CPTED is an acronym of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design.
The principles are access control, natural surveillance, territoriality, maintenance and activity support. Under these five basic principles, the user or policy maker can utilize the principles for the characteristics and the purpose of the space.
According to the crime statistics, a total of 39,475 criminal cases were happened in parks in the past 10years in Korea. The statistics indicates that crime in parks have been increased continuously. Major crime types which were happened in parks are violence, theft, sexual crime, robbery, and drug. As shown on crime statistics, although the crime rate in parks have increased, we have not considered any crime prevention policy for safer parks.
The purpose of this research is to think of the park safety and to develop the crime prevention policy for safer parks. To pursuit the purpose, the crime prevention policy will be reviwed in terms of CPTED principles. For this purpose, we introduce the CPTED principles and its criminological theory.
Then, we introduce the park code or rules which included specific contents about park safety and safe maintenance in other countries. Although we introduce the successful cases which were adapted by other countries, the main theme of this research is to uate safety level of the current city park facilities and to survey the user patterns in parks. Before the uation, A “Checklist for Safer Park” was developed by MiRang Park, Yonggil Kang, Seokjin Kang, and Harry Park. We picked up four administrative districts based on the crime rate in park for the past 10 years. Two administrative districts have the highest park crime, and the other two ones have the lowest park crime rate in Seoul, South Korea. Using the checklist we completed on-site survey for 101 parks in the four administrative districts in Seoul, South Korea. Among 101 parks, finally the 67 parks data were available to analyze.
In addition to the on-site survey for park facilities, we surveyed behavioral pattern and fear of crime in the park for park visitors. More specifically, the survey questionnaire included fear of crime, residence stability, collective efficacy, informal social control, social control, effective CPTED strategies for safer park, specific opinion for the new park policy and socio-demographic factors of users. A total of 1000 park visitors answered.
The result shows that the park facilities are good or moderate in terms of safety however, maintenance policy were moderate or poor. Specifically, lack of signage in park, districting landscape, inappropriate length and/or location of the light, the restroom, low illumination, maloperation of the maintenance office, and benches occupied homeless were commonly found at all parks. These findings coincide with visitor opinion. Visitors answered that the most preferred space in parks are walking path and bench. At the same time, the most unwilling space are walking path and restroom. It means that walking path suffers from lack of safety policy and facilities in spite of the importance in the parks. in addition to the facility issues, we found the fear of crime in parks are greater than their residental community even through the crime rate are lower than the community. Also, the park users tended to trust their community more than individual who encounters in parks. It means that park safety could not be completed by only CPTED principles indicating the physical change on environmental design. The desirable crime prevention strategies for safer parks should come with community integration policy. The integration policy might a start of the 2nd generation of CPTED. That is, in addition to the physical change based on the CPTED principles, the various strategies to enrich activity support should be considered for the safer parks. On the conclusion, we suggest fifty strategies of crime prevention for the park safety. we expect that the fifty suggestions will be useful for practitioners and general citizens to understand the park safety and park CPTED. More detailed findings and policy implications are discussed in the context.