SafeGrowth

Peter Pan kids - The Next Great Generation?

2012-01-27T23:50:00.000-08:00

Peter Pan cyber-art (Art by evelmash.deviantart.com)

According to those over 40, the Millenial Generation (people born after 1982) are spoiled brats, living in their parents basements, addicted to video games. Supposedly, Boomer parents coddled them too much and now they wear entitlement attitudes like a badge of honor.

Police recruiters tell me that Millenials resist authority. Police trainers tell me Millenials keep asking "why". They don't blindly accept what they are taught. They seek understanding before they buy into something.

Hm. Do we want cops who know why something is so? Do recruiters even know how to market to Millenials?

In Millenials Rising, Neil Howe and William Strauss call them Peter Pan kids because they defer passage to responsible adult-hood as long as possible. Interestingly, they claim Millenials are more civic minded than the X Generation before them.

There is another trend worth noting; from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s many Millennials became teenagers, an age criminologists call the start of the crime-prone years. Prisons are filled with young men who started their criminal careers in their teens. When the crime-prone proportion of the population increases, so too does crime.

Book cover of Millenials Rising

For example not long after the Boomers were teens, (1960s) crime rates exploded. But not today! Under Peter Pan's tutelage, crime has been declining. Millenial parents might have produced high crime rates, but their kids don't.

Maybe Millenials are too busy texting and cybersurfing to get into trouble?

Anyway, the brats - the one's with technology in their DNA, who challenge authority and question why, the one's who trigger less crime - they are what Howe and Strauss call the latest Great Generation.

Given what's ahead, I certainly hope that's true.

"We just don't want to get involved"

2012-01-21T01:20:00.000-08:00

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.

Crime photo of Kitty Genovese murder scene near her New York apartment in 1964

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?

Bike corrals for safer streets

2012-01-15T00:51:00.000-08:00

Making Brooklyn Streets Safer With On-Street Bike Parking from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

A few years ago, when Richard Florida suggested whole new urban forms will grow out of the Recession, it seemed far away. A half century ago, when Jane Jacobs suggested active and diverse streets can cut crime, who knew it would take so long to catch on.

Bike corrals are among the first bits of evidence suggesting both are well underway.

Bike corrals are on-street parking strips with parking for up to 20 bikes in parking spaces normally used for one or two cars. They bring more customers to their street than car parking provides. They pollute less and cut gas costs. For CPTED, corrals provide better natural surveillance and less opportunity for theft.

Bike corrals in Portland, Oregon

Brooklyn, NY has just opened its first bike corral (sometimes called parking swaps). Portland Oregon has over 70.

My urban design friend Megan Carr has just put me on to Streetfilms. It's a fantastic organization with over 400 free educational films about inspired transportation like bike corrals. Check them out HERE.

21st Century police: Times, they are a-changing

2012-01-07T02:01:00.000-08:00

Toronto's G-20 Riots. A morphing police role? The last few years, in cities around the world, riot and SWAT cops had to control crowds more than ever in recent memory. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Watching police leadership is like entering a Ringling circus of word games and non-sequiturs. That's because you never know what you're going to get. Leaders come in all shapes.

There's lion tamers who attempt to pacify police unions and manage unrealistic public expectations. There's clowns who entertain with their cult of personality but leave nothing behind but good feelings. There's acrobats, skilled in their craft, balancing forward-thinking and leading-by-example.

Given the current system of service delivery and the morphing of roles, policing and it's leadership cannot be separated from safety in our cities.

Case in point: Seattle papers report two controversies (common in many large cities).

1. Recent studies show over 30% of young males in America by age 23 are arrested for something more serious than a traffic violation. Are crime declines a fiction or do arrest practices need fixing?

2. There is widespread public distrust when police investigate themselves - especially when police unions get involved. This is particularly acute in Seattle after a Department of Justice probe cited a pattern of excessive force.

Last fall I created search links on the right side of this blog. Google analytics tells me policing trends belong there as well. Dylan said it best: "Times, they are a-changing".

Here are past entries on policing and leadership:

Can research help cops prevent crime
SMART Policing and the power of few - Part 1
Transforming the police - Part 2
Transforming the police - Part 1
Solving the city with math
New chairs at the compstat table
Reforming police = bending granite
Urban warriors and city cops
The guardians and the vanguard
Preventing crime in LA

Predictive policing and the PreCog paradox

2011-12-31T16:16:00.000-08:00

Bladerunner Spinners: police patrol in the 21st Century?

