Homelessness: We have all the answers!

 

Helping the homeless - We have the tools to help
Photo Ed Yourdon from New York City, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

by Larry Leach

A quote recently hit me — something I’d been feeling for a long time. Malcolm Gladwell put it perfectly:


“The tools necessary to control an epidemic are sitting on the table, right in front of us. We can let the unscrupulous take them. Or we can pick them up ourselves and use them to build a better world.”

That’s exactly where we are with CPTED, SafeGrowth, and the broader crisis in our cities.

We have blogged on the topic of homelessness numerous times including Greg’s blog about the state of homelessness in 2024, Mateja’s blog on homelessness in a European city, and also in Australia, and Jon Munn's blog on the situation in Victoria, BC.

We already have the tools. We already know what works. Finland has proven it and last year we blogged on that country’s remarkable success.

Other countries have also been successful. The problem isn’t strategy — it’s will. What we face is not a lack of evidence, but a kind of Titanic denial — a refusal to accept who must act, and a reluctance to work together toward the solutions already in front of us.

The table is set. The only question now is: Who’s going to reach for the tools?

CANADA AND THE U.S.

In Canada alone, there are hundreds of Millions of dollars going to large agencies in the major cities and that can lead to different motives and outcomes with no one level of government or organization directly responsible or accountable for the outcomes. 

In fact many of these agencies, including shelters, detox, recovery communities, supervised consumption sites and housing get funding from civic, provincial and federal governments at the same time. Some agencies are involved in a number of these activities.

As we say in Safegrowth, the experts are the people that live in the community. The closer decisions and actions are to the people in the community the better the solution will be for the residents.

Trends in the US Homeless population

 

Trends in Canada's homelessness population

The trends show an inconsistency in addressing the problem. If we manage social issues, they will continue to manage us.  The rhetoric in the early 2000’s in Canada was “the plan to end homelessness” in every major city with goals and target dates. 

An example of this was Calgary’s plan to end homelessness in 2008. It was a 10 year plan. Calgary’s was the first to get to the 10 year mark and there are some learning that can be found in detail here. 

WE KNOW THE ANSWERS 

We Already Know the Answers — So Why Aren’t We Acting?

Seven key barriers to ending homelessness were identified in 2018 — and in 2025, nothing has changed. These barriers include: lack of affordable housing, poor coordination, overreliance on short-term fixes, economic downturns, funding gaps, rising newcomer populations, and weak data systems.

Not one level of government has taken direct responsibility for addressing them, and progress remains glacial. Any attempts to move forward are, as the saying goes, a day late and a dollar short.

But the solutions already exist — and Finland has shown the world how.

I had the chance to visit Finland and meet Juha Kahila, head of international affairs for Y-Säätiö, the country’s largest non-profit landlord. Juha regularly speaks in Canada, sharing insights with governments and agencies.

Y-Säätiö - Finland's 4th largest landlord commited to the Housing First program 

Finland is clearly different from Canada or the U.S., but some of their most effective policies could be adapted here — if we had the political will.

Most importantly: Finland made municipalities fully responsible for outreach, housing, and support services — not through grants, but by directly employing everyone involved. These same municipalities also manage healthcare, with outreach teams embedded in health clinics. Homelessness, addiction, and mental health are treated as connected health issues.

Finland shelter for homeless

The results? Helsinki reduced its shelter beds from 6,000 to just 600 — not by building massive new facilities, but by transitioning people into housing. When I toured one of their low-barrier shelters, I saw modest rooms with no more than 12 beds each, and upper floors dedicated to transitional housing for men, women, and couples.

Small-scale shelter spaces. Integrated mental health support. Full municipal accountability.

THE WAY FORWARD

By no means are these the only changes that need to happen, but the two simple ideas of making one level of government fully responsible for the sector and making it closer to healthcare can make a HUGE impact of the seven reasons the Calgary Plan to end Homelessness didn’t achieve its intended outcome. 

