SAFEGROWTH® BLOG
regular contributors
GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC
GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC
Judging by recent e-traffic, my last blog struck a chord! Especially the contention that community engagement in policing has been a dreary failure. I conclude that, except in problem-oriented policing or when mentored by non-profits (see below), it seems a lost cause. Truth is, aside from trite historical footnotes (“the police are the public, the public are the police”) most police-community engagement today is little more than political optics. Of course, as in all polemics, that isn’t true everywhere. I was impressed to discover the Dallas Police Community Engagement Unit. Then I read it is three policing teams who do evidence-based analysis, work with apartment owners to deal with crooks, and attend community meetings where they "gather information first-hand that can be relayed to other teams in the department." MORE THAN REPORTING CRIME There’s nothing wrong with asking the community for information on criminals. That’s good police work. But let’s not pretend it is community engagement. Ultimately I don’t think any of this explains our engagement flop, at least not the version where residents take an active role planning and working towards their own public safety. Perhaps police are not the best agency to do that anyway. Governments hardly do any better. National Crime Prevention Councils rely on national "night outs", neighborhood watch schemes, or education about existing crime prevention programs. In other words walk around at night, watch out for crooks and call the cops. I know I’m simplifying and yet a critical thinker must ask, Who is really "engaged" when that engagement amounts to little more than walking around, calling the cops, or going to meetings? CPTED history offers some hope. Consider Oscar Newman’s dictum in Creating Defensible Space; Always include grass roots participation in prevention planning! We use a similar approach in SafeGrowth though our message is conveyed in a different way. For example, one lighthouse shining brightly on community-policing partnerships is the LISC - CSI SafeGrowth programs. THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE When the message is engagement we need a messenger who is appropriately staffed, resourced and most of all, trained in engagement tactics. The last time I checked the Engagement Toolkit I counted over 60 tactics. That messenger must master them all. Who is that messenger? Probably a non-profit like LISC or AARP, a philanthropic organization, a municipal planning department (as in Saskatoon), and an active community association. It will require municipal executives, particularly police chiefs and city managers, who know how to advocate for and implement such a model. They must be properly trained how to do that. Every time I’ve seen successful engagement in places like San Diego, Milwaukee, Saskatoon, and Philadelphia I get the feeling that is the shape of the future. At least I hope it is.
0 Comments
An email showed up this week from a crime prevention colleague in a far-away city. “Not sure if it's a sign of the times or just the fast pace, long work hours, and long bus commutes…but it’s a bit of an uphill struggle to get some communities to take ownership of their neighborhood issues.” It’s a theme I’ve heard over and over - getting residents, shop-owners and locals out of their homes, away from TV to “do” crime prevention. Setting aside their boredom (or their fears) and working together in common cause. That theme hovers raptor-like over work that depends on building community. Sometimes called capacity building, or in the latest sociological parlance collective efficacy, this is the idea ofcommunity engagement. Engagement is the road kill of community crime prevention, in one moment obvious and in another impossible. Academics study it, policy wonks insist on it and social workers claim it brings meaning to neighborhood life. Yet none of them tell us exactly how to do it, how to get people outside and “engaged”. In criminology the grandest experiment in community engagement was the juvenile delinquency work in the famous Chicago Area Project back in the 1930s and 1940s (still going on). Even today strains of that work echo in studies about cutting youth violence with community engagement. COMMUNITY MEETINGS? Police too did their bit during the community policing era with community engagement strategies, though they were usually limited to those monstrosities where cops sat up front in some hall to "engage" the community (sort of) in community meetings. There were experiments with neighborhood substations, now long gone (closed in the name of funding cuts as expenditures turned instead to fancy computer programs, night-vision goggles and new military equipment). In most cities all that remains is the police/community meeting room (usually adjacent to the front foyer at HQ). And still none of that tells us anything about the simplest question: How do we get