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OPPORTUNITIES, PRECIPITATORS
AND CRIMINAL DECISIONS:
A REPLY TO WORTLEY'S CRITIQUE
OF SITUATIONAL CRIME
PREVENTION
by
Derek B. Cornish
Wichita State University and
Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science
and
Ronald V. Clarke
Rutgers University
Abstract: Clarke's classification of situational crime prevention tech- niques is designed to provide a conceptual analysis of situational strategies, and to offer practical guidance on their use in reducing criminal opportunities. It has developed in parallel with a long program of empirical research, conducted by many researchers, on the situ- ational determinants and the prevention of a wide variety of crimes. For this reason the classification has been subject to constant revision and updating, of which Clarke's (1997) version, which lists 16 such techniques, is the latest. Recently, Wortley (2001) has suggested the need to augment the existing classification, which deals with the analysis of situational opportunities, with a complementary analysis of situational precipitators. These are factors within the crime setting it- self that may prompt, provoke, pressure, or permit an individual to of- fend. The present chapter examines the assumptions underlying the development of situational crime prevention, and offers some views about the theoretical and practical significance of Wortley's suggested additions and revisions. It concludes by proposing a revised classifica-
Crime Prevention Studies, vol. 16 (2003), pp.41-96.
Derek B. Cornish and Ronald V. Clarke
tion of 25 techniques to take immediate practical account of some of the concerns raised above.
A NEW CRITIQUE OF SITUATIONAL CRIME
PREVENTION
Until recently, Clarke's (1992, 1997; Clarke and Homel, 1997) classification of situational techniques has been seen as providing a systematic and comprehensive review of methods of environmental crime prevention, and has served to guide practical efforts to reduce offending. Such criticism as has been made of situational techniques has tended to concentrate on their alleged failure to tackle the root causes of crime — that is, to address issues of criminal motivation, and to support programs of social and individual crime prevention — or on the putative threats they pose to civil liberties. These issues have been exhaustively explored elsewhere (von Hirsch et al., 2000) and will not be further examined in this chapter. Recently, however, in a series of carefully argued papers (1996, 1997, 1998, 2001) and in his book, Situational Prison Control (2002), Wortley has offered a challenge from within the field of environmental psychology itself to the theory and practice of situational crime prevention. Wortley^1 s critique centers on what he views as the undue and po- tentially damaging preoccupation with opportunity variables when discussing offender decision making and situational prevention. He contrasts this with the relative neglect of other situational forces (termed "precipitators") within the crime setting that serve to moti- vate offenders. He identifies four types of precipitator — prompts; pressures; permissions; and provocations — each of which may pro- vide situationally-generated motivation to the hitherto unmotivated. He goes on to offer a two-stage model of situational crime prevention that views offending as the outcome of two sets of situational forces: precipitating factors and regulating factors. Temporal priority is given to the influence of precipitators in motivating the offender, these be- ing followed by the influence of opportunities in regulating whether or not offending actually occurs. He concludes that controlling pre- cipitators is just as important as regulating opportunities, and pro- vides an additional and complementary set of situational crime pre- vention techniques to control precipitators, claiming that these sup- ply the missing half of a new and more comprehensive situational approach to crime prevention practice. Lastly, he suggests that the development of such a situational framework might better explain and minimize the iatrogenic effects of situational measures in some circumstances.
Derek B. Cornish and Ronald V. Clarke
- models (e.g., seeing other people shoplifting may cause ob- servers to imitate); or
- expectancy cues (e.g., well-maintained parks may encourage users to treat them properly).
Pressures
These are situations that exert social pressure on the individual to offend (2001:65) or perform inappropriate behavior (2001:68). They include the expectations and demands of others to:
- conform to group norms (e.g., thieving because your friends doit);
- obey the instructions of authority figures (e.g., cooking the books because your boss tells you to);
- comply with requests and persuasive arguments (e.g., "Only wimps take any notice of drink-drive laws"); or
- submerge one's identity in a crowd (e.g., to engage in untyp- ical behavior such as looting when part of a riot).
