UCL in the News: Crime fighters

The challenge for industry and commerce is to produce intrinsically secure designs, whether products, buildings or services, that are also aesthetically pleasing, have a high degree of usability, improve customer service and are what consumers want - thereby creating pleasant and safe living and working environments. …

In crime, as in business, there are opportunity makers and opportunity takers. The former should be pursued rigorously through criminal justice. The latter are more easily put off. Many of them are what developmental psychologists call 'adolescent-limited offenders.' Getting them to maturity without having done others (and themselves) harm is one of the goals of opportunity reduction. …

With consumer products and services, there tends to be a rather general sequence. A product is designed with limited attention to its crime-proneness, a crime harvest is suffered and a solution, usually partial, is retro-fitted. …

The same sequence is recognisable in many cases since, from the car to the mobile phone. The introduction of the latter, a small, initially pretty uniform, valuable, cloneable piece of electronics with few security features, is a boon to street robbers and drug dealing industries. …

I use the acronym VIVA to describe products vulnerable to theft. These are things of high Value, low Inertia, high Visibility and moderate Access. The last because if few people have a new product there is no established market for it once stolen, and if everyone has one, there is less demand unless there is swift change in attractiveness. iPods and mobile phones conform to the VIVA generalisation so it is no surprise they are commonly stolen. …

But there are so many places to start, and no shortage of relevant research by academics such as those in the Jill Dando Institute at UCL. Beyond smart wallets, we must consider the three million new homes that are planned to be built by 2020. While all the talk is about incorporating energy-saving measures into their design, we must also integrate security needs. …