Security issue: Vandalism
Contents
Security issue: Vandalism
Vandalism is the act of willful or malicious destruction, injury, disfigurement, or defacement of property without the consent of the owner or person having custody or control. By this definition, this category includes defacement, such as graffiti. However, in order to keep this security issue limited and surveyable, this act is defined as a seperate security issue. Also, wilful destruction performed by an organised group for a shared reason is excluded from this security issue. This is dealt with in the security issue 'destruction by riots'.In the sense we use the term here, it will therefore only include physical damages, excluding defacement, motivated by other than rational reasons.
Description
- Alone or in groups (but not organised)
- Schools
- Football hooligans
Football hooligans: The term ‘organized’ is, in this sense, misleading. The amount and quality of this organization varies greatly between groups, from a highly disciplined, hierarchical criminal group that associates continuously throughout the week to a more casual grouping that comes on the occasion of a football match with the intention of committing violent acts.[1] As soon as the group attains a commonly felt (rational or rationalised) reason for their actions, the act falls under the security issue of destruction by riots.
- Groups going out
- Predominantly young people
- Either motivated by direct provocation, or
Viewing vandalism causation asessentially an in-the-person phenomenon, Cohen (1971) offers acquisitive, tactical, ideological, vindictive, play, and malicious subtypes. In full contrast, holding that vandalism "resides" not in persons but in the nature of buildings, school or park equipment, or other public facilities, Weinmayer (1969) categorizes the following vandalism subtypes: overuse, conflict, curiosity, leverage, deleterious, irresistible temptation, and "no-other-way-to-do-it" vandalism.
Attributing circumstances
- Alcohol
- Excitement
- Social circumstances (?)
- As is true for all forms of aggression,the single best predictor of future vandalistic behaviour is similar past behaviour(Tygert, 1988).
- Presence of young adults/adolescents
- Presence of likely targets:
- Easy to break (windows, bus stops)
- Deteriorated - a derelict building
- No apparent owner
- No apparent surveillance
Impacts
- Social
- Perceived security
Social impacts
Known social impacts of vandalism include changing citzens perception of (in)security and fear of crime. This usually happens in a way that has an effect on the gap between "felt" and "factual" secuirty, since individuals tend to make - correct or incorret - reasoning on societal security as a whole based on immediate environmentla clues. This is known as the "broken glass phenomenon".
Economic impact
Vandalism leads to considerable costs in both a direct (primary) and a indirect (secondary) way[2]. Direct costs of vandalism come in the form of:
- Preventive costs in anticipation of vandalism (e.g. security measures, insurance)
- Material and immaterial costs as a consequence of vandalism (e.g. physical damage, clean up costs, repairments, medical costs, mental harm); and
- Responsive costs to vandalism (e.g. the costs of detection and prevention, persecution, support trial, etc.).
The average costs of an act of vandalism are estimated at around € 700 for the Netherlands and € 900 for the UK (2005 prices)[3].
Moreover, the presence of vandalism can trigger secondary economic impacts. Vandalism can make the local environment an unpleasant place to live and work creating a signicant negative impact on real estate value and local business revenues[4]. Moreover, vandalism can lead to less public funding by local authorities (in terms of investments in social infrastructure).
Measures
- Change views of youngsters (In their view, public property in a real sense belongs to no one.In contrast, for youngsters less prone to vandalism, such property belongs to everyone; this view reflects their greater sense of themselves as part of a larger community ("Vandals," 1978))
- characterized by better aesthetic quality and maintenanceof school property;[5]
- located in more densely populated areas with higher activity levels;
- furnished a less obstructed view of school property to surrounding residents; and
- were located in better-illuminated neighborhood areas.
- prison - approach (such as target hardening, access controlling, offender deflecting, entry-exit screening, surveillance increasing, inducement removing) (! consequences !)[6]
- de-opportunizing vandalism[7]
- Surveillance
- Intervention
Footnotes and references
- ↑ National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS)in a Private correspondence, December 2002.
- ↑ Primary economic impact (or direct effects) are generally defined as the initial, immediate economic output generated by a specific cause (in this case a criminal offence). Secondary economic impact (or indirect effects) are generated each time a subsequent transaction is made, for example, the impact of crime on the real estate value in the neighborhood.
- ↑ SEO (2007). De kosten van criminaliteit.
- ↑ See Gibbons, S. (2004). The costs of urban property crime. The Economic Journal, 114 (499). ISSN 0013-0133.
- ↑ (School-related vandalism) Reprinted with permission of The Guilford Press CHAPTER 14 Controlling Vandalism: The Person-Environment Duet ARNOLD P. GOLDSTEIN
- ↑ Furthermore, the very scope of their implementation—in their most extreme form, the "Bastille response" (Ward, 1973) or the "crimeproof fortress" (Zweig &c Ducey, 1978)—has in some settings had a very negative impact on the very mission for which the setting was created in the first place. For example, "More and more high schools are becoming mechanical systems ruled by constraints on timing, location, and behavior. The similarity between schools and jails is becoming ever more pronounced" (Csikszentmihalyi & Larsen, 1978, p. 25).
- ↑ Weinmayer's (1969) assertion that "ninety percent of what is labeled vandalism can be prevented through design" (p. 286) Wiesenthal (1990), for example, observes that "property damage can be avoided by design elements that do more than resist attack; design can be used to subtly steer the user away from destruction or defacement" (p. 289). Wise (1982) suggests that design may be employed to channel attention away from potentially damaging activities, to reduce the effects of natural processes (e.g., erosion, weathering) that vandals may augment, and to eliminate or reduce the type of environmental feedback that may serve to reinforce vandalistic behavior. Wilson (1977), writing as an architect, summarizes the case fordesign-as-intervention succinctly: The shape of buildings can dictate patterns of use and the circulation of people around them and hence help to structure the networks of social relationships that develop. In addition, buildings, by the amount of surveillance they afford, may prevent or offer opportunities for certain activities to take place unobserved. Finally, attrition and damage to buildings can be prevented to an extent by careful use of materials and finishes. It is eminently sensible to suppose that there is some connection between design and behavior, including vandalism, (p. 795) Blauvelt (1980) urges making the school "occupied."He claims: The key to controlling vandalism is to make the school a place that in some sense is continuously occupied by some form of human or mechanical resence, which will deter or respond to the vandal. The heart of any effective approach to controlling vandalism will be establishing that sense of "presence" which defines the building as no longer being an inert target, (p. 4) Added bus conductors, real and dummy TV cameras in stores, Neighborhood Watch programs, improved neighborhood lighting, and increased number of store employees are all examples of opportunity-reducing, surveillance increasing social-ecological interventions.
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