Police1 Staff Report
(DURHAM, N.C.) -- Police here are using tactical landscaping to help reduce crime. Officers, city planners and architects are putting their heads together to develop plans that use bushes, shrubs and other foliage as impediments to criminal activities.
So called “crime prevention through environmental design” leverages surface variations to dissuade potential criminal activities.
Like boulders, you could even put manure, pea gravel -- anything where it makes it a difficult spot to stand, and it’s no longer conducive to loiter,” Patrick Harris of the National Crime Prevention Council, told WRAL-TV Monday.
A new warehouse project will be getting the plant treatment in hopes of discouraging loitering and other activities.
The approach has been employed in areas where criminal activity has been reported, including one area in which plants created a smaller area in which drug dealers could stand, which eventually helped move them off that location, police said.