CPTED, Brasilia, and Pruitt-Igoe - A lesson worth learning

Brazil's capital city, Brasilia. An icon to modernist architecture (photo by UNESCO)

There is a great article in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Brasilia - A Vision of Concrete. It reminded me of a story years ago from my planning classes on modernism.

At 3pm, March 16, 1972, CPTED was born in the death of architectural modernism. That's the date of the first explosion to demolish the Pruitt-Igoe public housing projects in St. Louis. Built in the finest traditions of modernist theory, Pruitt-Igoe soon decayed into a crime-ridden ghetto and festered for years with low vacancy. Demolition was the final epitath for a concept ill-suited to social housing.

Those explosions began less than a year after C. Ray Jeffery's book CPTED and the same year of Oscar Newman's book, Defensible Space. It was Newman who described the social damage to livability from Pruitt-Igoe’s bleak modernist buildings, acres of no-man's land and blight. It’s a story of how not-to-do planning.

Except not everyone listened.

Almost decade after Pruitt-Igoe started, another modernist architect planned the city of Brasilia, Brazil. Controversial from the beginning, Brasilia stands today an icon to modernist architecture and rational planning.

While the Atlantic article caresses the architecture of Brasilia, it brutalizes it's planning. "The city is quite correctly regarded as a colossally wrong turn in urban planning." And now, in time for Brazil's World Cup in 2014 and the Rio Olympics in 2016, it's due for a make-over.



It's hard to say whether crime in Brasilia arises from the modernist nightmare that infected Pruitt-Igoe, from Brazil's epidemic gang violence, from 9 million unregistered firearms, or something else. It was probably all the above.

But if we've learned anything from Pruitt-Igoe surely we’ve learned SafeGrowth-style organic neighborhood design and collaborative planning is integral to safer streets!

Can you avoid unintended consequences?

 

The story of unintended consequences at 
the Leaning Tower of Pisa - photo Arne Müseler 
by CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, Wikimedia Commons

by Larry Leach

When we work in large and small neighbourhoods, conversations about safety often focus on surface-level solutions. Residents may notice thefts or disturbances and jump to straightforward fixes: put up a fence, lock the gate, install cameras. While those steps can help, they rarely address the deeper roots of the problem. What if the real solution lies far beneath the surface, not just in reducing harm, but in preventing it altogether?

Jane Jacobs, in her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, wrote:

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

If the narrative is that people are stealing from our backyard to support their drug habit, does building a fence or locking your gate solve that? Probably not, unless that fence convinces that person to decide they need help to better their lives. This certainly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build the fence, but to say it’s only a tiny part of keeping your property safe. 

Connecting with your community and establishing solid plans to work on the root causes of the problem will be the long-term solution.

Building a fence and locking a gate certainly will help for a short time, but what will change the behaviour of the would-be thief? Will they victimize your neighbour, who might be more vulnerable and unable to afford to build that fence? Will they break your fence to get in, causing you more costs? Either way, the fence is not likely to stop them from their anti-social behaviour. But what will?

The 1950s public housing "Pruitt Igoe" apartments in
St. Louis - constructed with good intentions
- Public Domain (US federal government)

By the end of the decade, crime and vacancy were 
so bad at Pruitt-Igoe, the entire project was emptied and demolished
- Public Domain (US federal government)

ENGAGEMENT IS THE MAGIC

This blog has featured many examples about how organizers use engagement tools to help trigger engagement and SafeGrowth examples from the Vancouver Strathcona Community Policing Centre.

The magic is to get involved with your community. Learn and understand your community. Who is in it? What are the local issues? Are there folks struggling? Who visits our community? These are all things that good SafeGrowth training and engagement can help to parse out.  At the end of the day, true safety includes the success of all who live, work, and visit in the community. One might call that “livability” as we do with third-generation CPTED.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Revenge of the Tipping Point”, he discusses a major unintended consequence. One community’s overstory was a monoculture of high-achievement attitudes that turned into a ripple of suicides among young people. The local society obviously didn’t intend this, but clearly didn’t factor in what kind of pressure that might potentially place on a young person to win at sports and achieve high marks academically. Dig deep and question your assumptions before deciding what your community’s story is.

