What makes a competent CPTED practitioner?

Certification in CPTED comes down to some essential learning and practical skills -  it all begins with reading and studying  

by Mateja Mihinjac 

When working with clients in SafeGrowth we often get asked: “How do I know what CPTED expert I should hire?” 

Our response: “Make sure their expertise is certified by an independent and widely recognized third-party professional organisation.”

In practice, this is not so black and white. Many consultants claim they have knowledge or experience practicing Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). It is not uncommon to have CPTED consultants self-proclaim themselves “CPTED experts” after entering the job market directly from University, with no practical experience in the field. 

Other consultants are well-seasoned individuals who have been practicing in the field for years and convince themselves they know everything there is to know about CPTED. They don’t read, write, or publish in technical or scientific journals about CPTED. Consequently, they provide the same simple CPTED advice throughout their career with little reference to recent research or modifications to CPTED theory.

Assessing the same environment at night and day
- an essential data collection skill for the competent CPTED practitioner

Class learning or field experience? Neither group is populated by the best example of competent CPTED expertise. This arises due to several reasons:

• College/university education might provide foundational knowledge (theoretical understanding, how to collect and analyse data). While it is important to have advanced knowledge, that alone will not work without considerable practical experience. In the real world of preventing crime, theory cannot function without practice, and vice versa.

• CPTED experience might help a practitioner understand a problem, the environment, or how people behave. However, a CPTED practitioner should never believe they know everything due to their experience. There are many cases when past experience does not explain changes in offending behaviour or prevention methods. Theories evolve to respond to those social changes and only by keeping up with recent findings and new theories can a practitioner truly master the complex field called CPTED. 

All experts must constantly refresh themselves with new theoretical concepts. Our physical, social, and administrative environments change as society changes. That means crime and safety threats evolve. CPTED theory, policies, and other legal and regulatory documents must evolve to reflect those changes. That means a competent CPTED expert constantly reads, attends conferences, and writes about such things.

That leads to an obvious question: How can we ensure CPTED consultants possess the knowledge, skills, and experiential abilities needed in the field? 

Outdoor research tours are an essential ingredient for CPTED training

CPTED CERTIFICATION FOR INDIVIDUALS - ICCP

This year the ICCP (ICA’s CPTED Certification Program for Individuals) is 20 years old. 

Those unfamiliar with professional certification sometimes confuse the content of CPTED with the practice of CPTED. While theory and practice are interconnected, the primary measure of the certified expert is their competency in how they practice CPTED. That is obviously reflected in their background knowledge, what ICCP terms core subjects. This places the ICCP as a competency-based certification program. 

On the ICA’s website, the ICCP is described as:

“Certification in the field of one's choosing is a way of indicating to yourself that you have arrived. You have achieved a level of expertise … Certifications provide a raised bar to which those new to the field can strive. Certification also serves to lock out charlatans claiming to be "trained" or "certified" by merely attending a course or taking a test.“

The competency units within the ICCP program are on the website. 

The International CPTED Association website hosts the ICCP Certification Program information. It also lists additional learning resources like webinars and guidebooks

 

PROFESSIONALISING THE FIELD

While CPTED doesn’t need the same level of certification as medical and engineering professions, CPTED does respond to personal threats to property and lives. These are important matters and the ICA is pleased to have contributed to the advancement of CPTED over the past decades. 

All this has led to exciting new initiatives:

GLOBAL CPTED STANDARDS

Another movement forward, that certified professionals must know, is that CPTED now has its own European Standards and international ISO Standards.

CPTED-GRANTS

Many CPTED-related grant proposals in North America now require a certified CPTED professional on the submission team. 

EXPERT WITNESSES IN COURT

CPTED experts, including ICA CPTED-certified members, are now regularly called as expert witnesses in criminal and civil trials. 

COURSE ACCREDITATION

In 2019 the ICA launched an accompanying program – the Course Accreditation Program (CAP) – to accredit CPTED courses that teach the KSAs – the knowledge, skills, and abilities of novice CPTED practitioners. 

As such, CAP offers an accelerated pathway towards obtaining CPTED certification. One example is our SafeGrowth program which is CAP-accredited and several graduates have already successfully pursued the ICCP. 

 

CAP accredited CPTED courses include urban design sessions

WHAT IS A CERTIFIED CPTED EXPERT?

It is reasonable to ask why CPTED warrants a professional-level certification. As you can see from the discussion above, a competent CPTED professional knows that their decisions can prevent crime and their recommendations impact people’s quality of life. They can save lives. Those recommendations come with equity and ethical implications. 

In some cases, those recommendations might even mean the difference between life and death. Certification matters!

