Saturday, October 4, 2025

Children and the future of CPTED

Children have a role to play in their own future

by Larry Leach 

“We’re Not Raising Children… We are Raising Adults” was advice I once received as a young parent. In essence, if your children act in ways you wouldn’t accept from an adult, then you need to help correct that behavior.

Whitney Houston captured this beautifully in The Greatest Love of All: “I believe that children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.”

After reading recent blogs by Greg and Mateja speaking about children and the roots of crime, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the role of learned behavior and the power of youth to guide us toward safer, healthier communities in both physical and behavioral terms.

Greg’s blog outlined an entire line of crime and learning research in social control theory and blocked opportunity theory. Mateja described how children serve as a catalyst for neighbourhood connections. 

Since 2010, we have featured blogs on youth violence prevention, such as the work of 2nd Gen CPTED co-creator Gerry Cleveland.

THERE IS SOMETHING TO THIS 

When we hear from reformed offenders, their stories often trace back to childhood trauma. Unresolved pain led to alcohol or drug use later in life, used as a mask. Therefore, if many pathways to crime begin in youth, and children lack the tools to process trauma alone, prevention must start there.

School learning at all levels is important for preventing crime - photo woodleywonderworks,
CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

My experience in school politics showed me first hand how the system tends to measure success. We hear plenty about graduation rates and year-to-year statistics, but not a lot about how the school affects those rates? Were outcomes positive or negative? And what about mental health—rarely measured, though it profoundly shapes students’ lives?

It’s hard to put into numbers the value of mentorship, of a caring adult relationship, or of a community that steps in to support young people. Yet these are the very things that can make a struggling student feel seen and guided.

Research underscores the point. In a paper titled The Impact of Education on Crime: International Evidence, the authors note:

Reductions in crimes leading to an arrest realized from offering better school options to high-risk youth would conservatively produce USD $16,000 in social savings to victims over the next seven years. Because better schools also likely reduce crimes that never lead to an arrest, savings are likely to be substantially higher—especially when factoring in reduced prison and prevention costs.

YOUTH CENTRES AND OUTSIDE ACTIVITIES

Add to all of this, the lack of focus on the "whole child" in modern school systems, and we now need outside activities like Youth Centres and sport organizations to help develop a healthy mentality as they move towards adulthood. 

Children from youth centre  

Filling youth tool belts with the necessary life tools - when some families are dealing with their own personal trauma - is another key to prevention that many  municipalities are missing. This isn’t a statistic for policymakers, but a hands-on community intervention that’s harder to secure buy-in for.

Graduation rates, while important, don’t tell the whole story. A diploma does not guarantee that a young person has the tools to thrive as an adult. Communities need to fill those gaps intentionally, with adults willing to step in as mentors and guides. This takes effort and buy-in, but it can transform lives.

When we consider Third Generation CPTED and building a healthy community, youth should be at the forefront on building plans to prevent crime. Building healthy, connected communities means placing young people at the center of prevention. 

Teach them well. And then, let them lead the way.

 

Wednesday, September 17, 2025

An Odyssey - Searching for the cause of crime


Ancient Greek vase (480 BC) of legendary King Odysseus hearing the Sirens whose songs lure sailors to shipwreck - self-mastery and constraint led his ship to safety.
Similarily, in criminology, theories of social and situational control can lead us safely away from crime - photo Wiki Commons

By Gregory Saville

Note: To theory-averse readers – I apologize. We usually do not write long blogs. We offer real-life examples, stories of people doing great things, and ideas for change. We don’t delve deeply into theory. Now and then, however, I am reminded that theory is the foundation for good practice and that sometimes stories take time. This blog explains why.

Last year I re-read Homer’s Odyssey and thought: perfect blog arc. I drafted an outline—but life intervened. Last week, thumbing through notes from my first crime-theory classes in graduate school many moons ago, it hit me: these weren’t lecture summaries—they were maps of an odyssey —a long voyage across generations, full of rival schools, wrong turns, and breakthroughs. 

Like Odysseus, criminologists kept sailing from one island of ideas to the next, each promising an answer to why crime happens and how to prevent it. And, like Odysseus, each landfall changed the quest.

