. This construction was intended to upgrade the living facilities and improve the overall livability and security of the location.


CPTED DONE WRONG

However, after the construction, we found not only did calls for police service start going back up, but they did so dramatically. In fact, the trend was increasing at a rate that surpassed previous levels of calls for service. This seems counter-intuitive. Why would a place that had made improvements to the image and maintenance of the property, as well as security, see an increase in calls for service when the other public housing developments didn’t?

We conducted field research that provided some context. While interviews with property managers demonstrated knowledge of security measures, particularly CPTED principles, some of these principles were not properly implemented in the redesign.

For example, they constructed a large fence around the perimeter but failed to replace access control gates and security at key points. The redesign had major openings with no gates or doors to restrict outsiders from entering or exiting. While the entire site was fenced, there was no real access control in or out of the property. Unlike other locations we examined, not only did this facility not have security at the entranceways, it lacked a strong community presence. Thus, there were very little natural surveillance opportunities or proper access controls at the entry points where it mattered most.

Clearly, the lack of proper security measures in public housing, like access control and surveillance, can increase the risk of victimization. In this case, it is unsurprising that an outsider was able to walk right through the front entrance, unchallenged, and shoot his ex-girlfriend.

The implications of poorly implemented CPTED are clear, particularly for responsibility and accountability: accountability for competently implementing CPTED principles in a high-risk location, and responsibility for adequate security in public housing facilities to protect vulnerable residents.

Security robot on patrol - Video Washington Post

Luddite: (adjective) one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly: one who is opposed to especially technological change - Merriam-Webster

by Greg Saville

The story of the Luddite resonated last week with word from San Francisco about a controversy surrounding the  K-5 Security Robot. We blogged on the K-5 a few years ago - On the threshold of a robotics revolution.

Since then the journey of the security robot has not been straight; it has been drowned in a Washington DC fountain and it has mistakenly run over a toddler's leg at a Palo Alto shopping center.

And last week, according to Newsweek, the security robot was removed from duty after deterring homeless encampments near the San Francisco SPCA. Apparently homeless people vandalized the SPCA robot, angry about being singled out by the SPCA and the security robot.


LUDDITE OR TECHNOPHILE

The issue is layered. On one hand, security robots are the latest technology and like all new technologies, they can be applied in ways both sacred and profane. There are places, such as underground parking lots, where an automated security patroller with surveillance tools can keep watch and help make isolated places safer.

In the San Francisco case, SPCA representative Krista Maloney says“staff wasn't able to safely use the sidewalks at times because of the encampments… since the SPCA started guarding its facilities with the robot (known as K9) a month ago, the homeless encampments have dwindled and there have been fewer car break-ins.”

But beneath the surface lurks a darker story.

THE DARK SIDE 

This blog has reported on the so-called hostile architecture movement, especially CPTED tactics used to dehumanize places to exclude certain groups over other groups. Dealing with homeless encampments, which by definition means dealing with homeless people, with a security robot, is a questionable tactic. And the homeless have been outraged. Since the security robot began patrolling in front of the SPCA, the Washington Post claims it has been "allegedly smeared with feces, covered by a tarp and nearly toppled by an attacker."

Are there better, more humane, solutions? In some communities, Housing First programs, seem to work. In fact, the Canadian city of Medicine Hat, population 65,000, claims to have eliminated homelessness with the Housing First strategy. Why isn’t San Francisco helping the SPCA and the homeless with such a program?

by Gregory Saville

Last week the sci-fi film Bladerunner 2049 opened worldwide to rave reviews. In artistic circles, this is known as exceptional neo-noir filmmaking, or more accurately 80s style cyberpunk. Bladerunner 2049 follows the original Bladerunner film from 1982, now considered a masterpiece. It is based on a book by award-winning sci-fi writer, the late Philip K. Dick.

Dick’s themes included dystopian futures, authoritarian corporations, and government conspiracies. Bladerunner occurs on a future Earth poisoned from environmental collapse where cops (Bladerunners) are assigned as bounty hunters to search and eliminate a minority group of human-like androids called Replicants. Written 50 years ago, Dick’s tale foreshadows the environmental crisis, immigrant-purging, social turbulence, and police violence on our streets today. In short, he nailed it!


