Environmental Crime Prevention Strategies

Table of Contents

Last Updated on May 29, 2024 by Karl Thompson

Environmental Crime Prevention strategies include formal and informal social control measures which try to clamp down on anti-social behaviour and prevent an area from deteriorating. They emphasises the role of formal control measures (the police) much more than situational crime prevention theory.

Examples, some of which are dealt with below, include Zero Tolerance Policing, ASBOs, curfews, street drinking bans, dispersal orders and the three strikes rule in America.

These strategies are associated with Right Realism and are based on Wilson and Kelling’s Broken Windows Theory – the idea signs of physical disorder give off the message that there is low informal social control which attracts criminals and increases the crime rate.

Zero Tolerance Policing

Zero Tolerance Policing involves the police strictly enforcing every facet of law, including paying particular attention to minor activities such as littering, begging, graffiti and other forms of antisocial behaviour. It actually involves giving the police less freedom to use discretion – under Zero Tolerance policy, the police are obliged to hand out strict penalties for criminal activity.

The best known example of Zero Tolerance Policy was its adoption in New York City in 1994. At that time, the city was in the grip of a crack-cocaine epidemic and suffered high levels of antisocial and violent crime. Within a few years of Zero Tolerance, however, crime had dropped from between 30 – 50%. For an overview of ZT in New York and criticisms see this video (and love the ‘tache).

In the UK Zero-tolerance policing allegedly slashed crime in Liverpool, a city historically blighted by antisocial behaviour and violent assaults, following its introduction in 2005. Overall recorded crime fell by 25.7 per cent in the three years to 2008 with violent crime falling by 38%.

It was not only the likes of drug dealers and burglars who were targeted. Boys kicking footballs against an old lady’s fence, litterbugs and graffiti louts were also on the police’s radar, and twice a month hundreds of officers flooded the streets to hunt suspects who had jumped bail or those wanted for a particular kind of offence.

Zero Tolerance Policing is still used today in Britain. For example, the Berkshire police adopted a Zero Tolerance approach to knife crime in Slough in 2022, following a 21 year old dying in a knife attack. This is part of a broader Zero Tolerance approach to knife crime rolled out as Operation Deter from Thames Valley policing as a whole.

Criticisms of Zero Tolerance Policing

Zero Tolerance Policing in New York resulted in a lot more people being arrested for possession of marijuana – 25 000 a year by 2012 (one every ten minutes) – some of those people lost their jobs or rental houses as a result (the human cost of Zero Tolerance)
despite the claims of the right wing governments who implement them, crime has gone down in cities in the US and the UK without the widespread use of Zero Tolerance techniques. This excellent article points out that ZT was never adopted widely in the UK or the Netherlands but both countries have witnessed a decline in crime in recent years. The simple truth is that crime has been going down for other reasons, ZT policing has little to do with this.
It creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy – ‘If police concentrate their patrols in a certain area and assume every young man they see is a potential or probable criminal, they will conduct more searches — and make more arrests. Which means a high percentage of young men in that neighborhood will have police records. Which, in turn, provides a statistical justification for continued hyper-aggressive police tactics.’ (It’s time to rethink ZTP).

It might be racist – the above two articles also deal with the fact that somewhere in the region of 85% of people dealt with under Zero Tolerance in New York were/ are black or Hispanic.

Antisocial Behaviour Orders (ASBOs)

Antisocial Behaviour Orders were introduced in 1999 in order to correct minor acts of deviance which would not ordinarily warrant criminal prosecution. Anyone over the age of 10 could receive an ASBO.

They lasted until 2014 when they were replaced Criminal Behaviour Orders and a range of other penalties designed to control antisocial behaviour.

A key thing about ASBOs is that people could get them for DEVIANT behaviour that wasn’t necessarily criminal. If you breached an ASBO, however, you could go to jail for breaching the order.

It was local magistrates who had the power to decided whether someone should receive one.

Statistics on ASBOs

25000 Antisocial Behaviour Orders were administered between the year of their introduction in 1999 and the end of 2013, but how effective were they at reducing and controlling deviant behaviour?

The majority of ASBOs were handed out between 2003 to 2006, and declined in the following years.

Half of all ASBOs were handed out to 10-17 year olds.

Two famous case studies of ASBO recipients

In 2013 the so called ‘Naked Rambler‘ received an ASBO stipulating that he had to cover his genitalia and buttocks when he appeared in public, apart from in a changing room. The 53 year old was jailed for 11 months, after he defied the banning order.

In 2014 Jordan Horner, 20, a Muslim convert from northeast London was ordered to stop preaching in public,as part of a campaign for a sharia state in Britain.

What replaced ASBOS?

In 2014 Anti Social Behaviour Orders were replaced with a wider range of public order control measures including:

Criminal Behaviour Orders

Community Prevention Orders
Public Space Protection Orders.

According to the gov.uk website ‘behaving antisocially includes:

drunken or threatening behaviour
vandalism and graffiti
playing loud music at night.

Getting a Community Behaviour Order means you won’t be allowed to do certain things, such as:

going to a particular place, e.g. your local town centre
spending time with people who are known as trouble-makers

drinking in the street’

Criticisms of Anti Social Behaviour Control Measures

ASBOs gave people a criminal record for not actually doing anything criminal – You could (past tense!) get an ASBO for being loud, which isn’t in itself criminal, and then go to jail for breaching the ASBO – by being loud again.
According to Liebling (2023) ASBOs may never have been effective at reducing anti-social behaviour. There were too many other variables to tell whether ASBOs worked. For example there were a lot of longer term community projects with young people in the early to mid 2000s partly designed to control deviance. We simply cannot tell whether it was these or ASBOs that reduced crime during that time.