Class #1 Individual Pathology — “Look inside the person”

The theory voyage in criminology was launched inside the human brain in the 1800s. Italian physician-criminologist Cesare Lombroso hunted for the “born criminal”. Early-1900s eugenicists chased ‘feeblemindedness’ and eugenics boards forced sterilizations on the “unfit” — grim policy on flimsy claims.



Some tried to pin crime on IQ. Ultimately criminologist Edwin Sutherland wrote intelligence was not an important cause of delinquency, and more recent studies suggest any existing IQ/crime link reflects school struggles and social frustrations.

Today the spotlight has shifted again. Trauma, psychopathy, sociopathy, and malignant narcissism are the buzzwords. In our field, third-generation CPTED captures this emerging research. New studies by Indian psychologist Meenakshi Shukla
and Australian psychologist Natalija Djakovic
dig into the Dark Triad —narcissism/Machiavellianism/psychopathy—showing deficits in both cognitive and emotional empathy.

Socio-biology theories remain a viable explanation for at least some crimes, especially neurological research on aggression and the amygdala. Trauma-based prevention programs capture this research.

Other theory captains took new routes. German/British researcher Hans Eysenck’s Crime and Personality (1964) mapped “criminal personalities.” Neurological researchers explored aggression and the amygdala; endocrinologists tested chemical castration for sex offenders. And yet, research indicates that most people with risk factors don’t offend. None of these pathologies are silver bullets. 

The emerging field of sociobiology has rebooted with wiser tools—twin studies, behavioral genetics, brain imaging—pointing to a gene–environment duet. Biology matters; context decides. Whether biomarkers become crime depends on the social world where predispositions meet opportunity. Neighborhoods matter.

Class #2 Social Psychology — “We learn our way into crime”

By mid-century, the odyssey turned outward. Instead of asking what’s wrong in the brain, we asked how people learn morals and rules. Lawrence Kohlberg 
mapped moral development, and Albert Bandura showed we lean toward rewards and away from punishment—kids learn kindness or bravado from caregivers, from TV like Sesame Street, and from crime-glorifying media. 

In the 1970s, my old friend C. Ray Jeffery argued these learning “environments” should be woven into one integrated theory—a thread that fed CPTED thinking.

Much of that evolved from Chicago’s Edwin Sutherland who said it plainly: crime is learned from others—differential association. His students Sykes & Matza added techniques of neutralization, the justifications offenders use: “nobody really got hurt” or “the system is corrupt.” Culture-conflict and subcultural theories showed why immigrant and lower-status youth might reject mainstream rules: remove status and respect, and people build their own codes. In prison, a single “diss” can trigger violence.

Which begs the question: if crime is learned, why don’t more people do it? I once attended Professor Travis Hirschi's criminology class years ago where he answered that question: strong social bonds in families and school hold people back. Later, in A General Theory of Crime with Michael Gottfredson, he argued that low self-control—impulsivity and present-mindedness—explains much deviance across life.

A few decades earlier, in the1960s, radical criminology had flipped the script. Howard Becker
and labeling theorists asked who gets to define crime. Being from “across the tracks” or “the bad side of town” are labels we still see in SafeGrowth work. Stigma can create careers in deviance; diversion programs try to interrupt that path. Modern restorative justice pushes further: repair harm, include victims, reintegrate people, and rebuild relationships so communities can heal. Vancouver, Canada is the latest city to scale this up as a Restorative City.

Restorative Vancouver - photo courtesy of the peacemaking group Peace of the Circle led by Dr. Evelyn Zellerer

Class #3 Structure & Ecology — “Place shapes possibility”

The third cluster steered theory into bigger waters: neighborhoods, cities, the social fabric. In the 19th century, French sociologist Émile Durkheim called it anomie when shared expectations fray and meaning is lost. Working in Boston and New York, Robert Merton wrote “Social Structure and Anomie” (1938), turning that into strain theory: if we celebrate success but block lawful means, people will innovate—sometimes illegally.