Once they notice you, Jason realized, they never completely close the file. You can never get back your anonymity. It is vital not to be noticed in the first place.
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick (1974)

Philip K Dick was among the greatest sci-fi writers. He wrote award-winning books that became film noir classics like Bladerunner and Minority Report. Clearly, Dick was deeply suspicious of authority and technology.

I wonder if he'd agree with Malcolm Sparrow's critique of evidence-based policing? What would he think of mathematicians who want to solve the city with math? Or experiments to predict when or where crime will happen before it does?

And now NPR reports there's a new LAPD unit dedicated to predictive analysis. Some say this is our tomorrow. On closer inspection it seems like cost/benefit gone amok.

Witwer balls from Minority Report: "The fact that you prevented the ball from falling doesn't change the fact that it was going to happen." Except balls act according to the laws of physics. People don't.

Minority Report celebrates PreCogs, mutated humans who predict murder ahead of time - celebrated until they predict murder by the cop supposed to stop it. Logical calculation gone amok?

In Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, modern philosopher John Ralston Saul says we must guard against the unsentimental application of cost/benefit analysis and logical calculation. That's why, he says, "experts" are so often wrong. There are some things we cannot accurately predict. Weather for one. The economy for another, as recent events prove.

This is particularly true regarding crime. Saul says when predictive experts fail they are just replaced by a new group who say they can do better.

Voltaire once warned against adopting a vulgar rationalism (aka predictive technology) to determine what is, and what is not, appropriate use of authority and technology.

If we are to use predictive technology, may 2012 be the year we wake up to our own shortcomings for using it wisely.

New Year's Resolution - Cut the Fat

2011-12-26T12:31:00.000-08:00

As we embark upon a new year it is worth remembering the lessons of the past so we can minimize the bad and maximize the good. During this sea of recessionary dread, one lesson bound to resurface is police service delivery costs spiraling out of control.

It is mystifying how we can authentically discuss safety as though the community wasn't part of the equation. Yet, whenever we discuss police service delivery that is precisely what we do.

It is incumbent on municipal politicians - indeed it is their job - to learn reality versus the myth of police service delivery. As they say; what is our return on investment?

I found a speech by a leading criminologist on the topic. Informed police officers will recognize John Eck as founder of the SARA model in problem-oriented policing. Eck offers a cautionary tale we should heed in the new year.

An excerpt:

"Police, to the common person, are a free service and what we know about free services is this. You give us things for free and we consume more of it. That's what makes us fat. A modest amount of policing is far better than a large amount…

…we are going to have to live within our budget. We cannot ask these officers, highly trained, very dedicated, to answer all of the calls we currently have them answer with fewer numbers. They are having a difficult enough time as it is."

If the link doesn't load properly, click HERE

Safety Disney Style - Unlighting the streets

2011-12-18T15:46:00.000-08:00

Entrance to California exhibit at Disneyland. Light the feature, not the sidewalk

A few days in Disneyland proves a welcoming distraction. Disney is an example of fantasy story-telling and juvenile adventure from a company that practically invented the concept.

Most interesting was seeing Disneyland streets at night. Many are quite dark. Except for Main Street it is the surrounding buildings that show up in neon splendor. The point is to make streets predictable to allow easy walking without stumbling (I did anyway).

Then it's a simple matter to highlight surrounding features with spectacular lighting and beautiful reflections. This has the subtle effect of drawing you in to have a closer look. The ambient spillover light is more than adequate to navigate the streets.

Tomorrowland - lighting the buildings, not the street

For anyone obsessed on lighting streets, Disney shows how you can do safety and not light streets at all.

True, this is easy when people arrive in families seeking cartoon fantasies. How angry can you get in the company of Goofy, Tinker Bell and Mickey? It's a self-selection that breeds natural surveillance.

If you're up for some high-falutin Foucauldian theory about this read Shearing and Stenning's 1984 article - From the Panopticon to Disney World: The Development of Discipline.

When reading this it helps to resist the duh reflex. "Disney is an exemplar of modern private corporate policing". Translation: Walk for days through hundreds of exhibits, restaurants, and recreational areas without fear of crime by following Disney's rules. Duh.

Disney does this, they say, by embedding social control into the physical and management systems so that control becomes consensual. Like lighting the buildings and not the streets.

For my money, spent on a holiday in Disneyland, the corporate order of Mickey and Minnie is a fun reprieve. And if I tire of Disney's subtle corporate order, I just leave.

Happy Holidays.

It's easy to ignore poorly lit walkways with spectacular scenes nearby

A Gift for the Holidays

2011-12-07T10:53:00.000-08:00

Residents installed their own street lights

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.

Tulane University architecture students recently helped design and build this pavilion at the Hollygrove Growers Market and Farm - Photo by inspiredeconomist.com

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.

