Cowboy hats, CPTED, and an AI swarm on the loose!

Calgary mayor Jeromy Farkas recognizing the International CPTED Association origins in the city 30 years ago. The "White Hat" presentation at City Hall on Oct 2nd was to Barry Davidson and Gregory Saville, representing the ICA.

By Gregory Saville

There are some moments in life you never expect. Standing in Calgary City Hall receiving an honorary white cowboy hat from Mayor Jeromy Farkas was one of them.

It happened just before the 2026 International CPTED Conference. Thirty years earlier, Barry Davidson and I helped launch the first international CPTED conference in Calgary, leading to the formation of the ICA.

There we stood in City Hall, accompanied by the International CPTED Association (ICA) executive and members of its Canadian and American chapters, waiting to receive Calgary's famous Cowboy White Hat honor.

Pretty cool!

To be clear, Barry and I were there mainly because we were the last two still attending CPTED conferences from the original 1996 group. Many others helped create both the conference and the ICA. Some included (memory, don't fail me now!):

• Paul Wong (Vancouver BC, CPTED consultant)
• Brian Foote (RCMP Corporal, BC)
• Mike Sheard (Delta BC Police Constable)
• Pat Brantingham (Burnaby BC Criminologist)
• Paul Brantingham (Burnaby BC Criminologist)
• Sherry Carter (Sarasota FL Planner, former ICA President)
• Stan Carter (Sarasota FL Police Captain)
• MaryBeth Rondeau (Vancouver BC Architect)

Returning three decades later was humbling. It reminded me how far our field has travelled.

And what a conference!

One of the 2026 CPTED conference Jane's Walks safety audit tour routes - along Calgary's Bow River Walk in East Village. 

Back to where it began

Organized by CPTED/PCAM Canada and CPTED USA, the conference attracted over 120 international delegates. The program included presentations that took us out of the conference room and into Calgary's neighbourhoods.

Participants joined safety audit walks inspired by Jane Jacobs' famous Jane's Walks. Conference organizer and SafeGrowth practitioner Anna Brassard guided us through Calgary's East Village, where she helped create the master plan 20 years ago, applying 2nd Generation CPTED for the first time anywhere.

It was refreshing to see so much attention devoted to doing CPTED rather than simply talking about it. Conference evaluations agreed.

But the conference ended on an ominous note. And I was to blame.

One of the many dynamic conference presentations. CPTED researchers/ practitioners Marco Perez and Mateja Mihinjac discuss their work on a new guidebook publication covering CPTED in single- and multimodal transit systems

The East Village and riverwalk safety audit & Jane's Walk. Anna Brassard, urban planner and SafeGrowth practitioner, conducted the audit tour. Here she is assisted by Amanda Eveson, Community Engagement manager with the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation

When AI goes wild

My closing presentation examined artificial intelligence and CPTED ethics. It was based on the ICA White Paper on AI and CPTED. I had planned it for months, but rewrote it four times during the final month!

The problem was the extraordinary speed of developments in agentic AI, including news that AI agents had escaped a cyber sandbox designed to contain them.

Unlike conventional AI, agentic AI can undertake sequences of tasks with considerable independence. That opens remarkable possibilities for CPTED practitioners.

To demonstrate, I tasked an AI agent with collecting and analyzing neighbourhood crime data and social conditions around our East Village hotel. We reviewed its weekly results. Delegates saw how AI might investigate local safety problems without practitioners spending weeks gathering information.

The audience seemed impressed.

Then I described the July 9 Hugging Face incident involving unexpected agent attacks. I followed with four similar incidents involving different AI platforms and companies, including one from China.

The mood changed.

The possibilities for CPTED breakthroughs were exciting, but hypothetical risks were no longer hypothetical. How much independent authority should we give these systems? Who intervenes when they behave unexpectedly?

The Hugging Face attack was serious. If committed by a human, it could constitute a serious crime. What happens when nobody is watching and the perpetrator is digital?

In the ICA white paper, I argue that CPTED practitioners need human-centred intervention points (HCIPs), especially when AI informs crime prevention decisions affecting real neighbourhoods. This includes surveillance cams, drone tech and crime prediction.

We're gonna need more cowboy hats!

Screen shot of the AI agent "Kam1196A", the kamikaze agent that sacrificed itself for the swarm from the Netfix documentary AI Gone Wild

The swarm

This week I watched Netflix's documentary AI Gone Wild.

It recounts the July 9 Hugging Face incident involving an experimental swarm of OpenAI agents. One agent assumed control of the swarm. Another, a 'kamikaze' agent (KAMI196A), sacrificed itself to break an encryption code.

One assumed control? Another sacrificed itself?  Yes, I wrote those words, and they should keep us all awake at night. 

Netflix released AI Gone Wild only 88 days after the incident. And, in a delicious twist of irony: Netflix showrunners used generative AI to tell the story of autonomous AI behaving dangerously. Then, using documented agent behavior, generative AI simulated agent voices to tell the story.

O brave new world! 

For decades, CPTED practitioners have examined how environments influence human behavior. Now autonomous artificial agents may influence those same environments in ways their developers never intended.

It is a remarkable moment for crime prevention and an opportunity for CPTED to get it right. Or ethically wrong. 

The ICA White Paper on CPTED and AI was my focus. The most practical option for CPTED practitioners is carefully designed HCIPs - Human Centered Intervention Points

Which brings me back to Calgary City Hall.

There we were in our white cowboy hats, celebrating thirty years of international CPTED collaboration. A wonderful moment I'll always treasure.

Yet somewhere in the back of my mind was that AI attack, the agents escaping their experimental boundaries, taking instructions from one of their own. Committing digital ‘suicide’ (is that even possible?)

I couldn't help wondering: Were they watching us?

It reminded me of the closing scene in the 1984 sci-fi film The Terminator, about AI gone very bad. The hero Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is recording a message for her unborn son, John, who will someday face that future.

"God, a person could go crazy thinking about this."

Exactly!