Permissibility
Situations that weaken moral prohibitions permit potential of- fenders to commit illegal acts (2001:65). Wortley notes that, "Situ- ational factors can help distort moral reasoning processes and so permit individuals to engage in normally proscribed behaviour. The human conscience is highly malleable and sensitive to the physical and social context in which behaviour is performed" (2001:70). Wortley identifies four broad categories of moral distortion, based on earlier distinctions made by Sykes and Matza (1957):
- minimization of the legitimacy of the moral principle (e.g., "Everyone's on the take.");
- minimization of the degree of personal accountability for the behavior (e.g., "I was drunk at the time.");
- minimization of the negative outcomes of the behavior (e.g., "Stealing from department stores doesn't hurt anybody. They're insured."); and
- minimization of the worth or blamelessness of the victim (e.g., "So I beat her up. She was just another whore.").
A Reply to Wortley's Critique of Situational Crime Prevention
Provocations
Features of situations can sometimes produce adverse emotional arousal, which provokes a criminal response. As Wortley puts it: "Situations can induce stress and provoke an anti-social response, particularly some form of aggression" (2001:73). Aversive emotional arousal can be generated by:
- frustration (e.g., lack of options and choices; failures of equipment and services);
- crowding (public transport; housing; leisure settings);
- invasions of privacy (intrusions into personal space; lack of privacy); and
- environmental irritants (e.g., excessive noise and adverse weather conditions). According to Wortley, then, there are very many features of situa- tions that may precipitate offending in the absence of pre-existing motivation on the offender's part. (They may also enhance existing motivation, but this is not the crucial point of Wortley's argument.) Since these situational factors create motive rather than opportunity, they open up new prospects for theory and practice in situational crime prevention. However, as Wortley acknowledges, in practice some current situational techniques are already engaged in what could be regarded as precipitator control. What is at issue here, then, is not so much practice itself, limited and sporadic though its focus on precipitators may be. Rather, it is the limitations of the theory underpinning practice that is the issue: whether, instead of fulfilling its role of developing practice, it may be stifling it. Since this raises questions about the theoretical status of precipitators, and the sig- nificance of their place in situational crime prevention, we will come back to these points later.
Wortley's Two-Stage Model of Offending and Prevention
Wortley argues that consideration of situational sources of moti- vation takes us "...beyond the concept of opportunity as it is usually employed in the situational crime prevention literature" (1997:74). Instead, the role played by situational factors has to be reviewed and extended: "Situations are conceived as not just enabling crime to oc- cur, but as playing an active role in psychologically readying the in- dividual to offend" (1997:74).' The temporal order in which precipitators and opportunity factors come into play is significant, too. According to Wortley "...readying
events occur prior to cost-benefit analysis and may significantly af-
Derek B. Cornish and Ronald V. Clarke
For each kind of precipitator and its subcategories (16 in all), Wortley suggests a range of precipitator-control techniques which match and counter them. These techniques are arranged into a 4-by- 4 table (see Table 1) analogous to that produced by Clarke (1997). As the table is self-explanatory, we will not comment further on the techniques themselves at this point, Wortley concludes that there is a place for both types of tech- niques in situational crime prevention, that both are equally impor- tant, but that they tackle different areas of situational control: "Con- trolling situational precipitators of crime and reducing opportunities for crime can be understood not so much as competing prevention approaches, but as approaches directed at different stages of the per- son-situation interaction" (2001:75).
Productive vs Counterproductive Techniques
As well as offering contributions to the theory and practice of situational prevention, Wortley's analysis of the role and control of precipitators also leads him to some interesting speculations about the circumstances under which situational crime prevention tech- niques may become counterproductive (Wortley, 1998, 2001; see also Wortley, this volume). He notes that over-attention either to control- ling precipitators or reducing opportunities may, under certain cir- cumstances, lead to such consequences. On the one hand, trying to control precipitators too closely may restrict the scope for opportu- nity reduction and fail to regulate unwanted behaviors, while over- control of opportunities may sometimes increase the situational pressures to offend (Wortley, 2001:64). So-called "harder" forms of opportunity reduction, in particular, may suffer from the fact that they are easily noticed and may become provoking. And while more subtle forms of opportunity reduction exist, Wortley argues that pre- cipitator control is usually a "softer" form of situational prevention. This is both because it is more covert in its mode of action, so being more likely to achieve its effects outside the individual's conscious awareness; and because it offers the possibility of preventing even the desire-induced contemplation of the crime in question. It is for these reasons that he suggests that such techniques may be less likely to produce displacement. Theoretical explanations such as these for some of the "unintended consequences of crime prevention" (Grabosky, 1996) are to be welcomed for advancing the debate on this issue.
