ABSTRACT
The most compelling evidence to emerge from the studies presented in this book is that residents can serve as capable guardians against property crime through their visible presence at home, monitoring over their residential surroundings and intervention when they observe something suspicious or untoward. These three dimensions were confirmed to be valid expressions of residential guardianship, and moreover, were revealed to provide a robust and significant explanation for the amount of property crime on street segments. Not only were these dimensions of guardianship in action significant in explaining residential property crime, but they were also negatively related to property crime, revealing that high levels of active residential guardianship in terms of visible availability, monitoring and intervention, are associated with low levels of property crime. These positive results have also been replicated in Boston in the United States (see Peel and Welsh, forthcoming).