neighborhood dwellers engaged and into the public realm – their street, parks, community halls – where their lives intersect in a real way? FOOD AND FUN Then I remembered this lovely, formally adorned, Muslim mother at a SafeGrowth training a few years ago. She came up to me and said quietly, “you know, in the Muslim community engagement in daily life starts with great meals and tasty food. Celebration starts in the stomach.” Actually, I thought, it does for everyone! Potlucks, barbeques, corn and hotdog roasts, lemonade stands! Interesting, isn’t it! It is the fun and joyful things of community life like food, music, and play that draw people out. It's those times when they meet and share in each others lives in a gradual and ‘smell-the-roses’ kind of way. Less community organizer and more community jester. Trashing media crime reporting is my past-time of late. I've complained how difficult it is to find articles that resist racing to the bottom of the sensationalism pool. One exception from an earlier blog: Joe Schleshinger's writing on the decline of violence. As if on cue (and dishing me up a welcome plate of humble pie), I've just received two more examples of great journalism - a news article by reporter Ashley Luthern and an opinion piece in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel following our SafeGrowth LISC - CSI training. The opinion piece titled "Hiring 100 more police officers will help, but more is needed" concludes, "hiring 100 more police officers in Milwaukee won't by itself curb crime…[they] have to be part of a smart strategy…" Exactly right! Suppressing any self-respecting humility, I admit my favorite part is the final paragraph: "The SafeGrowth Initiative, aimed at creating neighborhood solutions to crime, can help, too. Sponsored by the Milwaukee branch of the Local Initiatives Support Group, SafeGrowth participants have come up with ideas for fighting crime in such places as a residential block, a parking lot frequented by drug dealers and a commercial corridor with a rarely used park and a troublesome tavern. One proposal was to create a better way for police to work with taverns during the design and permitting process to create a safer environment." Could not have said it better! Even more important is their suggestion for moving forward. A prevention strategy in 4 parts The Journal Sentinal opinion piece suggested 4 strategies for prevention: 1. Deploy cops strategically 2. Neighborhood activation 3. Municipal and grass-roots leadership That 3rd one is key. In fact (DISCLAIMER: humility suppression alert) teaching city executives how to activate grass-roots leadership isexactly why we developed our new program - Citizen Cities. The only slip I see is their 4th strategy: "Bring in more help from the state". True, government has an important role. Funds may be useful to purchase new (and proven) technologies and that can help. But new technologies and tactics hack at the branches, they don't dig at the roots. Plus, government funds come with strings, politics, and snags. Not to mention the risk of funding-addiction - when the money dries up, as it often does, so does the program. Much better to work with governments, launch an initiative with a police/community angle and then use a portion of those funds to help local groups organize their own independent funding. Aside from that, the article and the opinion piece are journalistic gems. Best humble pie I've tasted in ages. To Ashley and the Journal Sentinel…well done! Ever notice a bright colored house? Ever noticed thousands? There are obvious contenders for the throne of most colorful city. San Francisco's Lower Haight district or Miami's South Beach come to mind. Even better: Brazil's painted Favela's in Rio, Chile's Valparaiso, or Newfoundland's St. Johns in Canada. But I know of no city that has intentionally attempted to transform blight, crime and the energy of a place through color. Until now. In this TED.com talk Edi Rama, former mayor of Albania's capital, Tirana, describes how his city began their city transformation with paint. Check out the simplicity and impact. This is an inspirational city and an inspirational mayor. Greentopia film on Rochester's El Camino trail "...the true community is the children..." More good news from Rochester. A few months ago I reported on the cool BoulevArt project in Rochester following our SafeGrowth training this spring. I also described the streetscaping and outdoor art along University Avenue. Community organizer Rachel Pickering just now sent this latest video updating progress on the El Camino trail project, one of the SafeGrowth projects during the training. The news is serendipitous given my recent work on urban bike trails. El Camino used intensive programming to win the public realm. My favorite take-away: Discovering the critical role children play in success! A few months ago we completed SafeGrowth training in Rochester. Many of those projects are still underway. During our training we describe the importance of community art, what planners call