Humboldt Park Site Analysis Report: Environmental Crime Prevention

This report provides a site analysis of Humboldt Park, focusing on its environmental crime prevention strategies. The analysis examines various features, including bollards, emergency markers, and surveillance cameras, to understand their effectiveness in reducing crime. The report references relevant literature, such as the work of Sousa and Kelling, to highlight the importance of environmental design in creating safer public spaces. The study acknowledges the park's efforts in implementing security measures, such as natural and formal surveillance through well-maintained landscapes and CCTV cameras. The report also discusses the limitations of these approaches, such as the displacement of crime to areas without surveillance. It further explores the impact of security measures by analysing crime statistics, concluding that Humboldt Park has recorded a positive drop in crime due to security camera surveillance. The report reflects on the role of public spaces in reducing crime and promoting feelings of shared ownership, offering insights into the park's efforts to enhance the safety and security of its visitors. The report also provides a brief comparison with the West Garfield Park, highlighting the importance of public involvement and personnel training in effective crime prevention. The report concludes by emphasizing the significance of surveillance in both environmental design and Situational Crime Prevention (SCP).

Humboldt Park
Name
Institution
Professor
Course
Date

Parking Bollards
• Parking at Entry bollard barriers are placed to control vehicles and
pedestrians around parking lots and entry points. They encourage
slow, attentive driving. The bollards are highly visible with a wide
selection for different purposes.

Emergency signs

Guiding Lanes and Sidewalks at
Dangerous points
• Path walks are fitted with grills to avoid tripping and avoid walking in
dangerous areas

Formal and Natural Surveillance
• CCTV cameras for Formal Surveillance Natural Surveillance

Summary
• Crime prevention through environmental design is the manipulation of the built environment to reduce insecurity.
Crime can be costly and hard to prevent especially those that emanate from careless mistakes while using certain
features in different locations. The design and location of these features contributes to the security of the area
(Clarke 2010, pg. 12). The manipulation of the environment involves the modification of physical environments to
reduce chances of crime disposition and stimulation. There are places more vulnerable to crime such as public
transport systems and parks. In designing the security of a place, it is important to check for the areas that can
stimulate crime. Personal security is also important and it starts with the perception of the individual about the
security of a place.
• Parks play an important role in the reduction of crime. Users self-police such areas through the use of the park and
sidewalks. I have chosen to study Humboldt Park since it is a public area where many people visit both locally and
from far places. The neighborhood has rich social and ethnic demographic that are constantly changing. West
Humboldt Park is known for high crime since most of the residents are low income earners. The park has a
responsibility to ensure the security of its many visitors who wish to live, study and work within the area. Being a
park in the city, Humboldt Park is not free of crimes because it is hard to control people and things around us. The
park has invested heavily in environmental crime prevention. Offenders often look for any sign of disorder in an area
to commit a crime (Sousa, and Kelling, 2010, pg. 41-54). Pointers of insecure places include the lack of security
cameras, vandalism, breakage, and lack of proper gardening for the case of parks. Humboldt Park provides good
natural surveillance within the park due to the high maintenance of grass and property.

Summary
• Humboldt Park is using cameras to reduce crime despite the little research available and high cost
associated with other forms of crime prevention. Policymakers are focusing on potential investments
that carry minimal cost and bear more fruit with the scarce resources. According to the research done
by the urban planning and the Justice Policy Center on the impact of surveillance cameras, crimes rates
reduced far outweighing surveillance costs. The cameras are visible, with signs and flashing blue lights.
Officers can watch real-time camera feeds from their computer. The cameras were responsible for a
12% drop in crime rate drug related offenses and robberies dropped by a third. violent crimes dropped
by 20 percent (La Vigne et al., 2012, pg. 1-5). These incidents point to the effectiveness of surveillance
cameras in controlling crime.
• Humboldt Park landscape design has taken up security measures by erecting higher viewing areas,
advisory signs and emergency signs to warn and guide users of possible danger within the park. On July
12th, there were reports of an elusive alligator at the Humboldt Park Lagoon. Signs were erected
guiding users of their safety from elusive animals and the relevant authorities to report to. The reports
saw animal control officers come on site after social media users and visitors from the park circulated
the report of the Elusive animal. It confirms Sousa and Kelling (2010, pg. 44) view that use of parks
promotes feelings of shared ownership over public areas.

Summary
• Generally, the park has good natural and artificial lighting system that act as a crime prevention
tool. Lighting promotes visibility and surveillance. The park has erected bollards at the entrances
to allow authorized access (Tilley and Sidebottom 2017, pg. 13). Effective and efficient means of
help can be provided at the exact location where emergency markers have been erected.
• However, despite the high positive results witnessed by the installation of cameras in Humboldt
Park, much cannot be said for similar parks such as the West Garfield Park where crime rates
remained the same. The reason that residents give was that the cameras were more concentrated
in Humboldt Park than West Garfield (Welsh, Farrington, and Taheri, 2015, pg. 111-130). Police
were reportedly not monitoring the neighborhood cameras to interrupt crimes in progress, deter
potential offenders and make arrests. Lessons from these incidences reveal the need to involve
the public and training of personnel such as defenses and prosecution. Despite crimes not
reducing in West Garfield Park, Humboldt Park recorded a positive drop in crime due to security
camera surveillance (La Vigne et al., 2012, pg. 1-5). Surveillance is compulsory for crime
prevention as used in both environmental design and Situational Crime Prevention (SCP).

Summary
• There are notable implementations of security features at Humboldt
Park being a surrounded by high crime residential areas. A critique of
the approach to prevent crime is that SCP targets the setting and not
criminals. There are less sanctions and arrest for criminals. Criminal
behavior cannot be eliminated through the use of SCP. As witnessed
in Humboldt Park, the use of surveillance cameras only helped reduce
crime in the area but the criminals moved to where the surveillance
was law.

References
• Clarke, R. (2010). Situational crime prevention. 2nd ed. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, pp.1- 12.
• La Vigne, N.G., Lowry, S.S., Markman, J.A. and Dwyer, A.M., 2011. Evaluating the use of public
surveillance cameras for crime control and prevention. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice,
Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
• Mesko, G. and Flander, B., 2016. Developments of Social (Crime) Prevention in Europe-A Brief
Overview. Kutafin University Law Review, 1(1), pp.46-53.
• Sousa, W. and Kelling, G. (2010). Police and the Reclamation of Public Places: A Study of MacArthur
Park in Los Angeles. International Journal of Police Science & Management, 12(1), pp.41-54.
• Tilley, N. and Sidebottom, A., 2017. Handbook of crime prevention and community safety.
Routledge.
• Welsh, B.C., Farrington, D.P. and Taheri, S.A., 2015. Effectiveness and social costs of public area
surveillance for crime prevention. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 11, pp.111-130.