Derek B. Cornish and Ronald V. Clarke
influence of contrasting assumptions about the nature of criminal behavior. We will go on to argue that Wortley's contribution, while innovative and theoretically important, imposes quite restrictive as- sumptions about the nature of offending. These assumptions, we will suggest, do not apply to most criminal behavior, most sources of mo- tivation, or most situations. This may limit the practical significance of precipitators for situational prevention to particular settings, crimes and criminals.
Common Ground
When responding to critiques there is always the danger that ba- sic shared assumptions will be overlooked in favor of exploring differ- ences of view. It is important, then, to list what the debate is not about. First, there seems little disagreement about the importance of addressing the interaction between the offender and his or her envi- ronment — commonly referred to in criminology as the interaction between motivation and opportunity — when trying to understand the circumstances under which individuals offend or refrain from offending. Nor is there disagreement about the general value of situ- ational crime prevention as a way of controlling crime by trying to understand and manage aspects of this interaction. For example, we strongly agree with Wortley (1998) that even counter-productive ex- amples of situational measures show situations to be important con- trollers of behavior. Nor is there any disagreement on the funda- mental role that motivation plays in readying the individual to offend. This is clear from the attention given by the rational choice perspec- tive's involvement models (Clarke and Cornish, 1985, 2001; Cornish and Clarke, 1986) to the nature, development and channeling of common motives and desires by way of background factors, current circumstances, routines and lifestyles. And although situational crime prevention, with its selective attention to the process of crime commission itself, tends to treat the offender's motivation as a "given," this is only because these other and earlier choices and deci- sions in the offender's life have traditionally been considered to be the major factors responsible for readying the individual to offend.^2 In both Wortley's and our approach, there is also agreement about the value of existing situational methods for stopping the motivated offender from realizing his or her criminal objectives. Whether the offender enters the crime setting ready to offend, or whether readi- ness is precipitated by the setting itself, changing the cost-benefit analysis that the motivated offender engages in when deciding whether or not to commit the crime in question is an important as- pect of criminal decision making in both Wortley's and our analyses.
More generally, offending is seen as a multi-stage decision process, of which selecting and evaluating means to achieve desired goals are important components. In a very Humean way, reason is a slave of the passions in both approaches: as with Freud's ego, the job of rea- soning is to secure desired objectives at least cost to the offender. And we are in close agreement over the importance of investigating any and all situational cues likely to have an influence upon criminal decision making and crime commission. As we saw earlier, the debate is not strictly even about the status of precipitators, or the value of trying to control them. As Wortley points out, there have been many scattered references to their role throughout the history of the theory and practice of situational pre- vention, and recently some systematic attention has been given to incorporating a class of these ("removing excuses") in the current version of Clarke's classification of techniques (Clarke and Homel, 1997; Clarke, 1997). As Wortley himself comments, the immediate practical implications of his work in terms of increasing our store of available techniques may not be great: "The argument for separating crime-precipitating situations from opportunity-related situations is based more on the need for conceptual clarity than on the assump- tion that there necessarily will be a resultant dramatic increase in available techniques" (Wortley, 1998:183). And, indeed, we agree over the value of many of the actual tech- niques, over the fact that there is much overlap between the content of the two classification systems (as noted in Wortley's earlier [1998] Table 1; and Wortley, 2001:75) and on the "...potential for debate about the appropriate categorization of particular interventions" (2001:75). It is also clear that some techniques of situational prevention are less noticeable to offenders or potential offenders than others and, hence, less likely to provoke counter-productive reactions. Wortley makes a strong case for arguing that, under certain circumstances, some forms of situational prevention may be counter-productive. As- suming that they will always be positive courts the tyranny of good intentions; and trying to provide systematic accounts of the circum- stances under which counter-productive outcomes may arise is an important endeavor.
