Natural Surveillance & Bystanders

People are often surprised to hear about violent assaults happening in “broad” daylight, and expect violent encounters to be restricted to out of the way/deserted places, late at night etc. There are several reasons why assaults happen in well-trafficked places, during daylight, and the purpose of this blog article is to examine some of them.

I break violent encounters down in to two types: pre-meditated acts, where the assailant has planned to use aggression, the threat of violence or violence itself to accomplish a pre-defined goal e.g. a mugger, who has planned to approach you and stick a knife to your stomach, in order to get you to hand over your wallet, and spontaneous acts of violence, where an individual has become aggressive and potentially violent based on your actions and behaviors, whether real or perceived; you spill your drink, over somebody – or they think you spilt your drink over them – and they become aggressive and violent because of this.

Criminals who engage in pre-meditated assaults, also will commit violent acts, in plain sight. Even though “natural surveillance” is a great deterrent, it is not an absolute one. A busy, fast moving road, may have plenty of “eyes” that can potentially see what is going on, at the sides of the road, and the sidewalks/pavement that runs alongside it, however many drivers may be totally focused on the traffic around them, and not notice what is happening in plain sight of them (it is often passengers that notice such events). Also in fast moving traffic, people don’t get the time to study and assess, what is actually going on e.g. a quick glance at a physical altercation, as a person drives by, might not present them with enough information, to identify what they saw as an act of violence – they may explain what they saw away, as some friends “mucking about”. Denial, is a state of mind that allows us to not have to face the realities of what we both see and may experience - At a corporate seminar I conducted a few years back, a woman told me of how she had been mugged by two men, as her next door neighbors, stood and watched through their living room window. When she later quizzed them as to why they didn’t call the police or intervene, they told her that they though the two men were friends of hers, and that they were all just joking around. Denial is a strong thing, and nobody wants to make a wrong call and embarrass themselves – criminals understand this, and know that bystanders rarely act and intervene, when they see a crime or assault being committed.

The bystander effect, sometimes referred to as the “Genovese Syndrome”, after the murder of Kitty Genovese, in Queens 1964, is a well-documented and studied phenomena (ironically the actual incident involving Kitty Genovese is actually a poor example of said phenomena). The basic idea, behind the Genovese Syndrome, is that the more people there are who witness a crime/assault, the less likely someone will intervene and act. This is because everyone witnessing the event passes on the responsibility for intervening to the other individuals who have seen the incident. A busy road, with many individuals witnessing an assault, may mean that each person seeing the incidents believes that somebody else has reported it etc.

Natural Surveillance, is most effective, as a deterrent towards criminal activity, if the criminal believes that those who see the crime/assault being committed will act in some way, either directly intervening, drawing attention to what is happening (either directly by shouting, or by informing security and law enforcement), or gathering evidence that could potentially be used against them e.g. cell phone footage. This is why when redesigning community housing projects to have better “natural surveillance”, part of the redesign, involves the creation of small communities who are likely to be active in maintain and promoting safety.

Most violent criminals have a history of acting violently, and understand fully what they can and cannot get away with; they understand that most incidents they are involved in occur in under 5 seconds, and so a bystander’s time to act and respond in order to be effective is extremely limited. Natural Surveillance is generally far effective where a criminal has to spend a longer time committing a crime, such as breaking into a home, or carrying out surveillance, on a car in a parking lot, waiting for the owner to return, or if they are working a series of crimes in a location – a mugger hanging around a parking lot, looking for multiple victims etc.

In spontaneous acts of violence, people become emotional and aggressive, because they don’t have any particular outcomes in mind, other than acting violently, that would satisfy them (part of the de-escalation and conflict resolution model, involves getting them to an emotional state, where they can consider alternative, non-physical, outcomes). When somebody is in, such an emotional state, seeing no other way to right the injustice(s) committed against them, such as having a drink spilt over them, they care little for what is going on around them; their whole being is committed to righting the wrong. It doesn’t matter who is around, the location, or what time of day it is, in their mind violence is necessary. In fact if other people witnessed the injustice, they might feel a greater need to exact retribution.

If we fool ourselves into thinking that we will only be assaulted, late at night, in unpopulated areas, we are extremely mistaken, and have an unrealistic view of how violence is committed. Accepting the possibility that we might be assaulted on a sunny day, in plain sight, is something we have to acknowledge, and so not let our levels of awareness drop, when we are in such situations.