If you feel an ownership of your space, you keep an eye on it.

Which leads us to our next concept, surveillance. If you live in a neighborhood for some time you know what it’s “baseline” is. Meaning, you know what is normal and what isn’t, you know who belongs there and who doesn’t. A good CPTED designed area will allow for natural surveillance, remember the saying “Hedges no higher than 3 feet”? That’s natural surveillance. Block Watch? An organized means of neighbors watching out for each other. When neighbors take ownership of their space and utilize surveillance they’re more apt to intervene if they see something suspicious. By intervene I mean call the police, generally.

Access control is the placement of natural and human made barriers in order to control who comes into a particular area. This can involve the use of natural items like shrubbery, trees or rock walls or human made things like doors, locks, fences and gates. There is also a delineation between psychological barriers and physical barriers. A psychological barrier might be a nicely paved path through a well-kept lawn or signage pointing to the location of the office. Anything that announces the integrity and uniqueness of an area. Physical barriers can be large planter boxes that divide the space between two areas or just a plain old six-foot wooden fence.

Onto image and maintenance. Back in 1982 a couple of really smart guys named James Wilson and George Kelling came up with a theory called the “Broken Window Theory”. We cops latched onto this right quick and in a hurry, why? Because it’s a pretty simple and self-explanatory theory and let’s face it, no one ever accused us of being smart! What is your mental image of a scary place and no, the dentist office doesn’t count? How about a dark alleyway? Or how about a neighborhood full of derelict houses with burned out shells of cars littering the street, the place looks like the zombie apocalypse rolled through? If an area looks like no one cares then people will think that, well, no one cares. The place looks like a dump so it stands to reason that no one is taking care of the place or watching the place. If no one is watching, it’s the perfect place to commit crimes! So if there’s graffiti on a fence, paint it over. Yard looks like an Amazonian jungle? Mow it! A well-maintained neighborhood gives those bad guys the feeling that the people here care about their community, they’re outside working in the yard, walking their dogs or having football parties at the neighbors.


Activity support is nothing more than the scheduling or designing of legitimate activity in a space. The idea behind this is that as legitimate activity increases, illegitimate activity decreases. For instance, a park with a shady reputation suddenly relocates a youth soccer league to the area. Now the park is flooded night after night with hundreds of kids, their parents, family members, coaches and park staff. The lights are kept on later; people are constantly coming and going. Would a criminal want to come here to sell drugs? Probably not. Could we find one dumb enough to try, most likely!
Target hardening is the application of both human made and natural objects to a location in order to make it more difficult to commit a crime in or around. Typical examples of this are someone replacing their front door with a heavier lock, placing something like a “Charlie bar” in a window or sliding glass door. Natural objects may be something as simple as placing a very prickly type of bush under windows making it difficult and painful to climb over. The underlying principle of target hardening really comes down to time. How much time and effort does it take for someone to break into your home, for example? If a bad guy can kick in a front door in one kick, he’s happy! If it takes him 20, he’s tired and probably getting really nervous that someone will hear or see him.
Take a minute and look at your neighborhood, your local park and especially your house through the eyes of a criminal. If you wanted to break into your house, how would you do it? Imagine that scenario and then work backwards to develop strategies to keep your family, yourself and your property safe.
So now you have the principles behind CPTED. Once you stop and really think about it, it’s pretty self-explanatory and obvious, sometimes we just need a framework to start with and then we can fill in the blanks. I hope that you’ve found the concepts to be useful and that you’ll be able to put them into play. Get out of your house, meet your neighbors, start a block watch, get involved in your community and let’s make things better. Stay safe!