Points at Issue
With so much apparent agreement over fundamentals it might seem that any differences must be relatively trivial ones, and ac- commodation easy to reach. But in fact the formal identification of a new set of situational variables ("situational precipitators") raises
A Reply to Wortley's Critique of Situational Crime Prevention
A Reply to Wortley's Critique of Situational Crime Prevention
Situational Techniques:
- Do opportunity reduction and precipitator control, respec- tively, have similar breadth of application?
- How helpful is Wortley's (1998) distinction between "harder" and "softer" situational techniques, and to what extent are they coterminous with precipitator control and opportunity regulation? These questions exemplify some of the underlying points at issue. As we will discuss in the next section, the fact that they can be raised at all suggests that the differences between Wortley's views and our own, far from simply being a matter of emphasis, reflect the opera- tion of contrasting — and maybe conflicting — assumptions about criminal behavior. In the remainder of the chapter we will argue the case for adopt- ing a different position on each of these questions to the one we be- lieve that Wortley has taken. On the basis of this we will propose a rather more limited theoretical and practical role for precipitators than the one that Wortley has laid out. Instead of viewing precipita- tors as separate but equal contributors to the theory and practice of situational prevention, we will suggest that their role may in practice be a somewhat more restricted one. We will argue that the circum- stances under which precipitators play an important role in situ- ational crime prevention may be most usefully treated as constituting limiting cases of a more general theoretical position. We will also argue that the most fruitful way of developing a clas- sification of situational techniques is to start from a set of broad de- fault assumptions about offending derived from the rational choice perspective. These assumptions have their analogs in the situational factors most relevant to the situational prevention of offending: those of effort, risk, and reward. Other situational variables than these may have some impact on criminal behavior, but only in particular cir- cumstances and as a consequence of adopting further restrictive as- sumptions about offenders and offending. These assumptions are best seen as generating limiting cases relevant to particular sub- groups of crimes, committed in particular kinds of settings by par- ticular kinds of people. We will suggest, however, that Wortley's views are fully consistent with a rational choice perspective, and that they identify phenomena that have not as yet been given enough system- atic attention. But we will argue that any apparent divergences in our views about the practice of situational crime prevention can be as- cribed in large part to differences in the typical crime prevention problems being addressed — in other words to differences between
Derek B. Cornish and Ronald V. Clarke
the specific phenomena of interest addressed by traditional situ- ational prevention and by Wortley. In conclusion, we will offer some comments on the extent to which the theory and practice of situational crime prevention need to be modified in order to accommodate Wortley's critique. As regards the- ory, we will argue that the issues raised by Wortley help to identify important assumptions underlying the rational choice perspective and situational crime prevention, and that these require further clarification. And it is further argued that Wortley's identification of situational precipitators as motivating factors makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how person-situation interac- tions can lead to criminal behavior. But we will suggest that the practical benefits to situational pre- vention itself may be more limited. Rather than attempt to develop a comprehensive classification system that incorporates complemen- tary and matching sets of situational techniques based upon oppor- tunities and precipitators, respectively, we favor a more modest and pragmatic approach at this juncture. In short, given the practical purposes of such classifications of techniques we favor an approach that seeks to absorb and integrate situational precipitators within (with some modifications) the existing framework. This will reflect the relative importance of opportunities and precipitators to the general- ity of situational crime prevention efforts more accurately.
THE NATURE OF THE OFFENDER IN SITUATIONAL
CRIME PREVENTION
Contrasting Assumptions about Offenders and
Offending
Until quite recently, a range of default assumptions about the nature of criminal behavior guided efforts at situational prevention. These assumptions, which stemmed from pragmatic as much as theoretical considerations, included views about the crimes most worth tackling, the nature of offenders, the sources and development of their motivation, the use they made of situations and situational cues, the processes of criminal decision making they engaged in, and the most appropriate situational techniques for disrupting their criminal activities. The expansion of situational crime prevention techniques over the years is a welcome sign of the vigor of this ap- proach to controlling offending. But rapid growth in technical reach often takes place at the expense of continuing theoretical coherence.
