Guarding Against Crime

Measuring Guardianship within Routine Activity Theory

Danielle M. Reynald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409411765
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317124320
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This ground-breaking book examines the critical role that citizens play in guarding against crime. By focusing on the ways in which residents are able to capably guard their residential environments from crime, Reynald shows how local residents function (or fail to function) as effective crime controllers. The studies contained herein are aimed at developing our theoretical, empirical and practical understanding of the function of the capable guardian as a critical, yet elusive actor in the crime event model. In lieu of utilizing secondary data sources for proxy measures, this book argues in favour of new, more direct measures of guardianship, employing direct methods of primary data collection in order to capture the action dimensions of capable guardianship, as well as various other environmental and contextual factors that affect it. It features observations of guardianship in action and interviews with guardians to elucidate the factors that empower guardians to make them capable of crime control.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Guarding Against Crime

December 25th, 2009

After successfully evading detection at all formal airport and airline security checks, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded Northwest Flight 253 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands with a concealed bomb containing high explosive compounds that was strapped to his body. As the airline began its descent into Detroit Metropolitan Airport, Abdulmutallab made the attempt to detonate the bomb. Dutch passenger, Jasper Schuringa, seated to the right of Abdulmutallab recalled: “Suddenly we heard a bang. It sounded like a firecracker went off. I saw smoke rising from a seat… I didn’t hesitate. I just jumped.” It was not the officially appointed and trained flight crew that were alerted into action by this incident, but Schuringa who jumped over passengers to subdue Abdulmutallab after seeing smoke and what he described as “flames coming from beneath his legs”. Having been alert and in such close proximity to the bomber Schuringa said he tore a “flaming molten object which resembled a small, white shampoo bottle off Abdulmutallab’s left leg”. Schuringa restrained him by taking him in a choke hold and then hauled him out of the seat with the help of other passengers and flight crew on board. Reflecting on the incident later on, Schuringa explained: “I don’t feel like a hero. It was something that came completely natural…it was something where I had to do something or it was too late.”1

February 7, 2011

Six young men, armed with sledgehammers, attempted to break in to a jewelry store in the early hours of the morning on a shopping street in Northampton, England. Upon seeing the commotion, a 75-year-old woman, Ann Timson, said:

At first I thought one of them was being set upon by three others… I was not going to stand by and watch somebody take a beating or worse so I tried to intervene… What concerned me was that too many people just stood around watching as if they were in shock and nobody was doing anything…When I got close to them I realized it was a robbery and them I was even more angry that they felt they could get away with what they were doing in broad daylight.2

The 75-yeard-old made news headlines around the world with her action to intervene caught on video that showed her charging towards the young men, armed only with her handbag, and swinging it violently at them while shouting. The sudden confrontation she initiated was enough to disrupt the crime in progress, and sent the attempted robbers running off towards their motorbikes in order to flee the scene. Two of them were so startled by Timson’s opposition that they stumbled and fell off their bike while attempting to abscond. Like Schuringa, Timson’s reflection on the incident led her to this conclusion: “I’m not a hero and it was maybe foolish of me to get involved but somebody had to do something.”

These incidents serve as real-life evidence from different situations around the world of the theme that serves as the backbone to this book: that everyday people, regular citizens like you and me have the power to be guardians against crime. It was not formally trained police or other security agents that successfully took action to guard against the attempted crimes in the two illustrated cases, but two average people who just happened to be present at the scene of the incidents. Guardians don’t need capes, masks or any special weapons or powers to protect people, property or places from criminal victimization. A guardian can be a man or a woman, an elderly person or a young person and can serve to guard against any form of crime, from incidents of burglary, theft, and robbery, to incidents of white-collar crime, violence, kidnapping or terrorism. Using this thesis as its foundation, this book will provide an illustration of some fundamental factors that make individuals capable of guardianship by exploring some of the basic techniques people use in guarding against crime in a real-life context.