ART REFLECTS LIFE
​
For evidence, take a look at the street architecture of the future Los Angeles in Bladerunner and compare that with what is emerging in our biggest cities. Art, clearly, reflects life!

​Very seldom are artistic and cultural movements restricted to galleries and magazines. Even the most outrageous art and music seep out into politics, daily life and, most importantly, ways of thinking. That is because artistic and cultural movements do not arise on their own; they are a reaction to - or against - current affairs. That is why they are a barometer of things to come.

Consider how 1960s counter-culture morphed into environmentalism, civil rights, and equality for women, concepts in common parlance today. Or consider the artistic movement called modernism in the early 20th Century that evolved into the International Congress of Modern Architecture and the global planning disaster we now call urban sprawl.

​Bladerunner is art that tells a story: Philip K. Dick’s cyberpunk story of urban dystopia! For real-life examples look carefully at the cores of our most modern cities to see the worship of architectural cyberpunk.

If this analogy holds, then what about last week’s horrific mass murder in Las Vegas, the on-going trouble with police shootings, political turbulence, and environmental disasters of late? Are they signals that the Bladerunner story is unfolding as predicted? Never has there been a more appropriate time for a better model of neighborhood safety and urban growth.

I have been pondering the security technology encroachments into public life, particularly regarding CCTV monitoring. There was a time, it seems now very long ago, that the UK was awash in CCTV. Hundreds of millions of dollars, and over four million (and counting) CCTV cameras later, the UK is the most surveilled society on earth.

We were assured that would never happen in the US, or other developed countries. Violate our civil rights? No way cried the libertarian and democratic pundits in unison. 

Still, if you have nothing to hide…

Today, London and Beijing have over 400,000 CCTV each (proving politics is no guarantee either way). In the US there are over 30 million CCTV cameras, mostly in private hands. But there are now CCTV on streets in every major US city (Houston and Chicago lead the way with over 14,000 in Chicago alone) and public support is growing.

APPLAUDING OR BOOING?

On one hand, we applaud when police apprehend the Boston terrorists due in large measure to public CCTV. We also later watched those same terrorists as they planted and exploded the devices - prevention was not a result of those cameras. 

I always applaud traffic intersection CCTV to cut car crashes, especially in my city where drivers spend more time in narcissistic self-obsession beating the red light rather than watching where they are going. 

THE NEW REALITY

Recently I’ve been reviewing the latest in CCTV analytics, intelligent tracking and real-time scene analysis - CCTV on steroids. The thing is no longer motion detection or auto tracking (so old school). The latest is intelligent video analytics, a major evolution from facial recognition software in yesteryear. Video analytics is made possible by exponential increases in processing power and so-called ‘intelligent’ algorithms. 

And now it is part of security and public safety, watching for suspicious movements, packages, behaviors. Watching you! How does the computer know what to look for? It uses algorithms based on past behavior. In future, it may use artificial intelligence to learn on its own. And that is where things get interesting.

Wired magazine puts it this way:
​
“voice, image, and motion recognition will transform human-computer interfaces into a seamless interaction between the user and all the computing devices in that person’s life.”
A few years ago I blogged about economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin, his forecasts, the Internet of Things and his predictions for disruptive technologies. It seems he was right. Should we be worried?

- Gregory Saville

​Tonight is Halloween - that ancient Celtic harvest festival where children turn into goblins and threaten mere mortals with tricks or treats. Not really the stuff of serious nightmares, more the frivolities of fun.

Last week the International CPTED Association ran another successful conference with exceptional speakers from around the world. Presentations are online at the ICA website.

Saskatoon planner Elisabeth Miller, criminologist Tarah Hodgkinson and myself delivered our research on something that represents a real nightmare for 1st Generation CPTED practitioners – the return of displacement.
​

​Is it just me noticing this or has visionary leadership truly gone AWOL?

Friendy gangs, stealing kisses and music addicts. Now that's my kind of crime.

Thanks to Coca Cola, the band Supertramp and my ever-astute friend Paul Cleveland (who sent this video), here is another way to view security cameras.

It's proof of something cops and prevention folks forget; For every ugly act caught live by CCTV, there are many more beautiful acts that rarely make the news.

They should.

While governments in the UK are taking the remarkable step of hiring security to privatize police, something equally remarkable, and almost unnoticed, is unfolding in Detroit. 

