Introduction
One does not need to be affiliated with law enforcement to understand that the best strategy for addressing crime is not allowing it to occur, in the first place. Therefore, there is no surprise about the growing popularity of preventative criminological strategies that aim to eliminate the objective preconditions for people to consider indulging in criminal behavior. One of the most notable of them is commonly referred to as the Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) strategy.
SCP is reflective of the assumption that criminals are, in fact, rationale-driven beings and that the actual mechanics of a particular crime in the making should be discussed in conjunction with what happened to be the qualitative specifics of the surrounding criminogenic environment. Even though there is plenty of evidence that the SCP-based approaches to combating crime are fully workable, many criminologists/law enforcement officials continue to regard them as being rather controversial. This alone presupposes that SCP indeed deserves to be subjected to a further analytical inquiry: something that the author intends to do while reviewing the thematically relevant literature and discussing the significance of the would-be acquired insights in this regard.
Literature Review
Definition/Theoretical Provisions
The origins of SCP (in its contemporary form) date back to the early 1990s, when one of the strategy’s most prominent advocates Clarke (1992) had argued that the key to improving the criminogenic situation in a particular area is ensuring that potential offenders perceive the prospect of perpetrating a crime as being much too risky, on the one hand, and establishing the objective prerequisites for the concerned individuals to think of potential benefits as not being rewarding enough, on the other.
Hence, the clearly defined “mechanistic” quality to how the strategy’s adherents conceptualize crime and the driving forces behind it, “SCP remains focused on preventing crime by identifying and addressing the situational context of criminal events instead of understanding the principal causes of criminal predispositions” (Lee, 2010, p. 264). As a whole, SCP draws heavily from both the Rational Choice Theory and Routine Activities Theory.
According to the former, people never cease to remain rational agents within the context of how they contemplate whether it will pay off or not becoming involved in a particular crime, on their part. This, in turn, presupposes that for as long as individuals regard such a prospect as inexcusably dangerous, they will be naturally prompted to refrain from giving it any further thought. The theory’s yet another tenet is that one will be invariably tempted to indulge in one or another criminal activity if there is a good enough reason for the person to believe that he or she will be able to get away with doing it (Zafirovski, 2016). In this regard, the specifics of his or her existential mode/sense of self-identity/educational attainment will prove to be of no relevance.
The Routine Activities Theory specifies the building blocks of a crime, in the situational sense of this word, “In order for a criminal event to occur, three components must come together in time and space: a motivated offender, a suitable target, and lack of capable guardianship” (Hodgkinson & Farrell, 2018, p. 328). This again stresses the importance of taking into account the spatial aspects of the surrounding social environment, as an indispensable part of defining the measure of its susceptibility to crime.
Probably the main discursive implication of SCP is that, instead of striving to identify the whole scope of psychological and socio-economic incentives that motivate people to commit crimes, policymakers and law enforcement officials should concern themselves with reducing the emotional appeal of a crime, as the most straightforward pathway towards acquiring a particular resource of value (Gruenewald, Allison-Gruenewald, & Klein, 2015).
As the practice indicates, the most logical/cost-effective approach to achieving such an objective, on the part of law enforcement, is restricting the access to the resource in question, as well as reducing its perceived worth as an easily disposable/traded asset. This, in turn, implies that police officers should not be seeking to eliminate crime completely by relying on the punitive methods of enforcing law and order. Instead, they should concentrate on making sure that the crime rate in the areas that they patrol does not rise to the point of becoming intolerable (Davey & Wootton, 2016).
Practical Deployment
What has been mentioned earlier suggests that the practical deployment of the SCP-based strategies will make the most sense with respect to addressing the perpetration of the so-called “white-collar” crimes, mainly concerned with theft, money laundering, fraud, bribery, etc. The reason for this is apparent: the unlawful activities in question presuppose that those who indulge in them are capable of premeditating the possible consequences of the adopted course of action, on their part. According to Clark (1992), the police’s task is to:
- a) increase the effort, needed to commit a crime,
- b) increase the associated risks,
- c) reduce the emotional appeal of a sought-after reward.
As of today, there is no shortage of academic articles/studies that explore the effectiveness of different approaches to putting SCP to work in the field. Based on the information contained in them, it is much too early to come up with any definitive judgments as to the strategy’s workability. After all, different authors provide different (and often conflicting) evidence-based accounts of the practice’s actual outcomes.
Nevertheless, it is still possible to outline the most commonly occurring uses of SCP as a part of the currently enacted policing strategies throughout the country. One of such uses is reflective of the authorities’ commitment to ensuring public safety in America’s schools. According to Sevigny and Zhang (2018), “The majority of U.S. students now report attending schools that have implemented or deployed visitor sign-in requirements, adult hallway supervisors, security cameras, secured school access, security guards, and locker checks” (p. 164). This is meant to contribute towards increasing the risks of various illegal activities that take place on the premises, as perceived by the affiliated practitioners within the student body.