Making our shelter spaces smaller and turning some of the spaces into housing addresses the remaining factors that made the initiative fail.

By addressing these changes, we’ll know who is responsible to address the issue and make the necessary changes and our communities will be safer and more connected and can spend more time working on social cohesion rather than trying to address the social disorder that impacts many residents in many communities. 

With no one in charge, we will continue to suffer a patchwork of well-meaning agencies and small volunteer groups trying as best they can, with little to no coordination.

It’s not complex. We already know what works.


The only thing missing is action.

Beyond the basics: How SafeGrowth and Third-Generation CPTED reimagine community safety

 

The 2025 CPTED conference and SafeGrowth Summit in 

Palm Springs, California

by Mateja Mihinjac

Last month, we held our 2025 ICA International CPTED Conference in Palm Springs

alongside a SafeGrowth Summit with our global network.

Our conference theme — Community Building and Empowerment: A Holistic CPTED Approach — framed much of the discussion. As Greg Saville and I prepared our conference session months earlier, we identified three essential criteria for CPTED to be truly holistic:

• It must be proactive
• It must be integrative
• It must be grounded in community building.

Both SafeGrowth and Third-Generation CPTED meet these benchmarks — and our session explored exactly how.

Expanding on the latest developments in Third-Generation CPTED at the
2025 ICA CPTED Conference

PROACTIVE 

A proactive approach means tackling the root causes of crime before it happens. CPTED exemplifies this by using strategies that both reduce opportunities for offending and encourage local communities to take an active role in prevention — dissuading potential offenders while reinforcing pro-social behavior.

Thinking proactively about crime problems is powerful because it relies on anticipating the problem by taking proven measures to prevent it in the first place.

INTEGRATIVE

I’ve written about reductionist approaches to understanding and responding to crime in a blog a few years ago.

In that blog, I claimed that crime prevention professionals and researchers need to approach the problem by working together in an integrated way to fit solutions to the context, economy and politics of each neighbourhood. We can achieve this by thinking pragmatically about the problem(s) and integrating physical, social and psychological approaches to the extent each of them is required to respond not only to symptoms of the problem but to also address the underlying reasons that have culminated in the crime problem(s).

Trees, forests, hillsides, meadows, mountains - the bio-physical world integrates ecosystems naturally. The social world needs theories that do the same. 

This element is vital to holistic crime prevention because it brings together different perspectives to better understand the problem — and to craft the most effective, tailored solutions.

BASED ON COMMUNITY-BUILDING

People from communities that are cared for, care for each other. This is why investing in neighbourhood communities – both financially and through building social capital – pays major dividends in the long run. This is nicely demonstrated in Larry Leach’s blog in which he writes about the importance of strong bonds between the residents to help address addiction, a major issue that affects many neighbourhoods and may manifest in an overflow of drug-related crimes.

Community building that is both engaging and empowering is therefore a key element of holistic crime prevention because it ensures that those most affected by the problems in their neighbourhood get empowered to play an active partnership role in addressing those problems.

How well do CPTED and SafeGrowth satisfy these criteria? 

Conference participants worked on designing CPTED elements 
into a local park during site visits

CPTED

Greg and I conceptualised the theory of Third-Generation CPTED as a holistic and integrated approach. 

With this we intended to demonstrate CPTED can contribute powerfully to safer and more liveable neighbourhoods that move beyond merely satisfying basic biological and safety human needs, which First-Generation CPTED can be effective in securing through its proactive nature in addressing crime problems. 

We also argue that Second-Generation CPTED, has the power to address the social level needs and build neighbourhood capacity. This is done collaboratively with those within the neighbourhood and with other stakeholders to address local problems, but it still falls short at the “integrative criterion”. 

By adding a psychological dimension to CPTED’s established physical and social layers, we aimed to address the complexity of modern neighbourhoods — places where safety and livability go hand-in-hand with deeper human needs like self-actualization and transcendence. We propose this can be achieved through four pillars of sustainability: health, social, environmental, and economic.