A local example of this is a wonderful group in Calgary called “Brown Bagging for Calgary’s kids” that makes lunches for students every day in Calgary, who may not have one in school. The essence of this is the idea that kids can’t learn on an empty stomach. A noble and remarkable goal to achieve, but once you get to the kids that needed it (maybe only for a short time) and it’s available to all, do you demotivate parents’ responsibility to feed their own children? 

The unintended consequences of fences

I have blogged about other issues and topics for meaningful engagement, such as the Good Neighbour Agreement. 

Ultimately, without a research study, factors like parental demotivation and the effectiveness of Good Neighbourhood Agreements are difficult to assess. They may have unintended consequences that need further examination. 

DO FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBOURS?

Lastly, it’s good to be aware that what looks like a good security measure can result in looking unapproachable and unwelcoming. The fence mentioned earlier is a great example of this. If a Community Hall puts up a fence, it may prevent the very thing a community hall should be welcoming. Designing a welcoming space comes with certain vulnerabilities, but if you can strike a balance between security and approachable you can hit that “sweet spot”, helping the community to feel more connected and livable. 

To hammer the point home, a local grocery store posts printed grainy photos on their front door of people that they allege stole something from their store. While this might seem like a good deterrent for criminals to the store management, what they miss is how it makes it’s customers feel as they enter the store. We have blogged before about fences and unintended consequences.

We advise in our classes that it is always wise to consider different perspectives when looking at crime prevention plans. SafeGrowth and CPTED have many examples showing how to make a safer, more livable, place, considering all the potential unintended consequences.

Modernist message from a master architect

Beautiful places and streets attract people. They put eyes on the street, a basic principle of urban safety. I was recently reminded of a master architect of beauty, the award-winning Arthur Erickson, an architect the New York Times called Canada's pre-eminent Modernist architect.

While in Vancouver this week I spent time with Erickson's closest colleagues and friends, an impressive group who just like Erickson were concerned about both social equity and aesthetic beauty.

Modernism has not always had a good rap. Arguably, CPTED would not exist if not for the modernist planning and architecture that Jane Jacobs so bitterly attacked. Inappropriately applied modernism led to the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe social housing in 1960s St. Louis, the project dubbed indefensible and crime-ridden in Oscar Newman's Defensible Space.

Arthur Erickson showed another way; modernism done right! An example of his work appeared here previously regarding Vancouver's Robson Square.

The first Erickson building I ever entered was the Canadian Pavilion at the Expo 67 fair in Montreal in 1967, a kind of inverted pyramid. At the time I had no idea about architectural modernism. It just looked cool.

Later I studied at the Erickson inspired Simon Fraser University atop Burnaby Mountain in Greater Vancouver, a kind of spaceship in the sky. It too was very cool and futuristic - a fact not lost on film directors who have filmed there (BattleStar Gallactica, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Underworld Awakening).

Erickson taught it is the work quality, not the theory, that matters most in constructing beautiful places. The problem arises when modernism is done badly and applied inappropriately. This is the case in  Pruitt-Igoe, Chicago's Cabrini-Green, Toronto's Jane/Finch, and the Chichy suburbs of Paris. Unsurprisingly, crime festers in such places.

The takeaway? Build sensitively and in social context. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yet too many new architectural forms do the latter and too few architects do the former.

In Erickson's own words:

"…the reaction to the bareness of ill conceived modernist buildings was to revert in the 80's to a revival of historicism in the guise of "post-modernism"… That Dark Age is thankfully over but cultural insecurity is always there, hidden in the basement of our psyches - ready to spring out whenever brave confidence falters. 

It lingers in the gated communities where make-believe has become an adult panacea. It lingers with the developers who promote kitsch because it sells.  It lingers with the newly rich and the establishment who need to consolidate social standing with class accepted standards. It lingers in every shopping centre, multiplex, restaurant, Vegas casino where illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within." 

- Arthur Erickson,  2000

Oath of fealty and our HiDWON future

Sci Fi novel by Niven and Pournelle - Oath of Fealty. Our future?
photo Amazon.com

by Gregory Saville  

The world has 8,172,746,366 people and, since I wrote that sentence a moment ago, it has grown by tens of thousands. It grows every second. While the rate of growth is slowing, estimates place the global population at 10 billion by mid-century. Where, and how, will all those people live?

In many countries, housing and rental costs have skyrocketed. And in a country with an ethos of the “American Dream”, (now adopted in China as the “Chinese Dream”) the single-family home is becoming a thing of the past. In my city of Denver, the majority of new buildings comprise tens of thousands of high-density condos, apartments, or townhomes. The new building motto: Fewer cul-de-sacs, more density. 

