Editors' Introduction: Seeing and Being Seen to Prevent Crime

Cohen and Felson (1979) argue that for a direct-contact predatory crime to be committed, one of the three essential conditions that must converge in space and time is "absence of capable guardians," or, more abstractly, "absence of capable guardianship." Surveillance (or the appearance of surveillance) is part of capable guardianship. Clarke (1995) presents 12 "techniques" of situational prevention, organised under three headings: increasing the effort, increasing the risks, and reducing the reward. Three of the four techniques included under "increasing the risks" refer to surveillance: formal surveillance, surveillance by employees, and natural surveillance. This collection, whose contributors are all British, discusses the efficacy, use and social context of varying forms of surveillance. The weight of attention given to closed circuit television (CCTV; see chapters by Pease; Phillips; Norris and Armstrong; Gill and Turbin; Short and Ditton; and Beck and Willis) reflects the investment in this method of crime prevention in the U.K. over the past few years. There has been a truly dramatic expansion of CCTV in town centres over the past decade. It is estimated that there were two local authorities with CCTV schemes in 1987 (Bulos and Sarno, 1994), 79 town centre