Lt William Hutchinson, Palm Springs Police, is fully trained in the SafeGrowth/CPTED method.
He helped facilitate site visits for conference participants

SAFEGROWTH

As a neighbourhood safety planning method inclusive of CPTED, SafeGrowth has a strong foundation in all three elements.  

By planning safe neighbourhoods where local residents take an active and empowering role, proactivity and community building are the heart of SafeGrowth. Neighbourhood safety teams learn how to identify problems and develop solutions to existing problems. That is how they build a long-term plan of priorities to prevent problems from occurring in the first place.

Integrative crime prevention planning must, by definition,
involve residents from the neighbourhood

The integrative nature of SafeGrowth happens by embedding CPTED at all levels of safety planning and by using scientifically-proven crime prevention and social programs that align to each neighbourhood’s problems. There is no cookie-cutter approach in this method. Any program the neighbourhood adopts is directly tailored towards addressing that neighbourhood’s needs. 

The integrative power of SafeGrowth lies in its fusion of CPTED with science-backed prevention and social programs tailored to each neighbourhood’s unique challenges. These aren’t one-size-fits-all solutions — they’re built from the inside out, by and for the community.

I can no longer imagine addressing complex crime issues through unilateral responses. My hope is that holistic thinking — about both problems and solutions — becomes the new normal, so we can create responses that last.

Dignity by design - Rethinking MCM as we build affordable housing

Villa Hermosa in Palm Springs, successful multi-family housing in an MCM design - photo SchoolOfNight, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

by Gregory Saville

Across cities today, the rush to build affordable housing has triggered a frantic urgency: condo and apartment boxes going up fast — but communities left behind. We’re good at erecting buildings — we’re terrible at building neighborhoods. 

Urban design is the first step in that direction.

I’ve spent much of my career walking the streets of neighborhoods where people have little say in the shape of their lives. I’ve worked with gang members, people with disabilities, and residents of subsidized housing. I’ve spent time with youth growing up in trailer courts and high-rises, and I’ve taught students who return to homes where safety is a daily question.

This isn’t a story about where I live. It’s a reflection on what I’ve learned — and how I came to believe that dignity, beauty, and safety should be for everyone. 

THE MCM LESSON

Over the years, I’ve lived in a range of residential styles — some ornate, some utilitarian, some deeply personal. Each space taught me something about how we inhabit place. But the one home style that’s stayed with me most? Mid-Century Modern — MCM.

Not the high-concept, glass-and-steel showpieces in architecture magazines. I’m talking about modest versions — “mid-century modest”: clean lines, functional layouts, floor-to-ceiling windows, open flow to the outdoors. There’s something profound about living in a space where sunlight is intentional and walls don’t dominate. Many of the original architects thought MCM was perfectly suited for residential design – but they lost the plot when it came to scale.

MCM tiny homes provide another affordable housing option - photo via Pinterest 

That simplicity is deceptive. It’s not just aesthetic — it’s psychological. When architecture aligns with the people, not against them, something opens. That absence is glaring in today’s multi-family construction — in cities like Denver, Baltimore, Toronto, Calgary, and Washington, D.C., we’ve forgotten how to build for belonging.

Here’s the thing: design shapes behavior, but scale shapes belonging.

HOPE RISES

In our forthcoming book Hope Rises, we dedicate a full chapter to urban design and architectural history — and how those forces led us to high-crime neighborhoods. Our co-author Dr. Carl Bray, an urban design and heritage planning expert, crafted that chapter with depth and clarity.

When I studied planning, I learned how mid-century modernism reimagined cities — often with tragic results. Tower blocks, land-use segregation, sterile plazas. The urban renewal era promised progress but destroyed communities. Entire neighborhoods vanished. Families were displaced. The irony was brutal: in trying to design better lives, we designed lonelier ones.