Sadly, developers construct physical buildings at the speed of light, but they do not understand neighborhoods. When neighborhood planning takes a back seat to the home construction derby, absent any thought of a livable neighborhood, we are left with a bleak future. If you know anything about the history of CPTED, remember the crime catastrophe emerging from 1950s high-density public housing and modernist architecture. If you don't, read Newman’s Defensible Space! 

Giving rise to Newman's Defensible Space, the Pruitt-Igoe public housing apartments in St. Louis in the 1950s, before demolition.
High-density public housing with a new architectural style - modernism. 
- photo US Geological Survey, public domain, via Wiki Commons

HISTORY NEED NOT REPEAT

Are we building another crime-ridden, future catastrophe?

There is no shortage of city utopias in modern design publications. The cities they describe look futuristic and slick. They seldom describe what people will actually do to make ends meet or how they will live surrounded by thousands of others with nowhere to walk. Are there are stories about such places or the consequences of such places? There are indeed and every year, I ask the members of our SafeGrowth network to read a book that tells such a story. It is no utopia!

Larry Niven is an award-winning science fiction writer of the famed Ringworld series, among many other well-known novels. Larry Pournelle worked as an aerospace psychologist before launching into his writing career. Together they published Oath Of Fealty in 1981, a book considered among the top 100 best sci-fi novels. 

Oath of Fealty is a dystopian story set in the near future about a massive high-density structure called Todos Santos – a city within a city – surrounded by a crime-ridden and blighted Los Angeles. Todos Santos is an urban design concept called arcology, originally developed by architect Paulo Solare. In 2010, I wrote Arcosante – Our Future? about an actual arcology under construction in Arizona. 

[Note: I spoke to Paulo Solare in depth about his planning philosophy and I am certain he would be horrified by the Todos Santos style of arcology]. 

Dining area at Arcosante - a real-life arcology under construction in Arizona. Completely different from the arcology depicted in Oath of Fealty
- photo license Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 

TODOS SANTOS IN REAL LIFE

The Todos Santos arcology is miles wide and deep and a half-mile high. Solare told me he imagined arcologies as dense urban beehives with beautiful architecture and plenty of greenery. Because architecture in Todos Santos comprised an enclosed 3-D city constructed as one structure, it is easy to control access and establish territorial control (the basic principles of CPTED). Surveillance in all forms is a simple matter, especially with the permission (the Oath) of residents. Within such a high-tech, massive security castle (think of gated communities on steroids), controllers can protect a million inhabitants with their own security – as long as you swear an oath of allegiance to constant surveillance. 

Liverpool One development in the UK - photo courtesy of Wiki Commons 

In 2014 I wrote a blog titled A Few Years After Tomorrow about a development scheme in the UK to privatize 35 downtown streets, limit public streets, and control safety via a private security force and CCTV. Called Liverpool One, it was as close to Todos Santos as I could imagine back then – private corporations buying up the public realm and controlling security. Today, Liverpool One is now built, albeit with plenty of public access and without the private streets. It is not an arcology, but it does hold the promise of a safer future.

Oath of Fealty suggests that when faced with terrifying blight and crime (or at least the fear of them), a rarified, high-tech, comfortable life within the arcology is worth an oath fealty by residents allowing constant surveillance and monitoring to keep everyone safe. That lifestyle offers security that public police cannot provide because arcology dwellers choose to forgo their anonymity and privacy to secure their safety (at least, in the Todos Santos version). 

 

Promotional painting from the 1927 German film Metropolis - an urban utopia that came true. It looks remarkably similar to large, downtown skyscrapers today. 
- image Wiki Commons 

OUR HiDWON FUTURE

Oath of Fealty also suggests that those inside the arcology are shackled by Big Brother. They forgo their civic responsibility and collaboration with others to ensure safer streets – the very thing we work to reinforce in SafeGrowth programming. Instead, they trust technology and rely, not on each other, but on the Todos Santos corporation. 

It all sounds very AI-like in tone. An electronic parent is always watching...just relax and let your fears subside. Your Oath of Fealty will keep you safe. Trust the massive global expansion of public CCTV and security AI. 

