Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/06/situational_awa.html
Ronald V. Clarke argues for more situational awareness in crime prevention. Turns out if you make crime harder, it goes down. And this has profound policy implications.
Whatever the benefits for Criminology, the real benefits of a greater focus on crime than criminality would be for crime policy. The fundamental attribution error is the main impediment to formulating a broader set of policies to control crime. Nearly everyone believes that the best way to control crime is to prevent people from developing into criminals in the first place or, failing that, to use the criminal justice system to deter or rehabilitate them. This has led directly to overuse of the system at vast human and economic cost.
Hardly anyone recognizes–whether politicians, public intellectuals, government policy makers, police or social workers–that focusing on the offender is dealing with only half the problem. We need also to deal with the many and varied ways in which society inadvertently creates the opportunities for crime that motivated offenders exploit by (i) manufacturing crime-prone goods, (ii) practicing poor management in many spheres of everyday life, (iii) permitting poor layout and design of places, (iv) neglecting the security of the vast numbers of electronic systems that regulate our everyday lives and, (v) enacting laws with unintended benefits for crime.
Situational prevention has accumulated dozens of successes in chipping away at some of the problems created by these conditions, which attests to the principles formulated so many years ago in Home Office research. Much more surprising, however, is that the same thing has been happening in every sector of modern life without any assistance from governments or academics. I am referring to the security measures that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private and public organizations have been taking in the past 2-3 decades to protect themselves from crime.