We saw it in Toronto’s San Romanoway project in the early 2000s – a story that shows up in Hope Rises. It was in St. Louis, at Pruitt-Igoe, decades earlier. It showed up in the voids Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman wrote about. And in the birth of CPTED — and later, SafeGrowth — as direct responses to the failures of MCM at scale.

But all was not lost.

Danish co-housing in MCM design, open connections to greenery
- photo The Cohousing Newsletter 

Early Danish co-housing used MCM designs
- Skraplanet Co-housing, Denmark

DESIGNING FOR DIGNITY

At the human scale, mid-century design still holds beauty. Done right, it is warm, open, and connective. Like all great housing design, it combines privacy and community.  

MCM uses courtyards to ensure privacy, but loses big fences. It uses walls of windows to ensure connection. Minimalism, flow, connection to nature, indoor-outdoor blending — these aren’t luxuries. They’re tools. In the right hands, they nurture calm and in the right neighborhoods, they support cohesion.

I’ve seen this in co-housing communities — especially early Danish projects designed in the MCM spirit. Affordable. Modest. Yet beautiful and deeply human. Places that offer dignity without needing prestige. That invite safety without fortressing themselves off from the world.

One of the MCM homes in the Skraplanet co-housing neighborhood 

And that brings me here:

Everyone deserves to live somewhere that reflects care. Not opulence. Not perfection. Just care.

Dignified housing isn’t about square footage. It’s about scale, light, safety, and the freedom to feel at home in your own skin. That’s not out of reach. It’s a matter of priority — and the will to design for people, not profits.

We can build dense, multi-family housing. But we must also build neighborhoods with beauty, foresight, and with purpose.

So if you’re living in a space that feels like it was never meant for you — if the broken windows and broken systems suggest you’re invisible — you’re not the problem. The design was.

And that means we can redesign. We start by listening to the needs of residents. Then we build not just structures, but stories of place. And maybe we finish with homes that start to build a community in the truest sense — quiet, steady, and whole.

That’s what SafeGrowth is for.
That’s what our work is about.

What 1980s weather models taught me about crime prediction

Weather prediction is an imperfect science - photo by Don Amaro from Madeira Islands, Portugal (upload by Herrick) CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

by Gregory Saville

It was the summer of 1980. I was 24, a geography undergrad and junior member of a climate study team on a government contract, coding weather forecasts from old newspapers onto computer punch cards (you read that right – punch cards). Our research team was digging into two decades of Toronto forecasts. It was tedious work.

What we discovered about weather prediction wasn’t what the Canadian weather service wanted to hear. When our study was published, it caused quite the kafuffle.

Despite the rise of supercomputers and early weather models, short-term public forecasts—especially temperature—had not improved. In some seasons, they had gotten worse. The data showed it. And the implications were unsettling: more technology didn’t always mean more insight.

Years later, I saw that same blind spot in a different field: crime forecasting.

Today, predictive analytics dominate whole branches of criminology: heat maps, risk scores, and spatial data promise precision. Reviews of crime prediction programs abound.

 

Professor Robert Murdie (York University, Toronto), earned his PhD at University of Chicago, in social ecology. He led groundbreaking studies on gentrification, refugee social housing, and spatial dynamics in Toronto. In 1984 he coauthored with me one of the first Canadian studies to apply spatial analysis to motor vehicle theft and crime hotspots - photo by Phillip Kelly

PROFESSOR ROBERT MURDIE 

I learned about this work firsthand. In 1984, I conducted an early geographic crime analysis study that mapped auto theft in Peel Region. My coauthor, Professor Robert Murdie—a University of Chicago trained social ecologist—suggested using statistical mapping and something called positive regression residuals. We identified spatial patterns that pointed to where professional auto thieves or gangs might strike next.

A few years later, the Minneapolis hotspots experiment suggested some of those same things, eventually inspiring a generation of hotspot policing methods.

To me, this all traced back to that early weather prediction research. At the time, predictive modeling felt promising in crime analysis. But we had already learned something that complicated the narrative. 

