Inspector Mark Stokes

 Force Crime Reduction & Designing Out Crime Officer West Midlands Police

Title of presentation :Designing Out Crime and Designing in Safety works!  The experience in the United Kingdom and beyond

Designing Out Crime and Designing In Safety, works!  Often on a spectacular scale in preventing Crime, Fear Of Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour on a truly sustainable basis – with little evidence of displacement and more likely a diffusion of benefits.  This is the key message of this presentation, one that should interest anyone intrigued as to how design of the built environment can deliver such results.  It is a universally accepted wisdom that prevention is better than cure.  This is equally true of Crime, Fear of Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour as in medicine.   Conversely, reliance on solely criminal justice solutions to Crime is both economically and environmentally unsound (Pease and Farrell, 2009).  It also denies the proven ability to prevent an enormous amount of Crime before it is committed.  Designing Out Crime is a relatively new discipline originating in the mid-1980‟s.  However, its origins and motivation can be traced back to the dawn of humanity – and the world of nature.  It represents a combination of Physical Secur ity ‘Tar get Hardening ’ Measures ( Newm an,  1973) and C.  Ray Jeff ery‟s (1971) concept of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design.  Newman stressed the importance of Defensible Space, Natural Surveillance and Territoriality.  To this can be added the construct of Environmental Criminology (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1993) and that of Crime Science.    Since 1989 the Police services of the United Kingdom have delivered Designing Out Crime through the Secured by Design award system.  A series of independent, academic assessments corroborate its effectiveness – most recently Armitage and Monchuk (2009).  This presentation will illustrate this effectiveness by concentrating on the Brindleyplace commercial, retail and leisure development in Birmingham.

Mark Stokes has more than 33 years service with West Midlands Police, having devoted more than half that time to the relatively new discipline of Designing Out Crime - a more specialised form of situational crime prevention.  Indeed, he is now the longest serving police officer in this arena in the whole United Kingdom.  In 2002 Mark was invited to deliver the key note address on public area CCTV to the annual conference of the International Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design Association, held in Calgary, Canada.  And in 2004 he delivered a lecture about the recently published 'Safer Places: the Planning System & Crime Prevention'.