By: Steve Woolrich

Utilizing and supporting Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) practices can help enhance communities by reducing crime and loss and raising awareness about our built environments.  CPTED strategies are effective but require a well-balanced approach to crime prevention and ideally incorporate Crime Prevention through Social Development (CPSD).  With this in mind, I encourage partnerships which help foster a “culture of caring” for our communities and each other.

It is through these partnerships that we can successfully apply both CPTED and CPSD throughout our communities and ensure safe growth and sustainability.  Embracing community-based crime prevention initiatives such as this and working together helps forge new alliances and collectively engages our communities. What is truly exciting about this is that we can begin to improve the “quality of life” in our neighborhoods and reduce the fear of crime.  Could this have a dramatic impact on overall well-being and happiness?  Mark Anielski from Edmonton, Alberta is a well-being economist with an incredible perspective on this.  If we could sustain our “community” well-being and happiness I suggest there would be a significant reduction in crime. Mark embraces the principles of sustainability and writes “to sustain something means to hold up something, to give support or relief to, to provide for sustenance or nourishment or to support something as true, legal or just.  To sustain the life and real wealth of a community means to ensure that the basic needs of all individuals of a community are being met.”

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Filed under Community Crime Prevention, Crime Prevention through Environmental Design