Defining and Optimizing Displacement

As the criminology of place becomes more refined, we become more inclined to put our knowledge into action. Police agencies and others concerned with the security industry have begun to use place-specific crime analyses, and then develop tailored responses to correct the problems of discrete locations. Often, these plans of action include the use of some type of situational crime prevention to influence existing crime patterns. The issue of displacement, which for many years has been a central concern to the proponents of crime prevention, therefore occupies a position of great importance in the criminology of place as well. Indeed, the argument that any effort to solve problems in one place will simply divert offending to other locations is occasionally used by some practitioners as an argument against the implementation of place-oriented problem solving. This chapter examines the age-old issue of displacement, offers some conceptual tools to help define it and discusses how displacement could actually be optimized as a tool for crime control. DEFINING AND OPTIMIZING DISPLACEMENT The developing interest in crime prevention began slowly in the 1970s, gained significant momentum during the 1980s and is now a major topic in criminology. Started as an alternative to the "failures" of punishment and treatment to alter unlawful behavior (Jeffrey, 1977), situational crime prevention has developed, in one sense, to provide a formal theoretical basis for some practical and commonsense methods of dealing with crime (Clarke, 1992). The specific natures of this strategy can be quite variable, however, and it is therefore difficult to define with any precision (Tuck, 1987). Nevertheless, situational prevention is normally discussed as a crime control method that does not rely on "improving society," but simply on reducing the opportunities for crime to occur, usually through changes Address correspondence to: Geoffrey C. Barnes. University of Maryland at College Park, 2220 LeFrak Hall. College Park, MD 20742.