Chicago researchers Clifford Shaw & Henry McKay mapped delinquency across the city. Crime radiated in zones from the core; neighborhood conditions mattered more than individual traits—a theme that still resonates in SafeGrowth work. In the 1930s, they launched the Chicago Area Project to build cohesion and youth capacity; decades later a RAND corporation evaluation confirmed that it worked—delinquency fell and community organizing improved.

Neighborhood conditions affect social cohesion, collective efficacy, and crime

Richard Cloward & Lloyd Ohlin’s book, Delinquency and Opportunity, 
saw gangs as the street’s answer when legitimate paths are closed. Robert F. Kennedy read their work and helped channel it into Great Society programs to unblock pathways—jobs, training, education.

Conflict theorists added sharper edges: law can reflect the push-and-pull of groups; others, leaning on Marx, tied crime to class domination and surplus labor. These theories led to stormy seas—often more political than operational—but a needed reminder that power, inequality, and law are braided together.

Then came a three-point compass: Routine Activities Theory. Felson and Cohen argued crime happens when a motivated offender, a suitable target, and no capable guardian converge in space and time. Paired with British criminologists Clarke and Mayhew’s situational prevention, that changed practice: reduce temptations, harden targets, add guardianship, design better settings. In 1981, Canadian criminologists, Patricia and Paul Brantingham's environmental criminology, put crime theories into geography. 

In the mid-1980s, British criminologists Ronald V. Clarke and Derek B. Cornish crafted their prevention studies into a new twist on a very old idea - many offenders make rational decisions to commit crimes - the Rational Choice Theory.  I recently wrote a blog memorial to my friend, the late Ron Clarke (and his co-author Patricia Mayhew) for their tremendous theoretical contribution to the field. SafeGrowth taps into some of these ideas in early phases of prevention; and then extends them in later phases by using community capacity-building.

From the 1960s, Jane Jacobs’s ‘eyes on the street’ in urban planning and architect Oscar Newman’s defensible space in the 1970s, through to Robert Sampson’s collective efficacy in the late 1990s, the through-line is clear: urban design + neighborhood trust + willingness to act = effective prevention. SafeGrowth broadens this ecology of crime into long-term neighborhood capacity and livability.

According to legend, King Odysseus left Troy on a voyage home to Ithica following the Trojan War. Crime theory over the decades resembles that journey - photo courtesy of Tungsten, Wiki Commons

Final Class – Coming Home

Looking back, criminology’s odyssey isn’t about crowning one victor; it’s about integrating what each island on the Odyssey taught us. C. Ray Jeffery's desire for an integrative theory was right all along - albeit in a more expansive form. Pathology showed that bodies and brains matter—in context. Social psychology showed how we learn, belong, and are labeled—and how restoration can replace stigma. Structure and ecology mapped how inequality, environmental opportunity, urban design, and cohesion set the neighborhood stage where all those human stories play out.

That synthesis is where prevention lives. Biology supplies tendencies; peers teach habits; place turns risk up or down. This is the true ecology of crime—not a buzzword, but a practical way to braid the human, the social, and the spatial into strategies that work.

Odysseus doesn’t return the same man who left Ithaca. Neither do we. The destination isn’t a single, final theory. It’s a way of working together—scholars, residents, planners, cops, and city builders—to make safer, more livable neighborhoods that grow and flourish. That is our Ithaca: not a port where the voyage ends, but a place strong enough to launch new journeys and welcome people safely home.

Thursday, September 11, 2025

Children - a catalyst for neighbourhood connection


Engaging young people is an ideal way to foster connections between residents

by Mateja Mihinjac

I moved to a new neighbourhood several months ago. I was pleasantly surprised how lively the neighbourhood became as soon as the weather warmed up. Children playing out in the streets and in grassed areas in-between residential blocks, riding bikes and scooters, people walking their dogs – me included. This became a great opportunity to regularly meet people of all ages occupying outdoor space. 

Another thing I noticed was how young and middle-aged individuals, in particular, were regularly meeting in the grassed areas outside their blocks. They were chatting, sometimes also having a picnic and enjoying an odd drink. I observed most of these individuals were parents of children who were playing with each other nearby. Often, complete families of parents and their children were playing soccer in a playful competition. 