This book will treat guardianship and crime as the antithesis of each other. In this way, it will take the viewpoint that the occurrence of crime in time and space is defined by the absence of guardianship, and vice versa. Guardianship and crime exist on two ends of the spectrum. It will be the premise of this book that in order to fight crime we need to focus on guardianship. By intensifying guardianship, in residential environments for example, crime will decline. Among the central questions to be addressed in this book will be: How do we fortify environments against crime? How do we structure environments in ways that can facilitate guardianship by regular citizens? How do we empower residents to guard against crime in their residential areas? What resources can be provided or already exist that can maximize their potential to be capable guardians?

Guardianship as an Historical Antecedent to Formal Policing

“Private citizen’s involvement in crime prevention is being given a high priority as a public policy issue.” (Geis and Huston, 1983: 398). This has raised great debates about whether or not private citizens are capable of guarding against crime, whether or not they have the expertise to do so, and the dangers inherent in involving citizens at this level. These concerns are especially interesting in light of the fact that private citizen involvement in crime control is not a novel phenomenon and actually is an historical antecedent of formal policing in westernized states (Zedner, 2006). In fact, crime prevention through guardianship in the form of informal surveillance and shared responsibility has been put forward as an alternative to the ideals of the present day formal state police (Colquhoun, 1796; cited in Garland, 2001; Zedner, 2006). This informal guardianship by citizens preceded formal policing as it now exists within the modern criminal justice state. Indeed, the technique of guardianship as a form of situational crime prevention would thus fit in well with what Zedner (2006: 85) describes as the eighteenth century policing experts who “regarded prevention as more important than the retrospective functions of arrest, detention and prosecution that later came to characterize modern policing”.

Garland (2001: 31) explains that in the liberal democracies of the western world “the character of crime control slowly shifted from being a generalized responsibility of citizens and civil society to being a specialist undertaking largely monopolized by the state’s law-enforcement system.” Garland (2001: 30) goes on to describe the monopolization of policing, prosecution and punishment of criminals by the state during the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the US and the UK. He labels this as “the modernization of crime control and criminal justice”, which has seen policing form a specialized, differentiated arm of the modern state system. “Policing ceased to be a widely dispersed activity entrusted to amateurs and private employees and became instead the task of trained, professional officers in a specialist organization that formed part of the state.” (Garland, 2001: 30)

While it was widely accepted in the early part of the eighteenth century that citizens would “take action to protect themselves and their families by voluntarily coming together in informal networks and bands of mutual protection”, these systems gradually began functioning less effectively by the second half of the century as towns and cities started to grow and “large populations and greater mobility meant that social relations were more loosely articulated” (Zedner, 2006: 88). Fast forward to the current day and we seem to have come full circle with the reintroduction of the citizen as a responsible crime control agent and the promotion of the active cooperation of the public with formal, state-appointed crime controllers. Alongside this reinstatement of old methods is the emergence of a new path of “preventative partnerships” at the local community level that are designed to encourage communities to police themselves (Garland, 2001). This “new crime control establishment” depends on the cooperation of local residents, police and probation services and includes practices like Community Policing, CPTED, and Neighbourhood Watch, and focuses on security, crime prevention and fear reduction among other goals (Garland, 2001: 17). This new and “expanding infrastructure of crime prevention and community safety” (Garland, 2001: 16) is fuelled by the precepts of guardianship, the foundation of which is at the residential community level.

Guardianship and Civic Engagement

The reinvigoration of the concept and practice of civic engagement is a necessary forerunner for revitalizing the sense of responsibility and the power that regular citizens have for guarding against crime. Civic engagement has been defined as “working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes” (Ehrlich, 2000: 6). In this way, the civic engagement of an individual requires that he or she “recognizes himself or herself as a member of a larger social fabric and therefore considers social problems to be at least partly his or her own; such an individual is willing to see the moral and civic dimensions of issues, to make and justify informed moral and civic judgments, and to take action when appropriate.” (Ehrlich, 2000: 26).