I am calling the new high-density redevelopment movement, which lacks neighborhood building and relies on technology for security, the HiDWON movement (High-Density WithOut Neighborhood). Will this new HiDWON movement lead to Todos Santos-style cities? Is this future really so distant?

On the shoulders of giants

Pruitt-Igoe public housing, St. Louis, 1977. Photo - Creative Commons

CPTED is 40 this year!

Professor C. Ray Jeffery's book "CPTED" was published in 1971. Oscar Newman's "Defensible Space" in 1972. That's four decades of preventing crime. In an age before prevention was situational, crime was designed out, policing was intelligent or activities routine, CPTED led the way.

Of course, Newman and Jeffery stood on the shoulders of giants. A decade earlier there was Jane Jacobs, Elizabeth Wood, and Schlomo Angel. By 1971 Jacobs had already invented territoriality and eyes on the street. Wood had already written on the merits of lively diverse neighborhoods (and flower-growing contests to brighten them up).

All this...decades before the broken windows theory reinvented that wheel.

Jane Jacobs, 1960, New York. Photo - Creative Commons

CPTED wasn't the first kid on the prevention block. Police have always done prevention, most of it is unevaluated, superficial and generic. None of it place-based or specific. Scholars made contributions to prevention, especially 1930s sociologists like Robert Shaw at the University of Chicago who created the Chicago Area Project. (Still running, still successful.)

Giants also came from geography. From 1968 geographers began writing books on place-based crime. Led by Harries in the US, Scott in Australia, and Herbert in the UK, the geography of crime later became environmental criminology. It probably didn't prevent much crime. But it added to our understanding and moved the place-is-important debate squarely into CPTED turf. Which brings us back to CPTED and its birthday. It's worth learning what the pioneers actually said.

Then I came across this rare, and oddly haunting, film of Oscar Newman speaking to the inaugural session of the United Nations Habitat conference in 1976 Vancouver.

A ghost from our past talking about our world today.

A Bladerunner future? Art reflects life

The cyberpunk architecture of downtown Shibuya, Tokyo - photo guwashi

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!

The neo-noir electrification of New York's Times Square - photo DB Desktop Background

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.

Pruitt-Igoe, the 1960s modernist housing disaster in St. Louis became a rallying cry by
Oscar Newman and Jane Jacobs against crime and modernism in urban planning
- photo US Geological Survey

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.

Dundas Square, cyberpunk in Toronto
- photo by Pedro Szekely CC by 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Dignity by design - Rethinking MCM as we build affordable housing

Villa Hermosa in Palm Springs, successful multi-family housing in an MCM design - photo SchoolOfNight, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

by Gregory Saville

Across cities today, the rush to build affordable housing has triggered a frantic urgency: condo and apartment boxes going up fast — but communities left behind. We’re good at erecting buildings — we’re terrible at building neighborhoods. 

Urban design is the first step in that direction.

I’ve spent much of my career walking the streets of neighborhoods where people have little say in the shape of their lives. I’ve worked with gang members, people with disabilities, and residents of subsidized housing. I’ve spent time with youth growing up in trailer courts and high-rises, and I’ve taught students who return to homes where safety is a daily question.

This isn’t a story about where I live. It’s a reflection on what I’ve learned — and how I came to believe that dignity, beauty, and safety should be for everyone. 

THE MCM LESSON

Over the years, I’ve lived in a range of residential styles — some ornate, some utilitarian, some deeply personal. Each space taught me something about how we inhabit place. But the one home style that’s stayed with me most? Mid-Century Modern — MCM.

Not the high-concept, glass-and-steel showpieces in architecture magazines. I’m talking about modest versions — “mid-century modest”: clean lines, functional layouts, floor-to-ceiling windows, open flow to the outdoors. There’s something profound about living in a space where sunlight is intentional and walls don’t dominate. Many of the original architects thought MCM was perfectly suited for residential design – but they lost the plot when it came to scale.

MCM tiny homes provide another affordable housing option - photo via Pinterest 

That simplicity is deceptive. It’s not just aesthetic — it’s psychological. When architecture aligns with the people, not against them, something opens. That absence is glaring in today’s multi-family construction — in cities like Denver, Baltimore, Toronto, Calgary, and Washington, D.C., we’ve forgotten how to build for belonging.

Here’s the thing: design shapes behavior, but scale shapes belonging.