Derek B. Cornish and Ronald V. Clarke
choice perspective and its conceptualization of the interaction be- tween motivated offender and facilitating environment. Although situational crime prevention is about preventing or reducing crimes, its links to choice, and later rational choice models of offender deci- sion making, have inevitably generated implicit assumptions about the likely nature of offenders responsible for the particular crimes with which situational prevention was largely concerned during the first two decades of its development. Over the past 10 years or so, situational crime prevention practice has continued to develop within an overall rational choice framework, but some of its specific working assumptions about the nature of crimes and offenders have subtly changed in response to an increase in the range of crimes being tackled and in associated preventive techniques. At least three phases in the development of situational crime prevention can be identified, each linked to a particular but often unexamined set of views about the nature of the crimes and criminals under investigation. The following descriptions attempt to capture salient aspects of the contrasting sets of assumptions that underpin these "ideal types" of offenders, and the development of techniques intended to address the special problems they pose for situational crime prevention. There is a danger in introducing the notion of what might be re- garded as "a typology of offenders" into a field that explicitly confines its attention to situational determinants of offending. But although situational crime prevention applies its techniques to unidentified offenders, there is an equal danger in ignoring assumptions about their nature that might lie hidden behind this activity. As early as 1980 (Clarke and Mayhew, 1980), situational analysts were discuss- ing the potential of situational techniques to target different types of offender — and, indeed the following "ideal types" are not unlike those identified at that time as committed, part-time, or opportunis- tic.
The Anti-social Predator
This is, as Wortley (1998:185) rightly suggests, the model or ideal type of the offender that has long driven efforts at opportunity- reduction. It is worth noting that Cohen and Felson's (1979) initial statement of the routine activities approach was based upon similar talk of direct-contact predatory acts. Since situational analysts study crimes rather than offenders, it may be the case that assumptions about an anti-social predator as the archetypal actor in these kinds of crimes have arisen from a consideration of what the "choice- structuring properties" (Cornish and Clarke, 1987, 1989) of these
offenses demand in the way of characteristics from successful of- fenders — and of what type of offender would tend to choose them. This model of the offender makes a number of assumptions about offending.
Crimes and Criminals
The early crimes studied by situational analysts and used illus- tratively by the rational choice perspective tended to be predatory ones in which offenders roamed hunting-grounds on the lookout for victims or targets, whether to rob, burgle, or vandalize. In keeping with an early implicit rational choice formulation, offending was re- garded as goal-oriented and offenders as rational actors seeking to obtain a variety of satisfactions from their crimes at least risk and effort to themselves. Offenders were assumed to be anti-social, mostly free from moral scruples,^3 and committed to particular types of crime as simply the most satisfactory means to achieve their goals. The road to predatory offending follows — and, indeed, underpins — the standard rational choice account of offending which developed during the latter part of the 1980s. Many of these assumptions about the nature of predatory offenders are also consistent with those made by traditional control theories of crime (Hirschi, 1969; Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990): and this is how the psychopathic offender is of- ten depicted. As well as having these attributes, the predatory offenders whom situational crime prevention wanted to deter were (unsurprisingly) those who were currently successfully committing the predatory crimes in question — that is, those with knowledge, skills and expe- rience enough to minimize risk and effort, and maximize payoffs. Situational techniques directed at this notional group of offenders were expected to be able to disrupt the intentions of a wide variety of offenders, from novices to "professionals" — even if, in the latter case, reduction of offending rather than prevention was the goal.
