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Strange but true
Other | Wednesday 29th August 2012 | Osh
Baby faces to reduce crime
If we walk along Greens End, a street in Woolwich, we will find a gallery of baby faces. That’s due to a new social experiment taking place on the streets of south-east London in order to fight crime and to prevent incidents like last year’s riots.
Following the idea that baby faces “promote a caring response in human beings," a bunch of graffiti artists were called to cover the shop’s security shutters with local babies’ faces. For the design, the graffiti artists used baby photos sent in by families living close by.
An example of it is Zaffar Awan’s mobile phone shop, where new shutters were broken and almost all his products were stolen. Now his shop front door is covered with the face of Max, one of the Borough babies, who like a Roman God, is there to protect the shop from the invaders.
One of the goals of the project, supported by Rory Sutherland, is “Instead of signaling presence of crime in the area we are signaling the presence of a community”. As other measures to control antisocial behavior such as community policing, court orders, and tougher sentencing have failed, the project, named Babies of the Borough, intends to succeed appealing to human instincts.
This is not the first experiment based in innovative techniques, in 1997 classical music was successfully used to reduce crime in tube stations, and more recently, in the town of Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire, in order to persuade teenagers to hang out in certain areas, pink ‘spotlight’ lamps were installed to highlight their acne, so they would be too embarrassed to be seen there.
By Laura Vila
