Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity – design and CPTED

The CCO Framework in design

The CCO Framework has contributed to a range of design-focused activities and projects, covering design in general (products, places, systems, services, procedures etc) and CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design – see below) in particular.

The CCO is sufficiently abstract and analytic to give designers a generalised idea of the causes of crime they must systematically look out for in designing their products for use in particular contexts. It offers a disciplined but flexible start in thinking systematically about the kinds of intervention principles their solutions need to embody. Issues of design freedom – important for creative resolution of trade-offs and enabling innovation in the face of changing circumstances and adaptive offenders – are further covered under the Evolution, crime and security approach.

The CCO Framework was adapted and extended by Salford University for use by designers – the Crime Lifecycle Model. It featured in a guide to producing secure places, products and services published by the UK Design Council.

The Bikeoff project

The Bikeoff project by the Design Against Crime Research Centre and UCL Department of Security and Crime Science aimed to come up with a range of new designs for secure bike parking. It also produced a resource for designers, which drew on the CCO Framework.

The project outputs included two general presentations on Crime Frameworks and design and a detailed report on developing design standards using the CCO and the Misdeeds and Security Framework. (Incidentally, standards proved too optimistic so ended up as guidelines – see here.) An article on the project is here. (Note that the links in the original Bikeoff briefing page are now defunct.)

The Security Function Framework

The Security Function Framework is a systematic way of specifying and describing designs which contribute to security in various ways. It comprises four dimensions: purpose (what/ who is the designed item for?), niche (how does it fit with the wider security ecosystem?), mechanism (how does it work in cause-effect terms?) and technicality (how is it constructed and how does it operate?).

The CCO Framework can be used to describe the security mechanisms and how they block the immediate causes of criminal events. The process of developing descriptions/ specifications can begin with the CCO generic principles, but this can be further nuanced into more specific and context-embedded accounts.

CCO and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design

CPTED centres on the built environment at scales ranging from micro (e.g. window security) to meso (building and immediate surrounds) to macro (e.g. layout of housing estates, shopping malls, city centres and transport networks). The main page on CPTED, and Ekblom (2019b), both criticise the approach for its rather chaotic and poorly-defined assemblage of concepts (such as target-hardening, image and maintenance etc) and describe ongoing work to develop a more rigorous yet practically useful ontology.

The ontology draws in part on the CCO Framework. Some connections between CPTED and the CCO’s causal elements are immediately obvious. The built environment can equate to:

• The wider environment – street layouts, city centres etc
• Enclosures – which make the CCO Framework especially relevant to the built environment
• Targets – note that houses for example can be both targets of, say, malicious damage and enclosures containing the loot for burglary
• Space for the offender to be physically present
• A resource for offending as with hideouts, drug dens or ambush sites – so-called ‘offensible space’
• Environmental resources to avoid offending as with youth shelters and clubhouses which might keep potential offenders out of trouble

Obviously, the design contribution can serve to make crimes less likely or harmful, in which case the designers, commissioners and place managers are acting as crime preventers and/or enabling users to do likewise; or if the security dimension is lacking or badly-addressed, they can be crime promoters.