 

Youth in the Helsingborg, Sweden SafeGrowth program - describing
their summer safety audits in their neighbourhood

This reminded me of the community sports initiative from New York city from several years ago when I attended one of the SafeGrowth training workshops in Brownsville and Van Dyke public housing in Brooklyn.

 

THE VAN DYKE HOUSES SPORTS INITIATIVE

During the SafeGrowth workshops we discovered a powerful community-led initiative: the Unite Brownsville Cornerstone League (UBCL), a basketball program bringing youth and police together. NYPD Neighborhood Coordination Officer Jason Anazagasty, led the league and also took part in the workshops.


Officer Anazagasty described how much he enjoyed working with children and how the program builds stronger relationships between youth and police. He also pointed out a deeper impact the program created.

UBCL teams included youth from both Brownsville and the neighbouring Van Dyke housing developments, with games held at the Van Dyke community space. That required Brownsville youth—and their parents—to visit Van Dyke regularly. These visits sparked interactions among parents who had avoided each other for years due to grudges, tensions, and old conflicts. 


The Brownsville public housing in New York City were once described  
in Oscar Newman's book Defensible Space 


The program created a neutral space where families could reconnect, rebuild social ties, and eventually launch other community gatherings. UBCL became more than just basketball—it opened a pathway for families and neighbours to engage again.

 

OTHER EXAMPLES

Other examples demonstrate similar outcomes:

The verdict is unanimous – children serve as a catalyst for neighbourhood connections!

 

SafeGrowth consultant Tarah Hodgkinson wrote about safety audits
with kids in her blog from Saskatoon


FINAL THOUGHTS

We often fail to give children much credit – as adults, we frequently nag about them being loud and disturbing our peace. 

The above examples teach us of the important role that children and youth play in building social capital. In SafeGrowth, we encourage participation of youth in workshops because their perspective should be included in community voice. 

It is time we recognise the multi-faceted role children and youth play in our neighbourhoods.


Saturday, August 30, 2025

Cutting crime with knowledge and power - A doorway to effective policing

 
The 2025 Problem-Oriented Policing Conference returns 
to Madison, Wisconsin

By Gregory Saville

A few decades ago, television entered what critics call the Second Golden Age. Gone were the tidy cop shows of the 1970s. In their place came gritty realism. Among them was NYPD Blue, where Detective Andy Sipowicz embodied the flawed but dedicated street cop.

In one memorable episode, Sipowicz points to three hoodlums owning a downtown corner as he mentors a rookie about what it really means to police the streets: “Them three are bad and right now they own that corner. A good cop is gonna take that corner back so that people walking by don’t have to fear for their life.”

Today, that line may sound dated. Yet in its time, the sentiment rang true. As a young police officer, I too heard versions of that same lesson: your beat is your responsibility - protect it with pride. It reflected the enduring myth of the warrior in blue—the guardian who takes back the street.

NYPD Blue - the 1990s police procedural TV drama won 20 primetime Emmy Awards and 80 nominations over its 12-year run

Of course, reality was always messier. Crime is rarely solved by a lone act of heroism. Yet the drive to bring safety and dignity to a community remains. The difference today is that we know far smarter ways to do it.


FROM WARRIOR MYTH TO SMART STRATEGIES 

Despite what the skeptics say, police can and do stop crime— but only when they use the right tools. Sometimes that involves an arrest. More often, it means creative strategies that reduce harm without relying only on force.

This is the world of Problem-Oriented Policing (POP). Conceived by the late Professor Herman Goldstein, POP has become one of the most effective, research-backed models in modern policing. Instead of reacting case by case, POP asks: why is this crime happening here and how can we change the conditions that allow it?

Over decades, POP has built a proven track record: tackling robberies, drug markets, intimate partner violence, carjackings, and more. Its philosophy is simple: don’t just respond to symptoms— use crime analysis, community partnerships, crime prevention through environmental design, and many other inventive strategies to actually solve the problems.

