Crime does pay!
How security technology, architecture and town planning are powered by crime.

Although crime rarely enters most of our living rooms through door and window nowadays, but primarily via the television, the demand for security technology seems insatiable. Moreover, one cannot quite rid oneself of the impression that the function of security technology is not so much to keep the potential intruder out, as to assure the owner that there is indeed something worth protecting in the safeguarded interior. One could even say that the gadgets of the security industry merely announce the presence of valuables in the home to those who are being locked out; that it is more often about symbolic security – or about status symbols – that at most testify to the fact that one can afford these gadgets. That our society also needs real acts of crime, however, and that it knows all too well how to put them to good use, is something Karl Marx pointed out a long time ago.