Welcome to the Design Out Crime Research Centre website!

Tax office scams

The Australian Tax Office provides a list of current scams for stealing financial and personal identity information. The modus operandi (MO) described by the ATO are useful to identify scams in other jurisdictions.

RAC car thefts 2009

RAC car theft data for 2008/9 is interesting for the relatively low overall value of the car theft problem compared to say motor vehicle accidents caused by crime-related or other issues leading to road deaths or accident damage.

Reduce crime -paint pink

Think pink in India
(reported by e-DOCA)

A crime-infested town in the badlands of Bihar, is painting itself pink to reduce crime. Aurangabad's facades of most of the private and government buildings are painted a gaudy pink. "The town's sub-division officer Arvind Kumar Singh said. 'Pink fosters harmony'

Register for a PhD in Design Out Crime

Interested in a PhD in Designing Out Crime or Environmental Criminology or CPTED? Help shape a free, creative society. Undertake your PhD supervised by a member of the Design Out Crime Research Group at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. Start a PhD or Masters by research any time of the year.

The Design Out Crime Research Group is a cross-university collaborative research group with Directors in Curtin University of Technology and Edith Cowan University. We have research expertise in Design Out Crime, CPTED, crime prevention, product and system design, complex systems analysis, program and strategy evaluation, social and environmental crime prevention and environmental crime prevention. The Design Out Crime Research Group also manages the national DOCAwards for Product Design (see www.docawards.org )

For further details please contact:

Dr Paul Cozens
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Dr. Terence Love
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Dr. Trudi Cooper
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Smartphone insecurity

Smartphones can be easily infected with 'rootkits' that enable a variety of direct and indirect crime-related activities. Controlling a user's smartphone, enables activities such as eavesdrop on meetings, track the owners travels and flatten the battery, and act as an attack vector via automated activity .

Public CCTV

A recent systematic review and meta-analysis of data on CCTV in public spaces shows benefits for crime prevention. The results are primarily driven by relatively effectiveness of CCTV in car parks (51% decrease in crime). Other uses of CCTV were less successful resulting an an average decrease in crime of around 16% with 7% reduction in city and town centres and public housing.