A new children's area in a Hollygrove park

On the shoulders of giants

2011-11-30T23:48:00.000-08:00

Pruitt-Igoe, 1972 - Demolition of crime-ridden public housing triggered a rethink

CPTED is 40 this year.

Professor C. Ray Jeffery's book "CPTED" was published in 1971. Oscar Newman's "Defensible Space" in 1972. That's four decades of preventing crime. In an age before prevention was situational, crime was designed out, policing was intelligent or activities routine, CPTED led the way.

Of course Newman and Jeffery stood on the shoulders of giants. A decade earlier there was Jane Jacobs, Elizabeth Wood and Schlomo Angel. By 1971 Jacobs had already invented territoriality and eyes on the street. Wood had already written on the merits of lively diverse neighborhoods (and flower-growing contests to brighten them up).

All this...decades before the broken windows theory reinvented that wheel.

Jane Jacobs, circa 1960, New York

CPTED wasn't the first kid on the prevention block. Police have always done prevention (still do), most of it unevaluated, superficial and generic. None of it place-based or specific.

Scholars made contributions to prevention, especially 1930s sociologists like Robert Shaw at the University of Chicago who created the Chicago Area Project. (Still running, still successful.)

Giants also came from geography. From 1968 geographers began writing books on place-based crime. Led by Harries in the US, Scott in Australia, and Herbert in the UK, the geography of crime later became environmental criminology.

It probably didn't prevent much crime. But it added to our understanding and moved the place-is-important debate squarely into CPTED turf. Which brings us back to CPTED and its birthday. It's worth learning what the pioneers actually said.

Then I came across this rare, and oddly haunting, film of Oscar Newman speaking to the inaugural session of the United Nations Habitat conference in 1976 Vancouver.

Oscar Newman at the inaugural UN Habitat conference, 1976

Click here to view it.

A ghost from our past talking about our world today.

Laneway Chic - enlightening with paint and color

2011-11-25T23:58:00.000-08:00

Encouraging movement and enlightening a dark wall.

Sharing street lighting ideas on Facebook recently it occurred to me how often we forget that to be truly safe a place must not be lightened. It must be enlightened.

Big difference.

Example: the work sent to me recently by my friend Lorraine Gamman from London's St. Martin's College of Art and Design. Lorraine sent links to alleyway projects done by Doug Tomkin and Mark Titmarsh at the Design Out Crime centre at Sydney's University of Technology.

Apparently they are hanging out on street corners. They call it Living Laneways. I call it Laneway Chic.

One color, bright, angular, and ungraffitied

Their rationale? (Graffiti and lighting people, Listen Up): "Too often measures against crime…can have almost as unpleasant an effect as the things they prevent. The Living Laneways project set out to deter graffiti without alienating those who were responsible for creating it (through) the involvement of respected artists in the street-art community…"

Clearly, simple and chic laneway painting can enlighten a space. Elaborate murals are not always needed.

Mark Titmarsh has a web document called Living Laneways - City Life. It explains some DOC work in Sydney.

Check out his tagline - "respect, express, enlighten!"

If street beautification and prevention means anything, it means that.

Wayfinding made simple, bright, and fun

Preventing crime. Like going to the doctor?

2011-11-17T23:41:00.000-08:00

Apologies for some overindulgence. No stories this week. No new observations. Just a rant about calling a thing for what it is.

"Where does it hurt?" asks the doctor.
"Stomach".
"Let me see if I can feel where the pain is."
"It started this morning after breakfast."
"What did you eat?"
"Eggs, Here, I brought leftovers."
"I'll send them to the lab. When tests come back, we'll prescribe the right medicine."

It's called allopathic medicine. Symptoms - Diagnosis - Prescription. It's based on symptoms.

Same in crime prevention. Crime shows up. Cops or prevention folk do analysis. A strategy emerges and they try it out. Allopathic crime prevention. We all do it, me included: situational prevention, CPTED, problem-oriented policing, Design Out Crime. Symptoms first! Makes sense, right? Except for what's missing…

...prevention!

Analysis on symptoms or causes?

Allopathic prevention prevents subsequent incidents and that's good. Just like going to the doctor. But it's not really "prevention" when it hasn't prevented it.

Medicine is growing out of its allopathic adolescence. It is evolving into integrative medicine - nutrition, stress management, alternative therapies (good family medicine probably always did that). It teaches us how to live a healthy lifestyle to prevent illness.

Meanwhile, far too much crime prevention still envisions safety as a product of strategies applied to a problem. Just like allopathic medicine.