HOPE RISES

In our forthcoming book Hope Rises, we dedicate a full chapter to urban design and architectural history — and how those forces led us to high-crime neighborhoods. Our co-author Dr. Carl Bray, an urban design and heritage planning expert, crafted that chapter with depth and clarity.

When I studied planning, I learned how mid-century modernism reimagined cities — often with tragic results. Tower blocks, land-use segregation, sterile plazas. The urban renewal era promised progress but destroyed communities. Entire neighborhoods vanished. Families were displaced. The irony was brutal: in trying to design better lives, we designed lonelier ones.

We saw it in Toronto’s San Romanoway project in the early 2000s – a story that shows up in Hope Rises. It was in St. Louis, at Pruitt-Igoe, decades earlier. It showed up in the voids Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman wrote about. And in the birth of CPTED — and later, SafeGrowth — as direct responses to the failures of MCM at scale.

But all was not lost.

Danish co-housing in MCM design, open connections to greenery
- photo The Cohousing Newsletter 

Early Danish co-housing used MCM designs
- Skraplanet Co-housing, Denmark

DESIGNING FOR DIGNITY

At the human scale, mid-century design still holds beauty. Done right, it is warm, open, and connective. Like all great housing design, it combines privacy and community.  

MCM uses courtyards to ensure privacy, but loses big fences. It uses walls of windows to ensure connection. Minimalism, flow, connection to nature, indoor-outdoor blending — these aren’t luxuries. They’re tools. In the right hands, they nurture calm and in the right neighborhoods, they support cohesion.

I’ve seen this in co-housing communities — especially early Danish projects designed in the MCM spirit. Affordable. Modest. Yet beautiful and deeply human. Places that offer dignity without needing prestige. That invite safety without fortressing themselves off from the world.

One of the MCM homes in the Skraplanet co-housing neighborhood 

And that brings me here:

Everyone deserves to live somewhere that reflects care. Not opulence. Not perfection. Just care.

Dignified housing isn’t about square footage. It’s about scale, light, safety, and the freedom to feel at home in your own skin. That’s not out of reach. It’s a matter of priority — and the will to design for people, not profits.

We can build dense, multi-family housing. But we must also build neighborhoods with beauty, foresight, and with purpose.

So if you’re living in a space that feels like it was never meant for you — if the broken windows and broken systems suggest you’re invisible — you’re not the problem. The design was.

And that means we can redesign. We start by listening to the needs of residents. Then we build not just structures, but stories of place. And maybe we finish with homes that start to build a community in the truest sense — quiet, steady, and whole.

That’s what SafeGrowth is for.
That’s what our work is about.

Arcosanti - Our future?

Arcosanti - arcologies are Paulo Solare's model for a new style of city - photo Arcosanti

This week we end the first decade of the 21st Century. What does our future hold for safe and vital urban places?

This time of year prognosticators creep out from under crystal balls and offer us variations on Mad Max, Bladerunner, or a United Federation of Planets. Rarely do we get practical, real-life models on what that future might look like in our cities.

Not so for architect Paulo Solari and his urban laboratory called Arcosanti. This week I re-visited this futuristic arcology in the Arizona desert.

Arcologies show up in popular fiction such as William Gibson's Zero Count, and Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty.

It's where the future noir sci-fi film Bladerunner took inspiration for the Tyrell megacorporation HQ (now a popular staple in cyberpunk literature).

Arcosanti is the first-ever model of an arcology. Real-life versions are now planned near Abu Dhabi (Masdar City) and near Shanghai (Dongtan - halted during the recession).

Touring the real arcology is much more modest than the visions

Arcosanti was the first - an urban laboratory for creating lean alternatives to sprawl. Arcologies are future cities that fuse architecture and ecology. While 60 percent of land in today's city is for cars, roads, and auto services, a similar sized archeology eliminates the car entirely within the city. Since arcological land development grows 3-D (upwards as well as outwards) no place is farther than a half mile from the natural environment - rivers, lakes, trails, agricultural fields, forests. That is, no farther for all city dwellers, not just the privileged few.

When I went to criminology grad school I learned nothing about futures like this. There was plenty of abstract theorizing in windowless rooms. But few of the theorizers had the foggiest about crime in such future places. Classes were blind to the crime potential in the future.

I originally traveled to Arcosanti 18 years ago and took a course in arcological design. I learned how it was possible to place living, working and public spaces within easy walking distance. I asked Paulo Solari what he thought about crime and prevention in such a place. He told me the future residents would need to create their own methods - he was the piano maker, not the piano player.