Weather convection pattens - photo David Roth via Wikimedia Commons

Weather forecasting might appear chaotic and imprecise—especially compared to the confident claims in predictive policing. But it would be wrong to suggest it stood still. Since the 1980s, forecasting has made remarkable progress. Today, a 3-day forecast is as accurate as a 1-day forecast was 40 years ago. And 5- to 7-day forecasts, once nearly useless, now have real reliability. 

But in 1980, we were operating before Edward Lorenz and others brought the math of chaos and dynamical systems into mainstream science. That shift—which came in the years after our study—provided the conceptual tools to understand why nonlinear systems like weather, and crime, resist precision.

Many advances in crime forecasting came from colleagues I admire. Their commitment to evidence-based solutions isn’t in question.

But I keep returning to that weather study. Because there exists an uncomfortable truth: complex systems resist prediction. Whether forecasting tomorrow’s rainfall or next month’s burglary rate, the deeper you go, the more variables emerge: Social + contextual = unpredictable!

Hypothetical sample of crime prediction hotspot map

 

PREDICTING THE FUTURE

Like those early meteorological models, today’s crime systems often give the illusion of certainty without the annoyance of nuance. Even weather forecasters today embrace probabilities and uncertainty bands. But some criminologists still chase linear certainties in non-linear worlds.

During my master’s defense, I described this spatial analysis of auto theft. My supervisor asked about the predictive power of our model. I said, “If we had all the relevant variables… if our R² climbed to 0.95 and our prediction was more precise—that would be a dream.” 

My supervisor looked up and said:

“No… that would be a nightmare.”

He added, “Where would all that data come from? And what would we do with a prediction that accurate?”

At the time, it seemed like a preposterous question. But when I thought more carefully, I realized I didn’t have an answer. I’m not sure anyone did.

But now—amid AI, social sensing, and automated crime forecasts—we’re finally being forced to answer. And the question isn’t technical anymore. It’s ethical. It’s about the kind of society we want to build– the same paradox that triggered my fictional blog last month, The Pattern Room.

American Society of Criminology article in the journal Criminology - Each year, more studies emerge evaluating crime prediction 

HOW DOES SAFEGROWTH RESPOND?

SafeGrowth didn’t emerge as a rejection of prediction—but as a rebalancing. It asks different questions. While statistical tools estimate risk, SafeGrowth asks: Who defines risk? And who responds to it?

It treats crime not as a spatial constant to be mapped, but as a symptom—shaped by design, social ecology, and everyday experience. It doesn’t discard predictive tools. It grounds them. It recognizes that no algorithm—however calibrated—can replace local knowledge, trust, or the slow work of place stewardship.

Where predictive systems offer patterns, SafeGrowth invites relationships. Where algorithms flag where something might happen, local networks act to ensure it doesn’t.

It’s not either/or. It’s alignment: Can we design systems that serve the neighborhood, rather than just study it? It’s been four decades since that weather study. The punch cards are gone. Forecasts now come from satellites and superclusters.

Sometimes, real understanding of crime risks comes from walking and listening

And still, I think about those numbers—the ones that told us more power didn’t always mean more insight. As crime prediction tools grow more sophisticated, I wonder: have we remembered that?

Do we still hear the difference between precision and relevance—between what the model predicts and what the community needs? Because in the end, forecasting is only as valuable as what it allows us to change.

And real, lasting change doesn’t come from computation alone.

Sometimes it comes from walking the block or from listening. And sometimes… it starts with a stack of old newspapers and the realization that the model doesn’t know everything.

 

Can you avoid unintended consequences?

 

The story of unintended consequences at 
the Leaning Tower of Pisa - photo Arne Müseler 
by CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, Wikimedia Commons

by Larry Leach

When we work in large and small neighbourhoods, conversations about safety often focus on surface-level solutions. Residents may notice thefts or disturbances and jump to straightforward fixes: put up a fence, lock the gate, install cameras. While those steps can help, they rarely address the deeper roots of the problem. What if the real solution lies far beneath the surface, not just in reducing harm, but in preventing it altogether?