A 25-year experiment - the International CPTED Association

A 25-year experiment in crime prevention through environmental design
- photo Wiki Creative Commons

by Gregory Saville

Twenty-five years ago I participated in an experiment. Paul Wong, Barry Davidson, and I decided to sponsor an international conference on crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED). We had no idea if it would work, a vague hope that something bigger would come out of it, but no guarantee that anything would occur. 

We met in Calgary with 70 other CPTED acolytes including (among others) Stan and Sherry Carter from Florida, Tim Pascoe from the UK, Tom McKay from Peel Region in Ontario, Patricia and Paul Brantingham from Burnaby, BC, Mike Sheard and Brian Foote from Vancouver. The International CPTED Association (ICA) grew out of that conference.

This year the ICA celebrates its 25th Anniversary with hundreds of members all over the world. The current ICA President is from Chile, the Vice President from South Africa, the Executive Director is from Slovenia, the Secretary, and Treasurer from Canada and Board members from the U.S., Australia, India, Malaysia, Ecuador, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain, Mexico, and New Zealand.

But things were not always so rosy and, like CPTED, the ICA ebbed and flowed with the political currents of the day. The ICA was born following a period of criminological research in the 1980s, some of which led to new ideas like situational crime prevention and environmental criminology, and others that led to the broken windows theory and routine activities theory.

Downtown Calgary, Canada - home of the inaugural ICA conference
- photo Wiki Creative Commons

HOT AND COLD RESEARCH

Some of that research was revolutionary: Situational crime prevention gave us practical prevention strategies; environmental criminology showed how crime clusters along pathways and urban nodes; the geography of crime described crime hotspots.

But not all new theories were helpful. Some were Mr. Potato Head theories – full of holes and bland in taste. Others were saturated with fancy euphemisms that complicated simple ideas. Yet others removed the social aspects of CPTED and replaced them with target hardening. 

Then there was broken windows theory, which some consider CPTED. Broken windows transformed into zero-tolerance enforcement – a controversial police enforcement tactic for anti-social behavior. Broken windows back-fired spectacularly, especially politically. While it cut crime in New York, crime also declined by the same rate in San Diego with zero broken windows tactics. Broken windows tainted the original CPTED message. Even today, unwitting activists still claim broken windows is CPTED. 

Broken windows co-creator, Professor George Kelling, once told me he could not fathom how his theory went so far off track. In my view, broken windows ended in the hands of police managers suffering institutional autism – an inability to communicate outside their profession and themselves. Distortion comes easy to those who do not read history. The same thing happened in CPTED when practitioners, falling victim to slipshod assertions, adopted target hardening and CCTV cameras and ignored the social world where crime actually happens. 

The 2005 joint conference of the ICA and the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers. Loyola Marymount University overlooking Los Angeles.

THE ICA  AS  OCCAM’S RAZOR

Fortunately, the ICA is a practitioner-oriented organization more interested in what works than what sounds good, a kind of self-correcting organizational Occam’s Razor. In the early 2000s, it began introducing more holistic strategies, such as certification programs. ICA conferences travelled from Canada and the U.S. to Australia, the Netherlands, Chile, and Mexico. 

Within a decade the ICA had online training resources and a network of experts around the world. Gerard Cleveland and myself introduced 2nd Generation CPTED at ICA conferences in 1997 and 1998, which brought social factors back into CPTED. Since 2017 the ICA has dramatically expanded with webinars, course accreditation, online masterclasses, newsletters, white papers, and new guidebooks. This past year the International Standards Organization published the first-ever CPTED ISO, which ICA members helped to create. In short, the ICA is flourishing.

Introducing the ICA at the first-ever CPTED conference in Honduras, 2017

AND WHAT ABOUT CPTED...? 

In some places today CPTED remains mired in target hardening – a buffet of lights, locks, and cameras with hedge trimming for flavor. Poorly trained practitioners still use these methods to exclude groups, thereby promoting what is called ‘hostile architecture'. Social activists have caught on and, rather than figure out the true nature of CPTED and how hostile practices deviate, they label all CPTED as racist using the same biased reasoning that they blame on CPTED practitioners. 

In truth, the ICA has a formal code of ethics opposing hostile architecture. Sadly, too many CPTED practitioners are not ICA certified, not all courses are ICA accredited and they are not required to follow the ICA code of ethics. As they say, caveat emptor (let the buyer beware).

In other places, CPTED has grown into community-planning practices called SafeGrowth. On this blog, you will find a rich history of neighborhood development, community-building with social and economic programs, and personal development through neighborhood programs like Livability Academies. Both 1st and 2nd Generation CPTED play a role in SafeGrowth, but the quality of life (what 3rd Generation CPTED called neighborhood livability) plays a bigger role. 