Here's the thing; most serious crime emerges from dysfunctional families, broken neighborhoods, and personal troubles like drugs. You prevent it by getting into those places to help neighborhoods help themselves.

Let's call allopathic prevention what it is - crime repression. It represses what emerges and hacks at the branches. Prevention digs at the roots.

Rant over.

The Tragedy of The Commons - in reverse

2011-11-11T20:08:00.000-08:00

Excess parking or squandering public space?

Pondering the Occupy Wall Street protests this week I re-read a fascinating book: Capitalism 3.0 - A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons.

Places are unsafe when no one cares about them. Or when people are too afraid to walk there. That's why graffiti writers target abandoned spaces. Implied territorial ownership of public places is a very big deal, which is why CPTED practitioners spend so much time reinforcing it.

Capitalism 3.0 provides another way. Author Peter Barnes begins by updating Tragedy of the Commons, an old planning motif stolen from biology:

"our current operating system gives too much power to profit-maximizing corporations that devour our commons and distribute their profit to a sliver of the population."

In short, corporations pay little, if anything, for using our commons. Says Barnes, we pay for the commons. Corporations get a free ride.

He then offers a fascinating idea; hold corporations accountable and return value to citizens in a market-based, citizen-owned, legal entity called a commons trust.

An Alaskan trust called the Permanent Fund already does exactly that. Each citizen owns shares in the Permanent Fund which uses oil revenues to invest. Every year those investments pay dividends to each citizen of the state. How many governments give money back to their citizens?

Barnes thinks the commons trust will work for all kinds of commons.

Think of the possibilities:

* 700 community gardens in New York alone.
* 4,000 farmers markets across the US.
* Large retail malls with acres of parking but no social or cultural value

Read Capitalism 3.0. It's like putting on a new pair of glasses.

The Galatea Effect - a latitude to act

2011-11-07T02:41:00.000-08:00

I came across this statue of Galatea in a downtown public fountain this week. Occasionally "decorated" by locals having fun, reality can reflect myth. After all, Galatea is the ancient Greek myth of the statue brought to life by her creator. Neighborhoods and streetscapes too can come to life when residents have, or seize, the latitude to act.

Neighborhoods decline when the people who live there lose their connection and no longer feel part of their community - The Great Neighborhood Book

Streetscapes appear in a prior blog titled Beauty, eh? From the beginning of CPTED we've known the importance of streets and sidewalks. Professor C. Ray Jeffery, author of the first CPTED book stated the obvious: "People must have some reason for using the sidewalks; otherwise they stay indoors."

Symbolic fences, territorial landscaping, sitting area overlooking public walks. NOTE: No barricades, no chain-links, no crime!

Jeffery mapped out CPTED 40 years ago in two simple equations:

"Crime can be controlled through urban design, wherein safety and security are designed into streets, buildings, and parks."

"Cities can also be designed so as to increase human contact of an intimate nature. Loneliness and alienation need not characterize our urban life."

The first idea of design is 1st Generation CPTED. The second idea of contact (culture and cohesion) is called 2nd Generation CPTED, reintroduced in 1997.

This week I searched my town for streetscapes that fit both ideas and found great examples of design and culture. In a few cases residents modified public spaces on their own.

Apparently when given (or when seizing) the latitude to act, residents can create lots of beautiful and fun reasons to use the public street. Galatea can come to life.

This resident used a colorful flag and placed a bench facing public boulevards, labeled with the neighborhood name

The Interrupters

2011-10-31T15:08:00.000-07:00

Dying in the street - scene from The Interrupters

Gary Slutkin is another prevention kid with a great program on the block. Despite Newsweek's yellow journalism alleging conflicts between David Kennedy's and Gary Slutkin's different anti-violence programs (and their eviscerating response), they both have the same goal and similar successes. You say tomato, I say tomahto.

Recall Kennedy uses the justice system, targets high risk populations, collects cases on offenders, and uses the threat of sanctions to intervene.

Slutkin takes the public health approach. He blocks violent outbreaks by targeting high risk offenders and uses community "interrupters". Interrupters are savvy street workers who convince family and friends to help offenders see violence is in no one's best interest.

A new award winning film is out called The Interrupters. It describes a year in the life of violence in Chicago. It's a fascinating documentary about Slutkin's program.

I hope the film - and the program - does well.

Still…getting the right program is only half the battle. Staying on point is the other.

Kennedy's CeaseFire anti-violence program cut Boston homicides in half in the 1990s - the Boston Miracle. Now he says they moved away from CeaseFire and crime is on the rise. Streetworker unionization, role change and budget cuts decimated a once proud program.