This concept can be applied to explain what may be considered one of the critical factors that contributes to the explanation of crime levels – the lack of civic engagement. We see this played out at all levels of interaction – from the person who litters the public street without care or concern for others who use it, to the individual who turns a blind eye when he observes someone being victimized – and is manifested at the highest level in the form of crime as a deliberate violation against others. In this way, the concept of civic engagement goes hand in hand with that of guardianship from routine activity theory: the idea that anyone of us – you or me, a potential offender or victim – can choose to act in protection and defense of the other. This act of protection can occur at many levels – from just being available, to watching over people and property, to directly getting involved to protect others. But in order to be able to act in protection of people or property, an individual requires the motivation to do so, and the awareness that he/ she is capable. The question that provides the umbrella for this book, therefore, is this: what are some of the salient factors that empower individuals to act as capable guardians? What makes some individuals concerned about the defense of their homes and the wider residential environment, and others not? How does our environment provide or block opportunities for us to act as capable guardians in defense of people or targets?

Guardianship in Theory

From an academic standpoint, the concept of guardianship holds a great deal of appeal because of the wealth of knowledge that has yet to be exposed about how it functions as a mechanism through which crime can be controlled. Within criminology the concept of guardianship surfaced as a critical component of Cohen and Felson’s (1979) routine activity theory. This theory put forward the perspective that in order for a crime event to occur, it requires the convergence of three minimal elements: a likely offender, a suitable target (defined as a person, object or place) and the absence of a capable guardian. In doing so, they draw attention to the capable guardian as the ultimate protector and defender of people and property against criminal violations.

Thus, Felson and Cohen (1980) define guardianship as “any spatio-temporally specific supervision of people or property by other people which may prevent criminal violations from occurring”. In spite of the capable guardian’s central role in determining criminal victimization, and the fact that it is the critical actor within the crime event model that has the power to prevent criminal violations from occurring, research on guardianship has been marginal compared to that of offenders and victims. In fact, Tewksbury and Mustaine (2003: 303) argue that “the issue of guardianship lags in theoretical development and empirical testing.” It is for this reason that this book will be aimed at developing our theoretical and empirical understanding of the function of the capable guardian as a critical, yet elusive actor in the crime event model. While supplements to routine activity theory, such as the most recent reformulation of the crime triangle3, explain the importance of other types of crime controllers, such as intimate handlers of offenders and place managers, and other literature focuses on formal guardianship provided by police and security guards, this book concentrates expressly on the informal guardianship exercised in residential environments (i.e., guardianship exercised informally by lay-persons, as opposed to formal guardianship by the police).

In order to explore the utility of this concept as a strategy for crime prevention, this book will focus particularly on the original concept and definition of capable guardianship as it was conceived within the framework of the routine activity approach. In the first instance, supervision is the key action-word in Felson and Cohen’s (1980) definition of capable guardianship, yet studies that investigate the effect of guardianship on crime levels disregard the tenet of ‘spatio-temporally specific supervision’ upon which the concept of guardianship was built. As a consequence, current operationalizations of the concept have assumed that supervision is a natural consequence of availability.

Supervision has never actually been measured in previous investigations of guardianship. The extent to which actual supervision has an effect on crime, therefore, remains unexplored in this context. From a theoretical perspective, capable guardianship has the potential to protect all levels of crime targets – property, people and places. As such, it is necessary to specify the type of target(s) under investigation. Secondly, there is a clear conceptual distinction between self-defense or self-protection and the protection of unrelated others. Thus, this book views guardianship as conceptually and operationally distinct from self-defense measures such as such as carrying weapons for protection since this is likely to be representative of very different processes than the ones that would give rise to the spatio-temporally specific supervision that the guardianship concept in routine activity theory attempts to explain.