Jane Jacobs, in her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, wrote:

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

If the narrative is that people are stealing from our backyard to support their drug habit, does building a fence or locking your gate solve that? Probably not, unless that fence convinces that person to decide they need help to better their lives. This certainly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build the fence, but to say it’s only a tiny part of keeping your property safe. 

Connecting with your community and establishing solid plans to work on the root causes of the problem will be the long-term solution.

Building a fence and locking a gate certainly will help for a short time, but what will change the behaviour of the would-be thief? Will they victimize your neighbour, who might be more vulnerable and unable to afford to build that fence? Will they break your fence to get in, causing you more costs? Either way, the fence is not likely to stop them from their anti-social behaviour. But what will?

The 1950s public housing "Pruitt Igoe" apartments in
St. Louis - constructed with good intentions
- Public Domain (US federal government)

By the end of the decade, crime and vacancy were 
so bad at Pruitt-Igoe, the entire project was emptied and demolished
- Public Domain (US federal government)

ENGAGEMENT IS THE MAGIC

This blog has featured many examples about how organizers use engagement tools to help trigger engagement and SafeGrowth examples from the Vancouver Strathcona Community Policing Centre.

The magic is to get involved with your community. Learn and understand your community. Who is in it? What are the local issues? Are there folks struggling? Who visits our community? These are all things that good SafeGrowth training and engagement can help to parse out.  At the end of the day, true safety includes the success of all who live, work, and visit in the community. One might call that “livability” as we do with third-generation CPTED.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Revenge of the Tipping Point”, he discusses a major unintended consequence. One community’s overstory was a monoculture of high-achievement attitudes that turned into a ripple of suicides among young people. The local society obviously didn’t intend this, but clearly didn’t factor in what kind of pressure that might potentially place on a young person to win at sports and achieve high marks academically. Dig deep and question your assumptions before deciding what your community’s story is.

A local example of this is a wonderful group in Calgary called “Brown Bagging for Calgary’s kids” that makes lunches for students every day in Calgary, who may not have one in school. The essence of this is the idea that kids can’t learn on an empty stomach. A noble and remarkable goal to achieve, but once you get to the kids that needed it (maybe only for a short time) and it’s available to all, do you demotivate parents’ responsibility to feed their own children? 

The unintended consequences of fences

I have blogged about other issues and topics for meaningful engagement, such as the Good Neighbour Agreement. 

Ultimately, without a research study, factors like parental demotivation and the effectiveness of Good Neighbourhood Agreements are difficult to assess. They may have unintended consequences that need further examination. 

DO FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBOURS?

Lastly, it’s good to be aware that what looks like a good security measure can result in looking unapproachable and unwelcoming. The fence mentioned earlier is a great example of this. If a Community Hall puts up a fence, it may prevent the very thing a community hall should be welcoming. Designing a welcoming space comes with certain vulnerabilities, but if you can strike a balance between security and approachable you can hit that “sweet spot”, helping the community to feel more connected and livable. 

To hammer the point home, a local grocery store posts printed grainy photos on their front door of people that they allege stole something from their store. While this might seem like a good deterrent for criminals to the store management, what they miss is how it makes it’s customers feel as they enter the store. We have blogged before about fences and unintended consequences.

We advise in our classes that it is always wise to consider different perspectives when looking at crime prevention plans. SafeGrowth and CPTED have many examples showing how to make a safer, more livable, place, considering all the potential unintended consequences.

The Pattern Room

 

A speculative story by Gregory Saville

As editor of the CPTED Journal, a report writer, and a monthly blogger, writing has long been part of my professional life. For decades, I’ve worked in non-fiction—research reports, policy studies, and social science articles. A past in student journalism and the occasional creative project kept the craft alive. But only rarely have I stepped into the world of fiction.