place-making, as one step for creating positive neighborhood culture. We highlight Portland's famous Intersection Repair project that I blogged about a few years ago. One of the exceptional SafeGrowther's in Rochester, Rachel Pickering, just sent me this fascinating link to the BoulveArt project now happening across Rochester. Painting an intersection is so simple, colorful, and remarkably fun, it's a wonder it doesn't happen everywhere. I'm told it is a daunting process to organize it and sell it to the city. That's not the case in Rochester, who actually host this site. Good ideas, apparently, can spread. A year ago we completed SafeGrowth training in Fairmont Village, a neighborhood in San Diego. We set up neighborhood leadership teams to tackle neighborhood problems. I'm thrilled to say they're still at it! Coordinated by Jessica Robinson from San Diego State University's Consensus Organizing Center and assisted by nationally renown crime analyst Julie Wartell, project team members are still doing the hard work to make their neighborhood a better place to live. Project sponsor, Price Charities has a long history of neighborhood philanthropy involving revitalization and safety in the larger area called City Heights, the region encompassing Fairmont Village. City Heights has overcrowded schools, parks and streets in disrepair, and 37% of residents below the poverty line. In the 3 years prior to 2010, Fairmont Village suffered 63 robberies and 94 burglaries. CPTED theory predicts robbers and burglars are emboldened when streets are empty and neighborhoods in disarray. The SafeGrowth leadership teams tackled those concerns. Their SafeGrowth projectsreflected that:
They were able to enhance city development work that spruced up the business area and revamped a local school. Leadership teams extended that into livability and walkability. In fact Price Charities has now hired a full-time crime prevention coordinator and Jessica continues to help organize. She has created a great new website to describe the initiative. Check out their City Heights Safety Initiative website. How useful is natural surveillance for crime prevention if people see, but don't care? If crooks know people don't care, or are too afraid to act, why bother with street lighting and eyes on the street? The video above shows by-standers in New York having fun with a free mega-phone. True, there's no crime in-progress. Still, it does sound like they care. The cynically-inclined might predict mega-phone abuse, or theft. Maybe, but not here. On this day altruism rules. It wasn't always so. On another New York day, actually the evening of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death on the street near her home. Her murder was the random act of a predator. The New York Times reported 38 people watched out their windows and did nothing. For decades, "we don't want to get involved"became the motto for urban decay and alienation. It laid the foundation for a whole new social psychology - proxemics. Oscar Newman built defensible space out of it. Today we call it CPTED. Now the by-stander effect is understood. In a twist of irony it turns out the 38 witness theory is probably false. Reinvestigation revealed only 3 people saw small portions of Kitty's murder, some called police immediately and, due to poor lighting, most misunderstood what was happening. I wonder...with better lighting and territorial control of semi-public space on that street, would Kitty Genovese be alive today to play with street megaphones? Back in New Orleans this week talking at a crime summit hosted by Louisiana AARP. The topic is how SafeGrowth and the Hollygrove success story might work throughout the city. The highlight was meeting old friends from Hollygrove and watching them tell their story to groups from throughout the city. A 78% decline in crime rates this year is quite a story, especially when crime elsewhere in the city is plateauing. Recently there has been an increase in New Orleans homicides. Hollygrove's homicides have declined from 20 to 4. HOW DID THEY DO IT? How, they were asked, did they turn things around? Difficult to spell out in clear steps. Certainly plenty of early steps were underway soon after Hurricane Katrina. A garden center was reinvigorated by volunteers (see photo). The city began a program of condemning and demolishing blighted properties (over 35% of all homes were condemned when we did our first SafeGrowth session 3 years ago. Today that's down to just under 20%). Then AARP Louisiana came to the table with their Livability Academy and training. Change sped up considerably. For me this neighborhood continues to improve due to the soul and gumption of some local residents. They started their own non-profit organization and now claim ownership for making changes themselves. Here's a few things the residents did: 1.Installed their own street lighting when they could not get the city to do it 2.Could not get official street signs so used politicians signs from the last election to make their own (see…politicians can help troubled neighborhoods!) 