Perceptions of Crime in a Dreadful Enclosure

The environmental context for this research is Alumni Village, a married student housmg complex on the campus of Florida State University. Alumni Village was analyzed as an example of a "dreadful enclosure" which can be defined as a largescale housing estate or development which possesses a reputation as the home of thieves and cutthroats. Perceptions of the safety of the complex by its residents were obtained through use of a set of mental maps which were constructed by resident respondents. The method utilized in this study was derived in large part from Kevin Lynch's (1960) urban image delineation methodology. An analysis of the match between perceptions as recorded in mental maps and a known crime measure was carried out. Conclusions were drawn about policy improvements on the part of both the policing service and the management service for the complex. OHIO J. SCI. 77(0): 256, 1977 The environmental design perspective on crime prevention and control urges criminologists to explore the dynamics of man-environment interactions in order to construct empirical models of criminal events. These models should facilitate environmental analysis and engineering which will change the critical man-environment interaction at potential crime sites such that crimes will be prevented (Jeffery 1971). We have learned enough about manenvironment associations at the crime site in recent years to know that we are dealing with a very complex interaction. Jeffery (1975) has lately been concerned with bio-social components of this interaction and here we are concerned with another aspect: spatial perceptions of crime sites. These perceptions include at least 4 different sorts of people who are important to criminal events—potential victims, potential offenders, police and policy makers. Each of these groups of people play an important part in creating and defining the occurrence of crime. Victims and offenders are immediate parmanuscript received December 13, 197G and in revised form April 22, 1977 (#70-99). Presdent address: School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6 Canada. ticipants, police are both conditioning and responding agents. Policy makers decide what sorts of problems ought to be handled by means of criminal sanctions and shape the allocation of resources in time and space to such sanctions. We explore the crime site perceptions of one of these groups, potential victims within a married student housing complex of some 795 apartments, a limited but important setting. RELATED INVESTIGATIONS Recent victimological literature (Drapkin and Viano 1974) extends the theoretical and empirical importance of the victim-offender interaction, as a basis for understanding criminal events, by suggesting that mutual perceptions of victims and offenders can alter the behavior patterns of both groups (Landau, 1974). Indeed, as Dyreson (1973) has elegantly demonstrated, the behavioral interactions of victim, offender and policeman can often be modeled as an intricate spatial search and avoidance pattern in which the victim seeks to carry out a variety of activities while avoiding dangerous places and offenders. Conversely, the offender seeks to find congenial crime sites and "good" victims while avoiding the police; and the policeman seeks to find a maxi-