 

Madison Wisconsin, site of the 2025 POP Conference
- photo Wiki Creative Commons

THE POP CONFERENCE 

The annual Problem-Oriented Policing Conference is the gathering place for this work. Previous conferences introduced new strategies and concepts, such as the SafeGrowth model presented for the first time last year.

In 2025, the conference will once again return to Madison, Wisconsin after having been there in 2015. This year it will bring together practitioners, researchers, and community partners to share cutting-edge strategies and real-world results.

At the conference, you’ll learn practical tactics, such as:

  • Cutting gun crime through place-based prevention and community partnerships.
  • Reducing school bullying by reshaping school climates and peer norms.
  • Preventing robberies by focusing on repeat victims, and situational vulnerabilities.
  • Applying CPTED and SafeGrowth to redesign public spaces and reduce fear.

The conference is about equipping police and city leaders with the evidence and tools to reduce crime in meaningful, lasting ways. You can register here

The conference is run by the Center for Problem-Oriented Police headed by Michael Scott - the nexus for innovative and effective policing

FROM SIPOWICZ TO POP HEROES

Sipowicz’s message—take back the corner—was once the rallying cry of police culture. It symbolized toughness and control. But today, real heroism looks different. It’s the officer who asks why the corner became dangerous, and then works with residents to change it. It’s the leader who measures success not in arrests, but in safer neighborhoods and stronger trust.

The Sipowicz era imagined the cop as a lone warrior. POP reimagines the cop as a problem-solver, a partner, and a guardian of community well-being.

That is the spirit of the 2025 POP Conference: to give practitioners the strategies, partnerships, and confidence to reclaim not just a street corner, but the whole city and, along with it, the legitimacy and trust that sustain safe communities.

And in that sense, Sipowicz’s line still resonates. Good cops do take back the corner—but today, they do it with insight, compassion, and strategy. Those are the true heroes who guard the community.

 

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Building blocks for civic commitment - the key to safety

\
Reaching for livability and safety 
through civic commitment

by Larry Leach

The role of commitment in civic life is no different than the desire for a crime-free, livable neighborhood.

Do you feel emotionally tied to something? Maybe a sports team, celebrity, or politician? I do—with the British football club - Liverpool FC. The club’s unique culture is inseparable from the city’s history and tragedies. Before each match, as thousands sing You’ll Never Walk Alone, every supporter invests their own meaning. The song became Liverpool’s anthem in the 1960s, adopted from the version release by the famous Liverpool band “Gerry and the Pacemakers”. The atmosphere isn’t managed by the club—it’s owned by the fans. Why? Commitment!

Which came first, the club trusting the fans or the fans’ deep loyalty? I’d argue the latter. Commitment comes first.


More often than not, making connections between people
involves community events focused on food


What does this have to do with SafeGrowth? When it comes to building local capacity for cohesion, problem-solving and crime prevention, it means everything. Successful communities share the same backbone: history, shared experience, and commitment. 

SafeGrowth aims to help neighborhoods organize this energy and it does so by accepting that many of those people living there are the experts. As Mateja and Gregory wrote in Third Generation CPTED, it’s a holistic approach tying safety to public health, economic vitality, and quality of life—anchored in community engagement and ownership.

Maslow reminds us that our personal needs for safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization come from many different sources, but they all depend on relationships. 

Sociologist Robert Sampson clearly revealed in his landmark research about collective efficacy, how, in many places (especially high crime places), those community ties have eroded. To restore them requires personal commitment. I’ve seen it in twenty years with my Community Association: real progress happens only when people stop dipping toes and fully commit.


Psychologist Maslow's heirarchy of individual needs overlaps
with quality of neighborhood life described in 3rd Generation CPTED


When I was Soccer Association President, someone joked, “You can’t ask a coach what they’re doing for the next five years.” Yet if you want a coach who teaches life lessons and inspires kids, that’s exactly the kind of long-term dedication required.


COMMITMENT FROM THE GROUND UP

How do we build it? There are two keys:

1.     Recognize that each community must be itself—not a copy of another. New York isn’t Paris; Tokyo isn’t Sydney. Great cities learn from each other, but they thrive on uniqueness and history. Communities must do the same: discover their assets, embrace their story, and commit to the work ahead.

