One way is to use our design skills to make access and egress from potential crime locations much more difficult. Designing location can increase the effort for crime to be committed. Public space contains risks, and the risks can be mitigated by channelling movement patterns and dividing human activities into smaller and more manageable chunks. Public spaces like parks and streets should not be too large, and public shopping or transportation facilities, or public housing, shouldn't have vast unassigned spaces. A large housing complex with a fence around it but with unlocked gates is semi-private, inhibiting access only partially.
Manageable chunks can help provide social control and thus crime control.
People know a bit more about other people's business, and social planning and physical design involve chunking and channelling, which are the main tools of designing lower crime activity into everyday life. The tendency in urban design is to adopt an 'enclosure' approach, that is, to build a wall between what is regarded as safe and what is regarded as dangerous. I once read a description of urban renaissance in Los Angeles whereby the corporate citadels were designed to segregate out the poor and the homeless by using urban redevelopment to convert once vital pedestrian streets into traffic thoroughfares and to eliminate 'democratic space' which encouraged interaction between people from different walks of life. Public facilities and spaces had been made as 'unliveable' as possible. In contrast to 'enclosure', is the 'encounter' approach, first outlined in the 1960s by Jane Jacobs in her great book 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'.