Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) Overview
The Everytown Community Safety Fund provides direct investment, peer convenings and capacity building to community-based violence intervention programs nationwide. In strategic partnership with Everytown for Gun Safety, LISC provides training and technical assistance to grantees including the knowledge-sharing materials as part of this Everytown Community Safety Fund series.
Why CPTED?
Community violence generally happens outside the home in public spaces. Most community violence involves a relatively small number of people as victims or perpetrators, but its effects impact entire communities, eroding public health, causing economic disruptions, and contributing to lasting individual and community traumas. Community violence intervention strategies often focus on the individuals who commit violence, but another key strategy is to disrupt the public spaces where violence most commonly occurs. CPTED offers a method to analyze such places and identify physical interventions to make them safer, often a more effective and sustainable approach than pursuing individuals. When done right, CPTED strategies rely on local community members to guide the efforts. CPTED strategies can also counteract overpolicing and unnecessary arrests by reducing calls for service and law enforcement attention to public spaces.
What is CPTED?
Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is a crime prevention strategy that considers how the design of the physical environment, including buildings or spaces in a community, can minimize opportunities for crime to occur in specific places.
In practice, CPTED principles can be used to make spaces more clearly visible and more inviting to a wide range of users, activating spaces and encouraging legitimate uses. It can also be used to define privately controlled areas, reclaim vacant or deteriorated spaces for community use, and ensure that the community appears clean, orderly and well-maintained. These activities convey a sense of pride and ownership, discourage trespass, and make spaces less conducive to illicit activity. CPTED can help communities turn liabilities into assets, but it must be used with care. The use of CPTED principles should not make residents themselves unwelcome in their community’s spaces.
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