Resident groups, fed-up with declining resources, a cash-strapped police department and crime and disorder, have decided to take advantage of a recently updated Michigan law - the Home Rule City Act - and hire their own private security to police their neighborhoods. Council has yet to approve the proposal. 

The Act allows neighborhoods to levy a service fee on residents for private security. In America, neighborhood's hiring their own security is not new. Allowing neighborhoods to tax themselves to fund it…that is!  

Drastic times call for drastic measures! Really? Without clearly thought out public policy? Without proper hiring benchmarks? Without quality control for training and selection? Who will do that? The Detroit police? How can Detroit police monitor, control, or audit quality of neighborhood security when they are too cash-strapped to deliver services themselves? 

​In a stunning leap of Monty Python logic, I'm told the British Home Office thinks it can do all that quality control, monitoring and auditing of UK police privatization themselves. After all, as this Pythonic thinking goes, they did it for public police…that is to say the same "inefficient" public police the government is now privatizing. 

In other words, more bureaucracy to control outsourcing due to funding shortfalls for inefficient policing from government funding. Blimey! That circular logic makes one's head spin. It's the Ministry of Silly Walks through and through.

And how's that working for them? I just read news that a former division of Hallibuton Inc was a leading bidder to privatize UK police services. That's Halliburton - the same military-industrial giant of Iraq infamy. The same Halliburton implicated in the Gulf Oil spill a few years ago. 

There is nothing wrong with private security (in fact the opposite) as long as it is administered properly and monitored for quality by qualified experts. But does Detroit really want in on this game without well-thought policy mechanisms? 

Is it just me, or does the dystopian RoboCop future seem just a bit closer today?

I'm always intrigued by a trip to Washington, D.C. Inside the beltway it has remarkable sights, a successful subway system, sprawling parks, and terrific dining. 

Outside the beltway, it's another city. There are wealthy and intriguing neighborhoods - mostly low crime and safe - and blighted and poor neighborhoods to the east - mostly high crime and unsafe.

Once known as Murder City USA, today Washington's crime declines echo the Great American Crime Decline in every other city since 1990s. 

Still, high crime and fear remain.

In recent years police have enacted "crime emergencies" allowing the cops to double their manpower at peak times, gang intervention programs and police checkpoints. Though murders are at an all-time low, they are still 5 times the national average.

It is 2 years since the Supreme Court lifted DC's handgun ban. Yet the fear of crime persists. ABC news claims it's the affluent neighborhoods (where crime was already lowest) where gun purchases have spiked - a matter of fear over reality. It's in the poor neighborhoods (where most crime happens) where gun purchases have been dropping!

And now a cool new website - Stumble Safely - is under development in DC. Say's it's promo:

"Stumble Safely helps you find the best bars and a safe path to stumble home on. You can see some of our favorite spots on these maps …It doesn’t matter when or where you start drinking for Stumble Safely to help you."

​In other words, in spite of the crime declines, police tactics, and gun purchases, perhaps in the end it's everyday community folks coming up with innovative new ideas (like setting up their own websites) that can best improve safety. 

Jane Jacobs, it seems, was right.

I like the crime triangle. It is popular among crime analysts. It helps analyze crime hotspots. It is also part of problem-oriented policing. Sometimes too it is part of the prevention practitioner’s toolbox. It has elegant utility and simplicity. 

The crime triangle emerges from "routine activity theory" (RA) in the early 1980s. RA explained some behavior quite well, like predatory crime (stalking). It did so with a simple premise: crime converges at the intersection of likely offenders, suitable targets and an absence of guardianship (or, more recently, "handlers"). 

In lay terms, picture the three sides of a triangle with an offender, a victim, and a target/place. When those things come together, so the theory goes, crime goes up.

The crime triangle is useful. Break the triangle and you prevent the crime. Want to increase guardianship? Get property managers to keep better control of their properties. Improve bar management in bars that over-serve. Simple. Elegant.

So far, so good. Except for one thing; that is where it typically ends in the RA world. The crime triangle does not dig deeper into the causes of crime.

Why? Because routine activity (and its crime triangle progeny) is one of those crime and place theories. ​

RATIONAL CHOICE

RA is less a causal theory explaining why and more a descriptive symbol predicting when, where or how. It ignores why someone becomes motivated in the first place. RA assumes an endless supply of motivated offenders. They are motivated for some reason; we just don't know why. The only "explanation" of motive falls back to rational choice theory.

