Danielle M. Reynald

This ground-breaking book examines the critical role that citizens play in guarding against crime. By focusing on the ways in which residents are able to capably guard their residential environments from crime, Reynald shows how local residents function (or fail to function) as effective crime controllers. The studies contained herein are aimed at developing our theoretical, empirical and practical understanding of the function of the capable guardian as a critical, yet elusive actor in the crime event model. In lieu of utilizing secondary data sources for proxy measures, this book argues in favour of new, more direct measures of guardianship, employing direct methods of primary data collection in order to capture the action dimensions of capable guardianship, as well as various other environmental and contextual factors that affect it. It features observations of guardianship in action and interviews with guardians to elucidate the factors that empower guardians to make them capable of crime control.

Measuring Guardianship within Routine Activity Theory

Guarding Against Crime

Benoit Leclerc

The rational choice perspective (RCP) is currently the core theoretical approach underpinning situational crime prevention (SCP). To date, many crimes have been studied through the lens of RCP, which increased our understanding of these phenomena, how they are committed and how they could potentially be prevented through SCP. This book, designed with the hope of moving RCP forward for SCP purposes, takes a challenging but novel step in providing leading experts from different disciplines with the opportunity to express themselves on how we could best achieve this task. This book explores various perspectives, which include the development of frameworks based on the role of situations in crime or forensic sciences for improving crime prevention practices. The need to consider affective states and other offender-related factors to improve our understanding of offender decision-making models is highlighted as a means to better predict which SCP mechanisms may be most useful in discouraging particular types of offenders. Finally, it is also argued that the use of RCP should be more pragmatic and that this perspective should be preserved and adapted based on what we find in our experiments. Taken together, these theoretically distinctive and challenging contributions ultimately guide how crime prevention practices could be best approached in the future.

Danielle M. Reynald

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