1st Edition

Guarding Against Crime Measuring Guardianship within Routine Activity Theory

By Danielle M. Reynald Copyright 2011

    This ground-breaking book examines the critical role that citizens play in guarding against crime. By focusing on the ways in which residents are able to capably guard their residential environments from crime, Reynald shows how local residents function (or fail to function) as effective crime controllers. The studies contained herein are aimed at developing our theoretical, empirical and practical understanding of the function of the capable guardian as a critical, yet elusive actor in the crime event model. In lieu of utilizing secondary data sources for proxy measures, this book argues in favour of new, more direct measures of guardianship, employing direct methods of primary data collection in order to capture the action dimensions of capable guardianship, as well as various other environmental and contextual factors that affect it. It features observations of guardianship in action and interviews with guardians to elucidate the factors that empower guardians to make them capable of crime control.

    Chapter 1 Introduction: Guarding Against Crime; Chapter 2 The Guardians, Guardianship and Defensible Space in Residential Crime Prevention; Chapter 3 1The theoretical review in this chapter was first published in ; Chapter 4 Presenting Guardianship in Action: How Local Residents Guard Against Crime; Chapter 5 1The results presented in this chapter were first published in . Guardianship in action: Developing a new tool for measurement. Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal. 11(1), 1–20, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan; Chapter 6 1Results presented in this chapter were first published in ; Chapter 7 1Some of the results presented in this chapter have appeared in ; Chapter 8 Supervision and Residents’ Ability to Detect Potential Offenders; Chapter 9 Decision Making by Guardians: Factors Affecting the Decision to Intervene; supplement Supervision, Intervention and the Neighbourhood Context; Chapter 10 Conclusions and Directions for the Future;

    Biography

    Danielle M. Reynald, Griffith University, Australia

    'Dr. Reynald has measured how local residents reduce their crime risk - or fail to do so. Her work goes to the heart of criminology, with clear thinking and sharp measurement.' Marcus Felson, Texas State University, USA 'Reynald delivers a wake-up call for all researchers and practitioners interested in the environmental approach to criminology. She unravels and clarifies the rather under-researched process of guardianship and its central role in crime prevention, through a carefully designed series of incremental observational and interview studies. In future, no criminologist can write about guardianship without discussing this ground breaking work.' Henk Elffers, Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement NSCR, Amsterdam, The Netherlands