Demystifying CPTED: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design

Let's look at demystifying some of the principles of CPTED, there's a lot to consider a lot to think about. And of course, every home is going to be different. Your situation is going to be different from mine and your neighbor's house is going to look different from yours. But we can take a look at how we would put those basic principles into play around this simple house. So let's take a look at this house. Let's put a front door here, a little porch action, maybe a little walkway and let's put a back door over here. That's going to open up that way again. Little porch at the back and put windows Put windows in all the way around the house. If we consider that kind of a typical layout front door, backdoor windows all around the house. We put the front street out here, put in a sidewalk here, put in some neighbor houses, right? You can imagine all that. Now let's really get to the point where we're going to talk about what else is in our environment. What can we design around this house? If we've got a fixed house, the street we're not going to move the number of windows locations, the doors, things like that we're probably not going to change. These would be major, major issues. Changing the street really means moving out of this house moving into another one, changing the windows and doorways would be major construction. But if we imagine that there are trees and shrubs all around the house and some trees and shrubs maybe a head row here out in front of the house and beside the house, we can start to look at some opportunities to put our CPTED into place. We make these trees here. I'll put in a tree there. Well, if this tree blocks the entire view of the person inside the home, out into this area of the yard an area where someone could come through the head row someone could be moving around the house. Maybe we had some lighting that was actually shining here off the corner of the house. And the entire front area of the walkway is blocked because of the shadow that, that tree casts over here. Well, then that tree is really causing a problem. So one of the things, when it comes to surveillance, seeing or be seen that we would do right away in this diagram is get rid of that tree or at least trim it so that there were no leaves below the height of that window. No leaves or branches may be blocking or below the height of that light. But if it were the trunk itself and we had all kinds of other issues created by the thickness of that trunk it's going to be easier just to completely get rid of that. Now these shrubs that are all around the house we want to make sure that they're trimmed down to a level where we can see out the windows and that if we're walking up this walkway no one could be hiding behind him. That could mean trimming them up keep that lower 12 to 18 inches clear. And of course, keep them below the area of the window. Or maybe, you know, the first few inches of the window. We're probably not going to need to look straight down into the front yard so they can cover the windows. So a little bit, that's fine but we want to make sure we have clear fields of you there. And also that will allow us if we make sure that this one is trimmed appropriately here in this corner to see from that window onto the porch or down the walkway, as someone comes in the yard. Now this head row that I drew in here on the perimeter of the property, if that's 18 inches off the ground well below waist level, no big deal it'll serve as access control. It'll serve as a boundary establishment. And it won't block the view of the people on the street that are actually looking in towards the house. That's a perfect combination of all the things we want when it comes to using our landscaping, to enforce CPTED principles especially because this street and the sidewalk are here that implies that there's going to be traffic. That implies there's going to be foot traffic. There's going to be people moving around out here. We want them to be able to see what's going on in the front of our house. We want them to be able to see beyond this head row because as I've drawn it in here obviously it'd be very easy to get in behind the head row even if they just came in on the walkway and that criminal would then have isolation and anonymity. And we don't want that in this environment. Again, if we had a neighbor's house over here we want to make sure that the neighbor when they look out their windows or when they're walking down their walkway or parking in their driveway that they are able to see over that head row also and again, by having that low head row or we could make that a fence, right? We could put that in as a fence line also by having some kind of a decorative fence or a boundary establishing fence that we can still see through or see over. We now will encourage contact between our neighbors and our family. This way we become invested. We become friends. It becomes habit to look over and see if the neighbors are in their yard. We may see crime over here or a criminal driving by looking for a target of opportunity. May simply think, wow, too many people too much open access, too many line of sight areas into the windows and doors. That's not a target area for me.