As discussed in Section 2.1, one of the three sides of the outer crime triangle is guardianship, which is a situational measure that has been widely applied in crime prevention initiatives. From a review of over 30 years of the conceptu- alisation of guardianship, Hollis et al. (2013) conclude that ”guardianship can be defined as the presence of a human element which acts whether intention- ally or not to deter the would-be offender from committing a crime against an available target” (p. 76). For example, single parent households show higher risk for burglary even when controlling for other factors such as neighbourhood characteristics (Smith and Jarjoura, 1989), indicating that if there is someone to stay home during daytime hours and act as a guardian, the crime risk can be reduced. In fact, in a review of guardianship literature, (Hollis-Peel et al., 2011) find that every study interrogating this relationship found a preventative effect of guardianship on burglary rates.
Evidently, guardianship is a spatiotemporally specific supervision of people or property by other people which may prevent criminal violations from occur- ring (Felson and Cohen, 1979). Since guardianship is one of the core elements of the crime event model, it is a key situational crime prevention strategy, and knowing when guardians are present and when they are absent could help highlight when places are vulnerable to crime opportunities arising. Therefore an accurate measure of guardianship would be of value to researchers and also to crime prevention practitioners.
2.4.1
Measuring active guardianship
Traditional approaches to measuring guardianship attempt to approximate the presence of people in an area (Hollis-Peel et al., 2011). For example, one proxy measure to estimate the level of guardianship is to use the number of owner-
2.4. Active Guardianship of Place 59 occupied households as a micro-level indicator (Spergel et al., 1994; Rice and Csmith, 2002). An issue with such an approach is raised by Reynald (2009) in her work on active guardianship. She questions these owner-occupiers’ availability to be active guardians, asking whether they will be present in their homes at the correct time, and, even if they are present, how capable and willing are they to act as active guardians? In her theoretical framework, Rey- nald (2009) offers a four-tier model of guardianship intensity, where guardians can be invisible (guardian(s) unavailable), available (guardian(s) available), capable (guardian(s) available and capable of supervision), and intervening (guardian(s) available, capable of supervision, and willing to actively intervene) (Reynald, 2009). It is the last stage that represents the most active guardian- ship, where these guardians have the greatest preventative effect on the ex- ploitation of possible crime opportunities present in the environment.
Therefore, proxy measurements of population counts do not reflect this re- quirement to be able to intervene. To address this, Reynald (2009) proposed a better measure for active guardianship which considers the aspects of the envi- ronmental context that offer opportunities for action on the part of the guardian (Reynald, 2009). This measure builds on external signs of active guardian- ship that are evident in the physical environment as a proxy measure to repre- sent the intensity of guardianship in an area, based on data collected through an action-based observational approach. This approach requires field obser- vations of properties, noting their physical features. This observational mea- surement instrument allows for the measure of guardianship intensity (Reynald, 2009). While a much better measure for active guardianship, this approach is very resource-intensive and constrained to cover only the study area selected, and the hours which the researchers are prepared to spend doing the observa- tions. It also returns a temporally static, cross-sectional measure, which does not allow for mapping fluctuation in guardianship levels for example to estimate the within-day variation of crime risk.
Yet, as mentioned, guardianship is spatiotemporally specific (Felson and Cohen, 1979) so knowing how active guardianship levels fluctuate over time can help better highlight when places have increased crime risk due to de-
creased guardianship. Therefore an existing research gap emerges from the lack of an ability to map active guardianship in a way that reflects this variation. Such data could serve to identify when active guardians might move away from an area, making it more vulnerable to crime. In her thesis, Tompson (2016) proposes that ”effective guardianship is dynamic over time” (p.192), so to mea- sure this variation would allow exploring fluctuations in associated crime risk. Currently, to describe variation in guardianship, researchers compare working population to residential population. However, this may not reflect the fluctua- tion in active guardians, rather just people merely present, representing lower tiers on the guardianship in action scale (Reynald, 2010). Evidently, while theo- retically developed, there exists a gap in data to empirically represent dynamic fluctuation in active guardianship, and potential temporary increases of crime risk in certain places.
Considering active guardianship then as something that fluctuates in place and time, we see the first gap for dynamic data that might be able to represent this variation. This is an interesting gap because it would need to be filled by something which measures not only where and when people are present in the environment, but also what it is they are doing, and whether that is consistent with active guardianship behaviour. This is a similar challenge as is posed when considering the measurement of signal disorders discussed in Section 2.3. We know when and where physical signs of incivility are present, and we are also able to canvas people’s generalised opinions about their environments. However we are not sure how we can identify the elements of physical disorder which will be interpreted by people as signals, nor are we sure how to tie the subjective general attitudes captured by surveys to specific encounters with the disorder in the person’s activity space. Similarly, while data about the presence of people is available, identifying which of those people are willing to intervene as guardians remains a more difficult task. However, measuring fluctuations in these active guardians has implications for identifying areas with temporarily increased crime risk.