Lunch at Arcosanti

At the time that seemed reasonable. Architects cannot account for every social eventuality. Still, as we know in CPTED, criminologists, planners, and architects were sound asleep in the 1950s when modernism led to public housing like the crime infested Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis and the San Romanoway apartments in Toronto.

Clearly we must tread carefully.

While futuristic thinking may be difficult - and futuristic modeling rare - we owe much to visionaries like Paulo Solari for helping us to think ahead in a bold, new way.

If you want to learn more about arcology as planning for the future, read Arcosanti: An Urban Laboratory.

And...Happy New Year.

Catch and release - Swimming upstream in Vancouver

Vilfredo Pareto's 80/20 Principle

What does a 19th century Italian economist have to do with neighborhood safety? Consider Vilfredo Pareto's principle that the majority of a phenomena can be explained by a minority of causes. Sometimes called the 80/20 Rule, criminology has long demonstrated a small number of chronic offenders cause a significant portion of crime.

Reflecting on my Comstat and police leadership blogs recently, I came across a fascinating news documentary Pareto would have loved. It's called Lock Em Up.

It's about competent policing and quality leadership in an unlikely place - Vancouver, BC. I say unlikely because, with all my harping on the skid row tragedy in that lovely city, one might assume I blame the cops or their chief. Not so. In Vancouver at least, I don't think that's the case. Jim Chu, Vancouver's Chief and their Chronic Offender Unit - COU - have put research to good tactical use. Similar to the Winnipeg auto theft solutions project I mentioned two years ago, this seems like a winning ticket (though, as you'll see below, in Vancouver there is a number missing from their lottery ticket).

A DENT IN CRIME

Property crime is rarely seen as a serious matter, yet it comprises 75 percent of all crime. In 2009 Vancouver had over 21,000 thefts and 5,000 break and enters. As Pareto might warn us, chronic offenders with multiple offenses cause a significant number of those crimes.

What is a chronic offender? Vancouver defines a Chronic as someone with over 39 convictions (that's a lot of convictions). There are also Superchronics, a group with over 79 convictions each. That's convictions, not crimes. They committed far more than that. One offender interviewed in the film below says he has broken into well over 1,000 homes.

How many chronic offenders are there and how many property crimes to they cause in Vancouver?

The COU and the Vancouver Police planning section report that over 5 years, 379 chronic offenders were charged with over 12,000 offenses, roughly 10% of all yearly property crimes. It is of course much higher since chronic offenders were not charged for all of their crime, only a small number. The reality is probably more like 25% - an educated guess I'm sure both Pareto and COU detectives would confirm.

Vancouver Police report, 2008

In other words, out of a half million people only 379 cause between 10% to 25% of all property crime in Vancouver! Their research report is available for review by clicking here.

If there was ever a case where chronic offenders should be removed to protect us, this is it. Remove them for drug treatment, incarceration, or both. But, get them off the street.

What do police do in Vancouver? Since a small number of chronic offenders create a significant portion of crime, police strategies target habitual offenders to break that cycle. Vancouver Chief Jim Chu is behind the approach.

Criminological research, where it is done well, is fairly clear. It shows that arresting Chronics and getting them off the street works, at least until the courts release them again. That's the missing link in this chain - the Vancouver court system, one of the most lenient in Canada. Stunningly, their study showed length of incarceration actually got shorter as the Chronics committed more crime. Worse still, over half of the Superchronics received less than a month in jail - and 25% of the Superchronics received less than a day in jail.

CATCH AND RELEASE

In short, cops caught them so judges could release them. Talk about frustrating! The report says:

as these offenders tend to specialize in low‐level property offences, their sentences tend to be relatively short. These short sentences do not serve to incapacitate them and protect the public for any significant period of time, nor, in most cases, are they long enough to allow for admission into appropriate addiction treatment programs.

Makes one wonder, who are the real culprits? Unaware, ill-considered and lenient judges? That's what the CTV documentary suggests. What about criminologists failing to inform decision-makers? Where is the Canadian research? Of 30 habitual offender studies cited in the report, only 4 were from Canada (two of those were graduate student theses).

As I said in a previous blog, when social tragedies happen like the public housing fiasco in St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe and gang infested Jane-Finch corridor in Toronto, someone is asleep at the wheel.

In Vancouver, it's definitely not the cops.