However, the ongoing enactment of the SCP-based safety measures, in this regard, is far from being deemed truly effective. The validity of this suggestion is best illustrated, concerning the fact that mass shootings in American schools continue to occur on a quasi-regular basis. Among the foremost factors that contribute towards diminishing the effectiveness of SCP-policing in schools can be named poor funding and the fact that many students (as well as their parents) actively resist the implementation of the earlier mentioned safety-facilitating initiatives, as an integral part of the learning process (Kirby & Snow, 2016).
SCP has also been widely deployed by the police to disperse rioters in public places. The main justification behind such a practice has to do with what psychologists know about what prompts people to join violent mobs, in the first place. Namely, the promise of anonymity. As Verma (2007) argued, “Even though their (rioters’) overt action seems meaningless and purposeless, the reason is not insanity but short-term rationality where the anonymity of the group gives them the freedom to make short-term gains” (p. 203).
This, in turn, implies that when it comes to dispersing mobs, police officers must succeed in exhibiting the actual consequences of one’s unwillingness to stop indulging in anti-social behavior to the rest of rioters. As the practice shows, the most effective approach to doing this is identifying and isolating the most active rioters and subsequently subjecting them to an extreme beating in front of the rioting crowd.
If properly executed, this will result in the crowd’s segmentation and eventual dispersal (Robinson, Marchment, & Gill, 2019). The reason for this is that the publicly displayed application of physical force against a concrete individual by police weakens the sense of anonymity in rioters: hence, prompting them to rationalize once again the dangers of refusing to comply with the authorities’ demand to disperse (Nassauer, 2015).
Even though the SCP-based policing techniques are commonly regarded as “passive”, in the procedural sense of this word, their deployment proved very effective in the domain of maritime commercial shipping as the instrument for addressing the problem of piracy. In this regard, one must mention the fact that throughout the early 2000s-late 2000s there has been reported an exponential increase in the number of pirate attacks on commercial ships. After having realized that the provisions of international law, with respect to piracy, are essentially declarative, the shipping industry decided to take the matter of ensuring the safety of maritime transportation into its own hands.
Since the late 2000s, it became a commonplace practice with most shipping companies to have 10-15 armed security guards (provided by military contractors) onboard of every commercial ship. The theoretical premise behind such a practice directly relates to the main conceptual provisions of SCP that correspond to the qualitative features of the environment in which the concerned industry operates, “A strong, visible defense will deter or delay a crime… it does not have to rely on the criminal justice system to prosecute offenders” (Shane, Piza, & Silva, 2018, p. 554).
As a result, since the late 2000s the number of attacked (by pirates) commercial vessels began to decline rather rapidly, “By 2015, reported attacks had declined 48% since 2000 when 467 actual and attempted attacks occurred” (Shane et al., 2018, p. 549). Evidently enough, SCP does work. However, for the associated practitioners to be able to ensure that this never ceases to be the case, the practical deployment of the SCP-based policing strategies must be circumstantially justified.
The SCP approach to combating crime often presupposes the creation of physical barriers between the groups of people that experience hostility towards each other: something that contributes towards reducing the crime rate in the affected areas.
Even though this practice has been criticized on account of being anything but pro-active, there can be very little doubt about the strategy’s high utilitarian value. To exemplify the soundness of this suggestion one can mention the erection of the West Bank Barrier in 2002 by the Israeli: the measure that was intended to reduce the inflow of Palestinian terrorists from the Gaza Sector into Israel. Contrary to the critics’ assumption that the concerned development was going to result in displacing Palestinian terrorism to other areas, such a scenario did not actualize.
According to Perry, Apel, Newman, and Clarke (2017), “The Barrier together with associated security activities was effective in preventing suicide bombings and other attacks and fatalities with little if any apparent displacement” (p. 727). The study’s finding goes to undermine the validity of those criminological theories that accentuate one’s endowment with “criminal mindedness” as the main predictor of the concerned individual’s tendency to perpetrate crimes while paying very little attention to the “passive” obstacles in the way of doing it.
Critical Assessment
Although SCP has long ago been proven to be a valuable law-enforcing asset, it continues to be considered controversial to an extent. The reason for this is that, as it will be shown later, the discussed criminological strategy has a number of intrinsic strengths and weaknesses to it.
In light of the conducted literature review, it is specifically SCP’s consistency with the recent discoveries in the field of neurology that should be deemed the strategy’s foremost strength. The rationale behind this suggestion has to do with the fact that the human brain naturally chooses in favor of the most energetically efficient approaches to fulfilling the biological purpose of one’s life: to ensure the intergenerational survival of his or her genome. As seen by the brain, it makes so much more sense to simply steal or forcibly take away the desired resource (and save energy), as opposed to taking possession of the latter in a socially appropriate manner.