Rational choice assumes offenders are rational actors who weigh risks against rewards. From the window of RA (and the crime triangle), crime looks like a "normal" condition of life. 

True, some criminal behavior is “normal” in the sense that as events, products, and social affairs change, so too do crime opportunities. But as a causal theory, that’s rather trifling. It’s a bit like saying with enough water, sun and moderate temperature, certain environmental conditions will produce rain.

Then again some criminal behavior is not normal at all and RA just doesn’t work. Consider the story of the Connecticut mass murder in the news today. 

As the NY Times says, this is “the latest in a series of American workplace tragedies”. It is a sad story about a workplace shooter who killed numerous workmates and then himself. He may have snapped from perceived workplace injustice. Perhaps he was clouded in a drug stupor. Maybe he was insane.

Routine activity theory might suggest how to remove opportunity for future incidents like this. That is a good start. Baby steps. 

But RA theory will never actually know why because it will never ask. In cases such as this, the risk and reward assumptions of crime-and-place theories look rather silly. What does a suicidal shooter “risk”? What “reward” was this shooter gaining? Vengeance? (If so, we’re back to motive.)

WHAT CAN THE TRIANGLE DO?

What will the crime triangle tell us in cases like this? 

1. Capable guardians - cameras, plentiful supervision, and so forth. Unfortunately this shooting occurred at shift change when there were lots of employees and supervisors about. As for CCTV, how often do we watch nighttime news clips of robbery/shootings on corner-store CCTV? Cameras don’t stop shootings.

2. The time/workplace environment – preventing guns in the workplace. Will metal detectors work? Perhaps, but how difficult is it for shooters to become bombers. What then? Bomb sniffing dogs? At some point Orwellian paranoia replaces civility. Where do we stop? Body cavity searches?

3. The offender – modus operandi (not motive. Remember, RA is motive-neutered). The crime triangle asks if "handlers" like armed security might have intervened (that actually might have helped). Or maybe we could have prevented the shooter from getting guns in the first place? Others can argue 2nd Amendment rights. I won't bother here. 

Crime triangle questions just don't do it. Instead, we must also ask this: Why did the shooter shoot? What can we learn about motive to prevent such tragic events in future?

The crime triangle is a useful and elegant baby step. I like it and I use it. But it is veneer. It is short term. It is not enough.

Our analysis of neighborhood crime must include a more robust analytical dialogue. If our analysis does not encompass action to move social life forward, it is not robust. Ultimately, if our theory fails to include motive, we are cluttering our dialogue with junk and the analysis of junk.

How many times have you turned on TV news and watched security camera images of crooks robbing a convenience store? Or CCTV images of street violence broadcast on the evening news? Security cameras have been with us for many decades, usually inside buildings and vulnerable underground parking lots. 

Ever since the UK installed thousands of cameras on public streets a decade ago debate has raged whether they prevent crime or infringe on our privacy. Or both. Offical eyes watching our every move! 

Since the early 1990s the UK has led the way. Today over a half million cameras have watched public places all around London. This is the so-called ring of steel. Orwell would roll over!

Obviously we cannot consider city safety until we look at the issue of CCTV in public places. Does it work? Are there better answers?

The most authoritative voices I have found are David Farrington and Brandon Welsh. Most of their UK research shows conflicting results. Half the time public CCTV can have a positive (but small) impact. The other half the time, no impact at all. 

Read the Farrington study

Later they report street lighting has equal crime prevention impact to cameras in downtown areas, but these effects were greater in the UK than in North America.

Read the Camera vs Lighting research

This is all music to the ears of those practicing Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design - CPTED. The CPTED folks have said for years building a livable and vital downtown, where a wide range of people spend their leisure evening hours, is the best way to improve the natural visibility. 

I remember when public cameras were installed in in Sudbury, Canada over a decade ago following some downtown bank robberies. I recently read a Washington Post article on a similar trend in US cities

Read the Washington Post article

None of which answers the questions: Does CCTV really work to prevent crime downtown? Are there better ways to prevent crime? 

One thing we know for sure: 

Every time we watch a robber or street violence on CCTV, the crime is already underway. Cameras might help police catch bad guys later. But those cameras did nothing to prevent crime in the first place. 

If they did, we wouldn't be watching them on TV!