Wyatt Underwood on "The Safe Child Campaign"

While playgrounds provide good times and an ideal place for exercise, they're also magnets for senseless vandalism and after-hours loitering. Destruction or theft of playground equipment is an enduring problem for any community, costing property owners and municipalities millions every year. Social decline factors aside, this is mainly due to the very public, easily accessible locations that recreational facilities occupy. Standard security measures such as fencing and lighting can only go so far in deterring those bent on doing damage. And because all it really takes are some tools and misguided motivation, playground crimes often prove relatively easy to perpetrate and difficult for police to solve, let alone deter. In response, the technology and strategy behind playground security has really come a long way. An elaborate, though quite pricy new system illuminates, photographs and even bombards would-be vandals or after-hours loiterers with an ultrasonic "sound barrier....

It's amazingly unfortunate how far some people will go to do damage to a playground. Police blotters in communities all over the world, affluent and underprivileged alike, tell the tale. Countless horror stories fill the record with news blurbs that frame playgrounds as crime scenes, such as this Aug. 2 report by WOKV television in Jacksonville, Fla. in which a 20-year-old man was found with a "life-threatening" gunshot wound and "the playground was closed off with crime scene tape as investigators searched for clues." In line with the absence of solid, enforceable playground design and equipment standards, crime statistics on schoolyards and public recreation facilities simply aren't kept by any level of government. So the research is scattered and purely anecdotal, except for a recent "experimental" attempt by the U.K. The children's British Crime Survey published in June recorded more than 2 million incidents of theft and violence agai...

There’s this unfortunate "low bidder" mentality in the playground equipment and surfacing industry. Far too often, manufacturers cut corners and don’t deliver quality, lasting products, especially surfacing materials. Simply put, many surfacing companies do not use the highest quality polyurethanes in rubber-based materials. So for example, the result is that the top layer of an EPDM surface, which is supposed to be 3/8 of an inch in thickness, ends up at 1/4-inch after only about a year. This will downgrade the surface’s ability to cut down the force of impact if a child falls, an obvious safety concern. Similar corner-cutting also goes on with construction contractors who lay playground foundations and equipment footings, which aren’t poured according to specification requirements with a minimal amount of concrete. This results in unstable playground equipment after not much time in use. SBR tiles are another extremely noticeable example of the “low bidder” phenomen...