3.Quadrupled attendance at Night Out Against Crime walks 4.Cleaned and swept their own streets. 5.Absent landlords refused to move lawns, local residents did it 6.Partnered with police and the city to shut down a drug house 7.Created a seniors walking group - the Soul Steppers - to take back their streets. Soul Stepper groups are now throughout New Orleans 8.Got a problem bar to get rid of drug dealers 9.Bus department would not repair a bus shelter so they built their own with recycled materials And so on. That's how you start to turn a place around. To my friends in Hollygrove, congratulations! It's a great way to start the new year. SAFEGROWTH DEFINED: Crime prevention and community building is best achieved within the neighborhood by harnessing the creative energy of neighborhood change agents and functional groups. I'm on a roll with good news stories lately. Here's another one demonstrating the above. Hurricane Katrina hammered it. Fifteen to 20 murders annually vexed it. Even homegrown rapper L'il Wayne once sang "Hollygrove ain't no muthaf**kin melrose". No longer. Hollygrove in New Orleans is born again. Not in the religious sense…though, maybe. SafeGrowth training through Louisiana AARP is part of this story (eg: read The Hollygrove Story and Bus Shelter Madness). Fast forward… Only four murders this year. What's down? Crime, by 78%. What's up? Community events, garden centers, and Night Out Against Crime. AARP-sponsored strategic planning sessions with residents charted new urban designs for elder-friendly places. The Hollygrove Walking Club now walks for health and peace. Two weeks ago Hollygrove won a national MetLife Foundation award from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Watch this new videoon their success story. Here's another video, this one about their garden program. The rappers are right. The hood's where it's at! I'm always intrigued by a trip to Washington, D.C. Inside the beltway it has remarkable sights, a successful subway system, sprawling parks, and terrific dining. Outside the beltway, it's another city. There are wealthy and intriguing neighborhoods - mostly low crime and safe - and blighted and poor neighborhoods to the east - mostly high crime and unsafe. Once known as Murder City USA, today Washington's crime declines echo the Great American Crime Decline in every other city since 1990s. Still, high crime and fear remain. In recent years police have enacted "crime emergencies" allowing the cops to double their manpower at peak times, gang intervention programs and police checkpoints. Though murders are at an all-time low, they are still 5 times the national average. It is 2 years since the Supreme Court lifted DC's handgun ban. Yet the fear of crime persists. ABC news claims it's the affluent neighborhoods (where crime was already lowest) where gun purchases have spiked - a matter of fear over reality. It's in the poor neighborhoods (where most crime happens) where gun purchases have been dropping! And now a cool new website - Stumble Safely - is under development in DC. Say's it's promo: "Stumble Safely helps you find the best bars and a safe path to stumble home on. You can see some of our favorite spots on these maps …It doesn’t matter when or where you start drinking for Stumble Safely to help you." In other words, in spite of the crime declines, police tactics, and gun purchases, perhaps in the end it's everyday community folks coming up with innovative new ideas (like setting up their own websites) that can best improve safety. Jane Jacobs, it seems, was right. This week I attended the International CPTED Association's international conference in Calgary, Alberta. Typical CPTED conferences, like other prevention conferences, can be pretty droll affairs rehashing tired old ideas. Old wine in new bottles. The worst? My vote goes to academic conferences where obtuse PowerPoint slides fill sessions like hieroglyphics on an Egyptian Third Dynasty tomb - a theory-bound academese intended more for the academically-heeled than for those who actually prevent crime. Not this time. As a regular ICA attendee I was struck by the richness and passion in this year's offerings. We heard presenters from Germany, Chile, the Netherlands, Brazil, South Africa, Australia and North America. We heard police officers from Berlin and Toronto, planners from Washington and Saskatoon, scholars from Seattle and criminologists from Florida. We learned about behavioral based design in Ontario, community-led CCTV in Pennsylvania, safer schools in Holland and how to use public art to tackle domestic terrorism. My own sessions were gifted by incredibly talented practitioners with whom I co-presented. In one, Saskatoon planner Elisabeth Miller and I coaxed conference participants into an interactive dialogue about overcoming obstacles. In another session I co-presented with computer scientist Nick Bereza from ATRiM Group and Michael Huggett from Australia. We presented the CPTED Continuum - a new way to understand CPTED from target hardening to traditional