2.     Strong leadership draws in strong members. Projects completed together build pride and belonging. That is why SafeGrowth Livability Academies create a pool of community leaders and use problem-solving projects to start the process.

Every time I pass the youth centre where I volunteer, I’m reminded that commitment is not abstract. It’s bricks, voices, and faces. That’s the kind of belonging every community deserves to feel—and the kind of legacy we leave when we choose to stay committed. When we choose to stay the course together, we don’t just build places—we build meaning.”


Tuesday, August 12, 2025

A reflection on Ronald V. Clarke: Honoring a "crime scientist" and an old friend

Geneva Park Conference Center, Orillia, Ontario. Site of the 1988 conference on Research Futures in Environmental Criminology. I invited Ron Clarke as a presenter - photo Unique Properties

by Gregory Saville

I want to share a short reflection on my old friend Ronald V. Clarke—known not just as a criminologist and recipient of the 2015 Stockholm Prize in Criminology, but as a pioneering crime scientist whose humanity, curiosity, and intellectual courage reshaped our understanding of crime and prevention.

Ron passed away on May 28, 2025, at the age of 84. His death marked the end of a life dedicated not merely to studying crime, but to reimagining how we can prevent it—not through punishment or psychology alone, but by redesigning our environments and systems.

It was Clarke’s co-authored 1976 paper, “Crime as Opportunity,” that truly turned the criminological world on its head. He urged us to stop fixating on criminals and instead look at the opportunities that allowed crimes to happen—changing the offense, not just punishing the offender. From better window locks and improved sightlines to dye-marked banknotes—his vision was pragmatic, grounded, and surprisingly effective. He’d say things like, “remove the opportunity and the crime collapses.” 

Ronald V. Clarke - Professor/Crime Scientist/Friend. Also interested in
preventing wildlife crime and poaching
- photo Benefunder

I first met Ron at a 1988 conference I sponsored at a conference center in Ontario overlooking Lake Couchiching. He had arrived in North America a few years earlier from his career at the UK Home Office, where he pioneered new studies on crime opportunity. I once told him I thought treating opportunity as a root cause of crime was a step too far, unsupported by the data. When he disagreed, it felt less like an admonition and more like a steady, hand guiding me back to the point.

I suspect he preferred “crime scientist” less for the scientific rigor in criminology —which remains limited—and more because the search for offender dispositions had done little to prevent crime. It was hard to argue that! Mainstream criminology often ignored his work and he expressed his frustration with big, elaborate statistical exercises when simple, real-life situational changes kept showing clear effects.

UK Home Office - London. Clarke headed a crime prevention unit for the British government prior to his tenure as Dean of Criminology at Rutgers University
- photo CC-SA 2.0 by Steve Cadman

Ron was also a leader in the practical application of theory. He served as head judge of the Herman Goldstein Problem-Oriented Policing Award—he was my head judge when I was serving as a judge on that program—and set a tone of rigor and fairness that inspired everyone on the panel. 

He was a featured speaker at the 1986 environmental criminology search conference, and he immediately latched onto the action research method that was at the core of our work (the search conference is an action research method). It was about the direct application of theory into practice. That idea became a throughline in his later work - as it had been in his UK work - and it is still a core value we honor today in SafeGrowth.

A LEGACY OF OPPORTUNITY

Ron’s legacy is subtle but profound: he showed us crime isn’t destiny—it’s often a product of ill-placed opportunities, overlooked context, and uninspired design. And by treating the environment as part of the solution, he gave cities, planners, and communities tools that work—without trials, without ideology, but with practicality and empathy.

I honored him by applying his situational insights during our project work on homelessness —believing that when we change the settings of homelessness, we shift the narrative away from fear and blame, toward safety and support. That felt like the truest tribute to his spirit: evolving his ideas with compassion, not just application. His insistence on translating research into real-world change is woven into the DNA of SafeGrowth’s global network today—every project, training, and innovation we advance carries a trace of Ron’s vision for theory in action. 

Thank you Ron, we owe you a debt.