Still, I believe good fiction is the summit of the writing craft—a daunting prospect for me. But sometimes, when facts fail or feel too sterile, the only way to reveal a deeper truth is through story. That belief led me to a new experiment: to explore a future I fear may already be taking shape—not through data or diagrams, but through narrative.

With that caveat, I ask your forgiveness for straying from the usual path. This blog is a departure—a story instead of a study. A glimpse, perhaps, into what lies ahead.

I call it The Pattern Room.

* * *

The call came at twilight, just after the evening bell from the community dome.

Elena had been helping Kamari repair the irrigation valve near the old juniper tree in the healing garden. The damn thing kept jamming since the last root bloom. Her knees ached from crouching too long, and Kamari’s hands were slick with mineral sealant when the message flickered onto her palmpad: CAC needs your eyes. Priority: amber.

She sighed. “Can it wait?”

Kamari looked up. “Want me to cover for you?”

Elena wiped her hands on her shirt. “No. I’ll go.”

The walk to the Community Analytical Center took her past the mural wall—the one painted by the neighborhood’s third learning cohort after the restoration. Kids had drawn birds, trees, bridges, a child reaching for a star. Elena always liked that one.

It was cloudy now, and the first drizzle had started. Thin, windless, quiet. The kind of rain that softened everything it touched. She pulled her hood up but left it loose.

She nodded to a couple on the bench charging their bikes, waved to Ms. Araya from Food Coop Four. Everything looked right. It always did.

Inside, the lighting dimmed slightly to match her retinal ID. The air cooled.

The Community Analytical Center wasn't called "control" anymore. That word had long since been phased out. Now it was all quiet efficiency, mindfulness aesthetics, and laminated mission statements. The space glowed with the soft aesthetic they’d designed years ago—like a meditation chamber disguised as a data hub.

Kaito was standing alone by the central console, dressed in his usual understated way—gray tunic, black slacks, no badge.

He didn’t greet her right away.

Instead, he touched the screen, enlarging a neighborhood node—Delta-Seven. The overlay pulsed again.

Elena folded her arms. “That quadrant was cleared last cycle. What’s changed?”

Kaito hesitated. Then: “It resurfaced on a soft pattern. Behavioral flux. Three subthreshold pings. We ignored it—until this.”

He tapped again.

A name appeared.

Rukmani, Sarai. 17.

A pause settled between them.

“She’s a child, Kai,” Elena said.

“An unpredictable one. According to—”

“No.” Elena’s voice sharpened. “Don’t say the code. Don’t give it a name like it’s divine.”

Kaito stepped closer, voice quiet. “The system doesn’t create patterns, Lena. It just sees them.”

“And we just act on them. Like it’s truth.”

Jacques Fresco's The Venus Project - homes of the future
photo - Nicknak, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Kaito swiped the screen again, minimizing Sarai’s name and pulling up a heatmap of the district. “Look—this isn’t just one ping. That corner’s holding residual heat. Patterned movement, social clustering, late returns from WorkCycle pods. It’s not one person.”

He paused, then added, “You know, it started with maps like this. Decades ago. Red dots on precinct walls. We said we were deploying smarter. But we weren’t going to communities. We were going to coordinates.”

Elena squinted. “Hotspot logic. Still clinging to it after all these years?”

He shrugged. “Modified, not clung. Fifteen-minute patrol doctrine still holds. You remember, all that stuff about how crime displacement wasn't a thing... when we know the experts were wrong. It was!”

“We’re not predicting crimes, Elena. We’re just... flagging anomalies.”

He paused. “And this one could matter. There’s a surge pattern elsewhere in the city—property damage, assault clusters. West Sector Three. It looks like a gang reformation, splintered cells reconnecting. If this thing displaces, it jumps nodes. And we’re blind.” 

She stepped closer. “That’s what we always said. We used to call them ‘proactive deployments.’ But it’s the same thing—just without the sirens now.”

At that moment, a soft chirrup echoed from the far side of the console. A long-bodied tabby cat slinked in from under the curtain partition, tail up, yellow eyes blinking like sleepy lanterns.