CPTED and situational prevention to neighborhood planning. There were too many great presenters to mention them all (forgive me for not). But there was one speaker who had the right stuff. He captured our imagination. Jim Diers is a visionary and powerful speaker. Currently with the University of Washington, he is former director of Seattle's Office of Neighborhoods. He is also author of Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way. Jim spoke on participatory democracy and how to strengthen social capital. He is one of those people who finds ways to get people involved creating more livable places. If you are interested in vital and safe places, and you haven't heard Jim's story you must. If you haven't read Jim's book, you should! GUEST BLOG Tod Schneider has been a fierce advocate for advanced CPTED on safe schools for many years. He has published articles and books on safe schools and violence. He is a safe school design inspector, speaker and consultant. Tod is editor of the Safe Cascadia newsletter (www.safecascadia.org) and has graciously submitted this blog entry. He can be reached at www.safeschooldesign.com. **** I look at schools for a living, frequently as a security consultant, but I try to go beyond basic 1st Generation CPTED. My broader perspective is usually well received, but not always. Lately I rubbed a Principal the wrong way. He had been doing a great job revitalizing a troubled school, and by all accounts was succeeding. The school was clean, and behavior and academics were on the upswing. There were security weaknesses, which I identified. But what struck me the most drew on 2nd Generation CPTED notions of community culture and cohesion, or in my terms, SHAPED (safe, healthy and positive environmental design.) This was not a bad school; it simply left room for improvement. Student-made posters celebrated an upcoming popularity contest, and sports trophies were prominently displayed. High on a wall hung a professionally printed banner with the school “fight” song, and I kept coming back to it, trying to figure out why it was bugging me. The sentence structure had been mangled to serve the rhyme scheme, and the punctuation needed work. To my mind, for an educational facility this should have been embarrassing. When I mentioned this to the Principal, he barked, “what does poetry have to do with school security?” He explained that the song had been around for a long while, and was meaningful to the alumni. I reassured him that my report would emphasize school security. But had he been more receptive, here’s what I would have pointed out: * If I came to this school hoping to compete in sports or a popularity contest, this place looked great. * If I came here hoping to learn essential writing skills, the literary arts, music, math, science or international relations, I might feel uneasy. Those topics did not seem to rate very high in the main public areas of the school. * If the banner so prominently displayed was there to please the alumni, I would wonder who the school was focused on – the students attending today, or the students who attended fifty years ago when the song was written? * If I was a socially awkward, non-athletic kid, likely to be pushed to the margins of school culture, I might anticipate being unappreciated or bullied – or invisible. And in the rarest of cases, if I also had serious behavioral or mental problems, I might even be pushed into exactly the kind of antisocial behavior that school nightmares are made of. That’s what poetry has to do with school security. One example of attention to detail is school displays cases, like the one pictured above. They are often stuffed with athletic tropes, while other accomplishments are rarely recognized. Notice the sign, half-hidden, behind the Coke machine? It's for the National Honor Society. WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN DONE? The banner didn’t need to be hidden – it just didn’t need to be the most prominent display in the entry hall. Students could be invited to write a new song, or at least post examples of other writing that inspires them. Keep the old song around for nostalgia’s sake, but don’t saddle the students with it for the sake of those who are long gone. When schools post signs with misspellings, it suggests that spelling isn’t really all that important. And when the best poetry the administration can come up with is mediocre, what message does that send? There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the school team, and building school spirit. But it’s the kids on the margins that I’m worried about, with different interests, quirks or cultures. The ones who will never win the popularity contest, or lead the team to victory. For these kids, I’d like to see a more balanced display celebrating a full range of interests. Sports plaques were widely displayed here, especially at all major entry points; other topics were harder to find mention of, although I did go searching. Some bulletin boards outside classrooms did reflect other subjects, I was pleased