DESIGN AGAINST CRIME? BEYOND THE RHETORIC OF RESIDENTIAL CRIME PREVENTION

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Abstract
There has been a sharp rise in recorded crime in post‐war Britain: since 1960 known offences have increased by an average annual amount of at least 6 per cent. Most analysts, of course, believe this reflects changes in policing and in public reporting behaviour as much, if not more, than it indexes real trends in offending. Nevertheless, there are now more than 3m offences committed annually in England and Wales alone; and between 1980 and 1985, domestic burglary increased by over 150 per cent. Residental burglary and vandalism are a major component of the modern crime problem, accounting for 13 per cent and 15 per cent respectively, of known offences in 1985 (if thefts from dwellings were added, residential property crime would account for an even greater proportion of the total). This is, in itself, a sobering thought. Equally disturbing are the increasing expenditure on policing that crime trends have encouraged (40 per cent since 1979); the real cost of solving burglaries (which is currently estimated at £1.2bn per year in England and Wales); and the amount of property stolen or damaged (which was estimated at £35m in 1983 for one Northern police force area alone). Add to this the discovery of the British Crime Survey (conducted for the first time in 1982, and repeated two years later) that as few as two‐thirds of the burglaries and one‐fifth of the incidents of vandalism experienced by private victims ever comes to the notice of the police and it is obvious why residential crime is causing such concern among both politicians and the public.