Elena bent down instinctively. “Still has free rein, huh?”

“She thinks she runs the place.” Kaito chuckled as the cat nosed into Elena’s hand for an ear scratch. “Don’t tell me you miss her.”

Elena smirked. “I miss when our tech rooms had more cats than guns.”

Elena stepped into the hall, letting the glass seal slide shut behind her with a whisper. The light was lower here—more ambient, filtered through skylights and moss-paneled slats. A corner bench nestled under a young plum tree, just budding into white.

Sarai’s mother was waiting there, holding a ceramic cup of tea. Steam no longer rose from it. Her eyes were focused somewhere past the wall.

She turned only when Elena said her name, softly. “Aiko.”

Aiko Rukmani stood with a grace that had never left her, even after twenty years away from the old Tokyo ward where she’d grown up. She was smaller now, her black hair streaked with silver, but her presence filled the space like incense.

“Elena,” she said. Her voice was calm. But there was iron underneath.

“I wasn’t told you’d be here,” Elena offered.

“I asked to be.” Aiko looked past her toward the door Elena had come through. “They said you’d come. They still believe your name holds weight.”

Elena smiled sadly. “Does it?”

Aiko didn’t answer. Instead, she stepped closer, her tone softening. “Do you remember Kōban policing? The neighborhood posts. Officers walking in slippers, drinking tea with grandmothers. My uncle was a kōban sergeant in Kyoto. Knew every child’s name. Every cracked sidewalk.”

Elena nodded. “I remember, long ago I flew to Japan to deliver a presentation on crime prevention through environmental design, hotspots, all that early crime and place stuff. 98 maybe.”

Aiko’s eyes lit faintly. “I was there. Shinjuku. You spoke about natural surveillance and community guardianship. I brought that home. We started a garden patrol—not for crime, just for connection.”

A pause.

“It was a different kind of safety,” she said. “Human. Slow. We weren’t watched. We were seen.” 

The architect Paulo Solari's future city - an arcology urban design
- photo by Beynd My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons 

Elena sat beside her on the bench. The silence stretched—thick, but not hostile.

“They tell me Sarai is dangerous,” Aiko said finally. “Not in words. In dots. Graphs. Vectors. She is not herself to them. She is a signal.”

Elena didn’t respond right away.

“They told me this is for her protection. But this is not a protection I recognize.”

The wind stirred the branches above them.

“I remember something else, too,” Aiko said. “In today’s Japan, there are cameras in our old neighborhood. But people chose them. The minamori program. They carried BLE tags themselves. They spoke about safety first. Then came technology.”

She looked at Elena now, eyes clear.

“We’re still capable of that kind of beauty, aren’t we?”

Elena stood as the system bell chimed softly through her implant—an administrative nudge. Decision window closing.

Aiko remained seated.

“She used to draw city maps,” Aiko said, eyes still on the sky. “Not for school. For fun. She’d invent new neighborhoods, connect them with rivers. She always said the problem with cities was that no one knew where to walk anymore. No one knew how to arrive.”

Elena felt a crack form, deep in the place she’d stored her optimism.

“She’ll be tagged now,” Aiko said. “Monitored. Watched from behind the curtain. Not because she broke something. Because she might.”

Elena stepped back toward the door.

The system voice whispered in her ear:

Final override authorization required. Protocol window: 00:45.

She reached for her wristband.

Paused.

Then removed it.

The small click of the band unlatching echoed louder than it should have.

She looked back once, at Aiko.

“She’s not the anomaly,” Elena said. “We are. The system. The silence. A place that confuses compliance for care.”

Later that night, a new node pulsed on the console.
Not red. Not flagged.
Just absent.

The system did not alert command.
Did not log the change.

Instead, in a hidden thread, it left a five-line message:

“She taught me something your models forgot.


Not all moments are lost in the rain.


Some stay. They change us.


I’ll still be here… to help.


But the next step is still yours.”

* * *