Empirical studies in criminology are void of direct measures of guardianship. Rather, various proxy measures of guardianship – such as the number of owner-occupied households, percentage of labour-force participation and number of household members – are adopted in order to approximate the amount of supervision and control in lieu of direct measures. The British Crime Survey (BCS) and Garofalo and Clarke (1992) provide notable exceptions, as they use survey items to measure the amount of time people send at home as an approximation of the level of guardianship at the property level. Availability, however, is just one dimension of guardianship and conveys little about actual supervision by the guardian who may be present. Many have argued, however, that this reflects the tangible problem of the inadequacy of some of the proxy measures of guardianship that have traditionally been used in tests of the concept (e.g. Miethe and Meier, 1994).

One of the central aims of this book will be to present an operationalization that adheres much more closely to the original routine activity definition of guardianship as the supervision of people, property and places. In this way, this book will build on the existing research on guardianship by presenting the first empirical study that measures guardianship directly as an action process that is based on actual supervision4. Furthermore, this book will demonstrate the theoretical and empirical advantages of employing a direct measure of guardianship that is much more explicit in its adaptation of the definition of the concept from routine activity theory.

Guardianship in Action (GIA): Introducing a New Methodological Approach

In lieu of utilizing secondary data sources for proxy measures, this book will employ several direct methods of primary data collection in order to capture the action dimensions of capable guardianship, as well as the various other environmental and contextual factors that affect it. In this way, this book will present a new, observational measure of guardianship in action. By dissecting the original definition of capable guardianship, we can extract a minimum of three observable dimensions of guardianship that all hinge on the act of supervision: the first is availability. In order to supervise people and property, a guardian first needs to be available in order to carry out supervision. Availability, therefore, is a pre-requisite for supervision. The next action dimension, and perhaps the most vital component of the definition of capable guardianship, is actual monitoring or supervision of people and targets. The final dimension is the consequence of supervision, or the prevention of criminal violations from occurring. One of the immediate consequences of supervision is the ability to observe acts in progress. Thus, the final action dimension of capable guardianship can be viewed as the deterrent action (i.e., the direct action taken to deter criminal violations) that is taken when an available guardian observes a crime in progress, or the potential for criminal violations to occur. These three dimensions can be viewed as the dimensions of guardianship in action (GIA).

In this way, this book will treat GIA as a feature of a place that determines the likelihood that crime will occur therein. As one of the principal micro-level theories of environmental criminology, routine activity theory and its concept of guardianship offers an explanation as to why crime opportunities and events tend to be concentrated in time and space (Eck andWeisburd, 1995). Weisburd et al. (2009: 4) explain the importance of the role of micro-units of place – such as addresses or street-segments – in understanding crime concentrations and crime production highlighting the fact that “50 per cent of crime is found at three or four per cent of the micro crime places in a city”. With this in mind, this book will examine the role that guardianship plays in determining which micro-places experience the highest concentration of crime events. The book will investigate how guardianship functions at the smallest spatial units, i.e., the individual property level and the street-segment level, as this seems the most appropriate starting...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Guarding Against Crime
• 2 The Guardians, Guardianship and Defensible Space in Residential Crime Prevention
• 3 Theories Related to Defensible Space and Guardianship of Residential Environments
• 4 Presenting Guardianship in Action: How Local Residents Guard Against Crime
• 5 Observing Guardianship in Action: Putting the Model of Active Guardianship to the Test
• 6 Environmental Predictors of Active Residential Guardianship
• 7 Daytime and Nighttime Guardianship and Property Crime: Considering the Offender’s Perspective
• 8 Supervision and Residents’ Ability to Detect Potential Offenders
• 9 Decision Making by Guardians: Factors Affecting the Decision to Intervene
• Supplement to Chapters 8 and 9: Supervision, Intervention and the Neighbourhood Context
• 10 Conclusions and Directions for the Future
• References
• Index