to see. But the only plaque outside the choral room was for athletes. Down a distant hallway, adjacent to a storage closet, I finally did find a modest display about music. At least, I thought, it was something. How do we get people from disadvantaged places to the table in the first place? How do we initiate community engagement when communities are so disengaged? There is little point in creating a safe physical place if people are disengaged from community life. Take schools for example. It is no surprise that crime and vandalism rates increase shortly after high school kids leave school and on weekends. In one Brazil research study, youth homicide rates skyrocket during weekends Across the US, almost half of all juvenile crime occurs shortly after school lets out and into early evening according to some studies. Even worse is when a neighborhood suffers from poor student attendance and youth disengagement from the educational system. Disengagement is a cancer for neighborhood vitality. Educational detachment ripples through a young person’s life for years. Eventually it reaches the shores of community safety. School detachment is the mark of a neighborhood in trouble. Kids in school matter. Most prevention programs are after-school programs aimed at the kids. Rarely do programs target the parents, teachers, and communities themselves. Not so for a capacity building program with Western Australia’s aboriginal people over the past 9 years. Check out the Voices of Our People. Their capacity building program was a response to absenteeism and disengagement by aboriginal youth in school. Gerry Cleveland, education and youth violence expert, created and delivered the program in conjunction with others such as Carol Garlett, the Aboriginal district director of Education in Western Australia’s remote Kimberley district. (Gerry’s SafeGrowth blog last year describes his philosophy on justice and safety). Gerry’s training aims to enhance community participation and reduce absenteeism. After 9 years aboriginal staff are more inclined to take leadership roles and manage school and community projects – projects they develop themselves. In one early evaluation a half dozen schools had 10% improvement in attendance. In one school it was over 30%. Gerry’s capacity building answers the question of where to begin by going to the source. They start with people directly in the community - Aboriginal support staff, parents of students, and Aboriginal students themselves aged 6 to 12. Leadership and emotional intelligence training is also key, not for service providers from outside, rather for aboriginal teachers and parents inside the community. In international development circles this is called technology transfer – but in community development it is more about co-developing solutions with residents and applying them locally. Capacity building training helps residents do it themselves. In SafeGrowth too, this isreally the whole point of sustainable community.
For more on this project check out the section on engaging youth in Western Australia in the Chapter titled Second Generation CPTED: The Rise and Fall of Opportunity Theory in Randy Atlas’s book 21st Century Security and CPTED. After reading the Less Law, More Order book mentioned below, a question came to mind. How do we actually do the crime prevention planning the author mentions? Then I thought of that old song by rockers April Wine: Doin it right (on the wrong side of town).
Picture this: A northern / mid-western city of 250,000 residents. A beautiful river winding through town with downtown redevelopment on some streets and downtown crime on others. Sound similar to anywhere-ville? Except for one thing. This city is rapidly moving forward with SafeGrowth like no other city. That city is Saskatoon, Canada. Spending time in Saskatoon this past week reminds me how old style CPTED can evolve into a much more advanced practice. It is far beyond the one-time crime prevention initiatives, crime prevention commissions, task forces, and well ahead of CPTED planning guidelines in other cities. Elisabeth Miller, senior city planner, has been working to integrate a SafeGrowth style planning method with their Local Area Planning (LAP). Her powerpoint from last year's ICA conference tells us how they are doing it See Elisabeth's description of SafeGrowth in Saskatoon My favorite line from her presentation: Unfortunately more education needed to be done as the “Let’s CPTED that” started to become a perceived solution to a number of problems….particularly for City Councilors that were being questioned by constituents. While they still use the term CPTED, when you look at their description you see they are much more advanced. Click on their city website and see for yourself. Even there you'll see the link to their LAP method. See the Saskatoon web description Community safety audits, crime mapping, CPTED surveys, community participation sessions, neighbourhood by neighborhood annual reports. They now do it all. But they are beginning to do it using a coherent neighborhood