What this means is that people are indeed better seen as “natural born criminals” who will most definitely end up being involved in one crime or another, for as long as they are convinced that there will be no retribution and that they will not be required to apply too much of an effort while doing it: all in full accordance with the main theoretical provisions of SCP (Felson, 2018).
The SCP strategy’s yet another strength is its cost-effectiveness. After all, it is indeed much cheaper to invest in increasing the perceived risk of committing different (mostly “white-collar”) crimes in the specific area than assigning more police officers to patrol it, especially given the fact that many governmental and privately-owned organizations on the locale actively resist being subjected to police surveillance.
Finally, SCP correlates well with the discourse of neoliberalism in criminology, which revolves around the assumption that instead of trying to root out crime, law enforcement should be merely managing it. As Farrell (2010) noted, “Situational prevention across the spectrum largely bypasses blame or punishment for harmful behavior and, instead, seeks to design it out” (p. 5). This discourse promotes the privatization and decentralization of law enforcement with its advocates suggesting that the time has come for the country’s justice system to begin serving primarily the rehabilitative (rather than punitive) function.
It is understood, of course, that the neoliberal initiatives in criminology are themselves being criticized as such that will result in undermining the society’s structural integrity from within. Nevertheless, for a particular criminological strategy to be perceived as thoroughly legitimate, it must be up-to-date, in the discursive sense of this word: the requirement that SCP fulfills with ease.
The list of SCP’s presumed weaknesses appears to be much more extensive. Probably the most notable of them is that this particular strategy is commonly regarded as ill-suited for addressing the “expressive” (irrationally violent) types of crime. The reason for this is that the “Rational choice perspective (adopted by SCP) fails to account for emotional or other intangible aspects of criminal decision-making” (Welsh, Zimmerman, & Zane, 2018, p. 145).
This significantly limits the range of the strategy’s applicability. The mentioned flaw, however, is far from being deemed indisputable as there is a good reason to think that the elements of rational decision-making are present in even the most irrational/spontaneous motivations that set people on the path of crime (Walters, 2015).
SCP is also blamed for being much too simplistic, in the methodological sense of this word, “Situational approach lacks the vigor, complexity, and sophistication of other criminological theories and amounts to little more than common sense” (Wortley, 2010, p. 39). While reacting to this particular criticism, the promoters of SCP usually point out the fact that the concerned strategy takes into account the most fundamental (instinctive) aspects of the human psyche’s functioning, which cannot be overly complex by definition. They also tend to defend their stance on the issue by evoking the popular expression: if something looks stupid but works, it is not stupid.
Yet another major criticism of SCP is reflective of the assumption that the situational approach to combating crime does not seek to address the societal roots of the former. Such a suggestion is best thwarted by referring to the fact that the socio-economic betterment of society, as the key to making it less criminogenic, is not the responsibility of law enforcement. The apparent ineffectiveness of the community-based approaches to tackling crime substantiates the validity of this suggestion.
The only criticism of SCP that is indeed difficult to address is concerned with assessing the policy from a socially systemic perspective. It can be articulated as follows. If the SCP-based crime prevention strategies continue to be deployed in the US, this will provide additional momentum to the rise of the so-called “gated communities” across the country. Consequently, this will result in increasing the rate of the society’s segmentation along class lines and ultimately in causing more and more citizens to feel socially alienated.
And, it is specifically socially withdrawn individuals who are much more likely than the socially integrated ones to end up embracing crime, as a way of advancing their existential agenda. As Raymen (2016) observed, “SCP’s attempts to ‘design out crime’… actively create urban environments which perpetuate and exacerbate the competitive-individualist and asocial (crime-inducing) subjectivities” (p. 499). One cannot help but admit that there is indeed a strong cause-effect logic to such a suggestion.
Concluding Remarks
The conducted literature review suggests that the initial conceptualization of SCP and the strategy’s sub-sequential deployment in the field have been objectively predetermined. In its turn, this can be seen indicating the fact that the crime prevention strategy in question does have what it takes to be referred to in terms of an indispensable criminological tool into the future. At the same time, however, it also appears that the strategy’s practitioners may never cease applying an active effort in ensuring SCP’s methodological compatibility with the overall vector of societal dynamics in America.
References
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Clarke, R. (1992). Situational crime prevention: Successful case studies. New York, NY: Harrow and Heston.
Davey, C., & Wootton, A. (2016). Integrating crime prevention into urban design and planning. Journal of Place Management and Development, 9(2), 153-165.
Farrell, G. (2010). Situational crime prevention and its discontents: Rational choice and harm reduction versus ‘cultural criminology’. Social Policy and Administration, 44(1), 40-66.
Felson, M. (2018). Policy levels for situational crime prevention. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 679(1), 198-201.
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