Motivation
For predatory offenders, the motivation to contemplate offending arises out of the usual commonplace human desires (see Clarke and Cornish, 2001, Table 1). The particular nature of these wants and needs are shaped by the individual's basic physiological drives; by personal priorities and preferences acquired during the course of de- velopment; and through those generated by the pleasures and vicis- situdes of his or her current lifestyle. In the case of novice offenders, living or contact with marginal lifestyles may selectively expose indi-
A Reply to Wortley's Critique of Situational Crime Prevention
plies a provisional "ruthlessness," since at this point moral consid- erations (if any) will have been resolved. The assumption that event decisions should be separated from in- volvement ones also highlights what offenders do when they commit a crime, and so continues to emphasize the amoral, predatory and calculating aspects of offending. Decisions at this point relate largely to technical aspects of the "hunt," the "kill," and escape from the crime scene. Since readiness is assumed to have been constructed prior to, and usually in a different place from, the criminal event itself, concentra- tion on the technicalities of the crime script (Cornish, 1994a, 1994b) assumes an offender who is experienced enough not allow reconsid- eration of readiness to leak into and disrupt later decision making. This lays further stress upon the nature of the offender as predator, and has implications for the way in which situations are defined, and situational cues utilized.
Situations
For the predatory offender, situations are there to be utilized for crime-commission purposes: and the offender selects the situation for the opportunities it is likely to provide. Knowledge of situations and the opportunities they present is gained via the routine activities of day-to-day life (Felson, 2002; Brantingham and Brantingham, 1993; this volume), and by more focused patterns of search. This view of the "situation" as one which is freely chosen and purposefully entered (or not) on the basis of its value in furthering the motivated offender's contemplated offense, is a key default assumption of tradi- tional techniques of situational prevention. It emphasizes the in- strumental use that the predatory offender makes of situations, and downplays any independent effect — such as a motivating one — that exposure to setting factors might have on the offender.
Situational Cues
Situations influence criminal decision making by providing cues that alert the predatory offender to the existence of opportunities to carry out the offense he or she is "ready" to commit; and this process of alerting may occur whether the predatory offender is specifically "hunting" or not on that particular occasion. Such cues are looked- for signals or reminders providing the information that an offender needs in order to do something that he or she has already decided to do once the circumstances are right. For predatory offenders, then, situational cues function primarily as discriminative stimuli relating
A Reply to Wortley's Critique of Situational Crime Prevention
Derek B. Cornish and Ronald V. Clarke
to opportunities to carry out crimes successfully. The cues in ques- tion are those of risk, effort and reward, and these will be the infor- mational aspects of situational cues to which predatory offenders attend. While situations may possess different or additional mean- ings for other ideal types of offender, it is for the information they provide about the presence or absence of opportunities to commit a particular type of crime that they are important to predatory offend- ers.^4 As Crime as Opportunity puts it (Mayhew and Clarke, 1976:7), however, there are differences between the "objective, material condi- tions necessary for an act to be committed" and "the conditions sub- jectively perceived as favourable to action." Although opportunity cues are grounded in objective facts (a window is either open or it is not), perception of opportunities and their use or rejection is a sub- jective one and depends upon the offender's skills, experience and degree of involvement in a criminal lifestyle. These will determine the extent to which cues signaling opportunities are noticed, seized, sought, manipulated, or manufactured by the predatory offender. The relationship between predatory offenders and the opportunity cues they utilize, then, is usually not determined simply by the im- pact of single situations on them, but also by any prior experiences they may have of committing that particular offense. As to whether opportunity cues are ever more than simply in- strumental to the task of crime commission, Wortley has suggested that "prompts" — the class of precipitators having most in common with opportunity cues — may also motivate offending. However, al- though this seems a reasonable assumption, it is probably true only in limited circumstances. It is certainly possible that a blatantly tempting opportunity to steal, a badly vandalized fence, viewing a pornographic movie, or gaining sudden access to a firearm during a fight, may all put the idea of offending into an individual's mind, or even seem to bring about an offense. After all, there has to be a first time for everything. But in rational-choice terms, when opportunity cues act in this way, they are best seen as feeding into the processes of initial involvement — that is, of providing graphic information about possible criminal solutions as part of the process of becoming ready to offend for the first time. For the most part, however, such cues are utilized in the context of a standing decision to offend, and under these circumstances they simply indicate circumstances more or less propitious for offending. By the same token, the fact that the involvement and crime- commission decisions may occur quickly and almost simultaneously should not be taken — as it sometimes is — as evidence of the power of situational cues to motivate offending. So-called opportunistic