by neighborhood planning style, with local participation at every level. Saskatoon is among the first municipalities that truly get that safety cannot be relegated to checklists and police CPTED surveys. It must be a full player in the urban development and planning process. Like they say in the song: Go rev up your chevy, put your gas foot down We’re doin’ it right on the wrong side of town I was thinking about what folks have said to these posts (thanks everyone for such great comments!) It brought to mind the LA Times article by J. Q. Wilson about inconclusive poverty/crime research. Yet I still can't shake one nagging question: How does our inability to precisely nail down the cause for crime excuse our inaction? I get that we don't want unintended consequences to our actions. Yes, that makes sense. It does make one wonder; What is state-of-the-art in research? So I did a bit of my own research to find out. Here's what I found. Wilson incidentally is pretty pleased with LAPDs crime mapping and their aggressive policy of searching people on the streets for guns! (No surprise. He's one of the pioneers of the approach in a theory called "broken windows".) That's not such a bad thing, really. Especially if it makes things better! But notice how aggressive policing is so easily used to explain crime reductions, whereas tackling poor neighborhoods needs more study! That sounds like a double standard to me. Is the "science" for aggressive policing and crime mapping better than the science about poverty/crime? Not - pardon the gun-pun - by a long shot. Read Hsieh and Pugh's 1993 article in Criminal Justice Review, "Poverty and income inequality are each associated to violent crime". Or read Kennedy's 1998 study in Social Science and Medicine. What does he conclude? "Studies have shown that poverty and income are powerful predictors of homicide and violent crime." Are we to believe THAT research isn't good enough yet the crime mapping/zero tolerance research IS good enough? Then I came across a book by Stan Lieberson from Harvard, Making It Count. Leiberson says that although most social research is non-experimental many researchers treat their data as though it was experimental. Why does it matter? It matters because social science data gets turned into numbers and then chopped and diced and served up as proof of this or that. It is all about counting the numbers. And THAT, Lieberson says, is part of the problem. Just look at J. Q. Wilson's numbers in the LA Times article. See the LA Times story For me, Lieberson hits a chord: "There is a double standard used by academics in that evidence supporting an undesirable conclusion or theory is subjected to much tougher standards than evidence supporting other conclusions." Bingo! In other words, it seems convenient to trash the poverty/crime link because stats seem inconclusive. It seems simpler to support a get-tough, broken windows theory with zero tolerance enforcement. To be fair, I know LAPD uses other methods too. I also have seen how competent problem-oriented policing paired with updated training methods does make a big difference. Getting the guns off the streets too will help. I agree we should do more of all those things. They get some good short term results. But we mustn't stop there. Ultimately we MUST deal with the dysfunctional roots growing in deprived neighborhoods, neighborhoods where gang breeding and violence is cultivated in a bed of broken families and poverty. That's where the REAL "broken windows" exist. Social research is always done in a muddy social world where nothing lends itself to clean, experimental, laboratory tests. If we wait for definitive answers we'll wait forever. J. Q. Wilson should be applauded for heading up a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Law and Justice to look for more answers. But pleeeeese let's not bury the obvious in yet more academic reports. Doing yet more research on the obvious won't change anything. We DO know what's going on there. Let's get going to help neighbors to change it! True, ignoring research findings isn't wise. But so is more ROTO - Research-On-The-Obvious! ROTO has lots of nasties, like the unintended consequence of hold-backs from government funding while we wait for "conclusive" answers. Or worse; misdirection of funding onto band aids like zero tolerance enforcement. Welcome to the SafeGrowth blog at safe-growth.blogspot.com If you are interested in, or working on, neighborhood safety, community development, or crime prevention, this blog is for you. Posts will highlight current trends in how to turn troubled communities back from the brink of crime. I will post anyone who wants to comment. I have only 4 exceptions: posts with abusive, off-topic, or offensive language; any racist, sexist or homophopics slurs; thread spamming; or ad hominem attacks. Those are verboten. All all others are welcome. |
Details
|
CONTACTSafeGrowth.Office@gmail.com
|
SafeGrowth® 2007-2024
|
SafeGrowth® is a philosophy and theory of neighborhood safety planning for 21st Century.
|