Protecting your Home and Business

Crime Prevention through Environmental Design is a proactive crime prevention technique that works by eliminating criminal opportunities in and around your property. You can keep your property safer by designing it in way so that it decreases crime opportunities.

The goal of CPTED is the reduction of opportunities for crime to occur. This is achieved by changing the layout or design features of your property in a way that discourages crime.

CPTED need not be expensive or difficult to apply and simply involves taking advantage of your property's natural surroundings, access and potential for easy detection if a crime were to occur.

For businesses and residences, this can be done through strategically placed lighting, flowerbeds, low fences, walls, hedges, signage, better and / or more timely maintenance.

For residences, it is important to have the impression of occupancy, in discouraging criminal activity. This can be accomplished by maintaining your lawn, shoveling your driveway, using timers to control your lights and having someone check on your property if you are away for a long period of time.

The information below provides examples of how you can design and use your environment to discourage crime.

• Keep your property well lighted at night - use automatic timers.
• Plant and maintain shrubs, which are neatly trimmed especially under windows and around doors.
• Define your private property by planting low hedges around the perimeter or installing fences that will not block the view.
• Keep your home clean and well maintained.
• Notice and ask questions of strangers who don't belong in your space.
• Keep shrubs trimmed to eliminate hiding places for criminals.
• Move your parking area so your vehicle is in front of your home, or in a position to be easily observed by you or your neighbor.
• Limit the number of ways people can enter your property.
• Replace inadequate door and window locks with good security hardware such as deadbolts.

Convenience stores go out of their way to make access to everybody as easy as possible. That's good business. But at the same time, the stores often expose themselves to the dishonest, from shoplifter, fraud artists and burglars, to employees who indulge in internal theft.

Over the years, security and crime experts, psychologists and others have worked on the problem of store crime. As a result, there is now a body of knowledge of proven methods to cut down on all types of crime to which convenience stores are subjected. These methods run the gamut from making eye contact with customers to the physical layout of the store.

The common denominator in all these measures and policies is crime prevention, doing things that lower the risk of becoming a victim of anything from a rubber cheque to an armed hold-up.

Based on these proven measures, a "PROTECT YOUR BUSINESS: think prevention" Kit was developed as the result of a collaborative efforts of the New Brunswick Association of Chiefs of Police, the New Brunswick Department of Public Safety, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the New Brunswick Association of Convenience Store Owners, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

• Information Booklet
• Quick Reference Sheets
• Store Stickers
• Suspect Identity Chart
• Suspect Vehicle Description Sheet
• Suspect Weapon Description Sheet

To order your kit (at a cost of $4.35 + tax), simply contact your local police service.