Happy 25th birthday to the International CPTED Association!

If you want to learn more about the ICA, or attend the 25th Anniversary ICA virtual conference, Nov 2-4, 2021, check out their website.

Abolish CPTED?

Is CPTED racist? Does it exclude minorities?

by Gregory Saville

As our COVID ravaged cities impose social isolation, working-from-home, and cabin fever, those who live in high-density apartments and housing developments must be confident they are safe from crime and violence. And, more than ever before, residents must feel their home is a sanctuary. Crime prevention through environmental design - CPTED - is an ideal answer for these difficult times, especially 2nd Generation CPTED and SafeGrowth.

Next Thursday, Dec 17, I and some colleagues are running a free educational webinar for property managers, realtors, and housing groups seeking residential safety. The “Virtual Property Management and Safety Summit” is sponsored by real estate safety expert, Tracey “the safety lady” Hawkins.

THE ANTI-CPTED MEME

All this stands in stark contrast to recent calls for the abolition of CPTED from municipal codes and city planning due to the perception that CPTED can exclude minorities from public life. Consider the Vancouver City Planning Commission website or articles by Bryan Lee Jr in Bloomberg City Lab website.

Keeping residents safe at home - What are the alternatives?

According to Lee: 

“While CPTED principles are said to help discourage crime by orienting building windows and entrances to aid in providing “eyes on the street” that monitor activity, in practice this strategy can end up serving the same suppressive purpose as stop-and-frisk policing — to assure that anyone considered suspicious is made to feel uncomfortable.”

The solution, say these latter-day gurus who would protect us from the current Racial Reckoning, is to abolish CPTED, a crime prevention strategy that has brought safety and security to millions of citizens all over the world – as you will discover by reading some of the hundreds of scientific publications regarding CPTED. 

ABOLITION OR ACCREDITATION?

In my view, CPTED is not the problem. For example, while aspirin has been an effective pain remedy for over a thousand years, improper use can result in overdose and stomach problems. The solution is not to abolish aspirin. Same with CPTED. It is vulnerable to improper use by poorly trained practitioners. No doubt some practitioners indiscriminately lock and fence properties without regard to alternative options. CPTED can produce racial exclusion if placed into the wrong, untrained hands. But the solution isn’t abolition. It’s proper training and certification through legitimate accredited courses – the very thing the ICA has offered for years.

In his 1972 landmark book “Defensible Space”, architect Oscar Newman wrote 

"The question to be asked is how does one initially achieve thoughtful building groupings rather than having to resort to barbed-wire fences and locks after the fact?"

One answer appeared on the International CPTED Association’s “Special ICA Webinar: Exclusion versus Inclusion – In CPTED Everyone Has a role”.

On Thursday, Dec. 17, we will provide another during our Safety Summit. 

Join us.

Thursday, Dec 17 - free summit on property safety

Hostile architecture, CPTED and the homeless

A homeless man sleeping rough - photo by Franco Folini - Creative Commons

How often have we watched the bamboozled scientist in a dystopian horror film claiming: I am only the inventor of the new robot … I’m not responsible for how it is used! as we watch that robot trash the laboratory into smithereens?

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design - CPTED - is a powerful crime prevention technology that is vulnerable to misuse by the ill-trained or the untrained, especially regarding homelessness.

Last year the International CPTED Association ran a session on Homelessness and CPTED at its annual conference. The result was an ICA White Paper about CPTED and the homeless. Myself and Randall Atlas co-wrote the paper with the help of some dedicated ICA members. We submitted it to offer some practical and ethical guidelines to CPTED practitioners regarding homelessness.

Homelessness is a complex problem and using CPTED tactics is risky business. We are ethically responsible for how we use CPTED! That is why we wrote the ICA White Paper. Turns out, it was just in time.

HOMELESS ENCAMPMENT ABATEMENT?

Last week a news article Privatizing the Clearing of Homeless Encampments described what recently happened in Seattle when CPTED became hostile architecture. A private company was hired by the city to abate homeless encampments (Translation - trash their property). According the the news article, that company’s logo was: Let us help you develop a CPTED plan to help deter unwanted issues!

By no means do I diminish the impact of homelessness on residents and their families, but deter unwanted issues? Do we really consider homeless people the unwanted? Do we think they are best handled with metal anti-sleeping spikes? Are we really helping by target hardening them away from our park benches?

The news article tells the official story:

City officials say they offer the people they encounter shelter options. But they admit that only about 40 percent of people kicked out of illegal homeless encampments end up in city shelters—most are simply shunted to some other location.

Surely we can do better!