Oakland too lost the plot. Courts issued gang injunctions without CeaseFire coordination. Then "funds from the city to CeaseFire were interrupted when the number of Oakland police dropped below levels required by the ballot measure."

When will officials learn to keep political fingers off things that actually work in the hood? When will we, the neighborhood dwelling public, wise-up and slap their fingers for it?

Back from the brink

2011-10-25T17:36:00.000-07:00

Senior's walking toward - and choosing - their own future

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).

New Orleans' Hollygrove - success story

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 video on their success story.

Here's another video, this one about their garden program.

The rappers are right. The hood's where it's at!

Imagine this - transforming the untransformable

2011-10-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

Image from video Our Community, Our Vision

Last blog was about cohousing as a way out of a Wire-esque future. Here's another.

I love winning stories, especially in places with special challenges. Winning stories have power; cynics are exposed with winners under their nose.

Wins in Philadelphia have appeared here previously in the Semillia arts initiative and the city's vibrant South Street.

Eastern north Philadelphia however has special challenges. At a policing conference last week I spoke to a participant from a 2010 SafeGrowth training. Sarah Sturtevant is a talented member of Philadelphia's LISC team and shared some wonderful stories with me.

One was about a redeveloped Rainbow de Colores park. See Sarah's blog HERE.

Kids playing in a transformed park

A few other wins are described HERE.

Then I came upon a great video of their visioning sessions. Says one person in the video: "When you build a plan to fix problems you might be wildly successful and fix all the problems, but still not create a good community."

How true.

The video Our Community, Our Vision.

Thanks Sarah to you, your fellow LISCers, and especially those community members and local organizations committed to wins. You all remind me of another Sarah I wrote about a few years ago. She too was remarkable.

Thanks for your inspiration.

Avoiding a Wire-esque nightmare - Part 2

2011-10-12T18:17:00.000-07:00

HBO photo of The Wire's Felicia Pearson as gang assassin "Snoop"

One of my favorite quotes in The Wire is when a 16-year-old drug dealer points to a run-down apartment and says, "…this shit! This is ME, y'all. Right here!" I've heard real drug dealers say that.

Author Arthur C. Clarke once wrote the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a little way into the impossible.

Unworkable neighborhoods demand a different future. Higher density housing may replace sprawling suburbs for reasons both environmental and economic. But too often we get old style house design and traditional apartment buildings. We get unmanaged and decrepit public housing that ends up as gang-breeding warehouses. Witness all-too-real neighborhoods in The Wire.

The Wire never won a major award and had modest ratings. Yet it's described as the greatest TV series ever made. Part of that is due to its bleak existential portrait and the warning it offers. Clearly, we need to venture into the impossible.

I recently saw just such a vision in Victoria BC - Fernwood Urban Village, an elegant and well designed development proposal for density co-housing.

FERNWOOD URBAN VILLAGE

Rendering of Fernwood Urban Village

Cohousing is resident-planned, owned and managed equity housing. When I contacted cohousing projects around Seattle, many had affordable rental units. Enough of those in our future and maybe we could eliminate public housing altogether!

Like most cohousing, Fernwood is pedestrian-oriented with common dining rooms, media rooms, and workshop. Residents own their private residence but the design "makes social interaction easy and integral to everyday life." Each unit has it's own kitchen but residents usually choose to share a few meals each week in the common house.

Unlike gated communities, resident-owners share co-housing design and management. Thus, residents learn problem-solving and collaborative decision-making skills for handling conflict later on.

Uplands cohousing, first in the UK

Municipalities rarely encourage or provide financial incentives for cohousing. That needs to change. We need to venture into the impossible.

Check out co-housing movements in the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Australia.

Avoiding a Wire-esque nightmare - Part 1

2011-10-06T12:23:00.000-07:00

Bob Castle's "The Wire" diagram from Creative Commons

David Kennedy’s book Don't Shout for eradicating gang violence describes only the first step. It skims root causes that create gangs in the first place. There is more - the neighborhood and the street and the housing where gangs breed.

A few years ago an HBO crime drama, The Wire, portrayed contemporary gang life and a cultural war against the urban underclass. Striking to me was the similarity between gang ghettoes in The Wire and the actual housing projects we work in SafeGrowth programs. We call them "gang breeders" because that is exactly what such nightmarish places create.

Five years after The Wire ended we are deep in recession and housing is undergoing a transformative tsunami. Foreclosed houses in outer urban rings are leaving swaths of ghost suburbs. Inner urban rings are densifying into a new kind of suburb where demands for multi-family housing and apartment rentals are exploding.

A WIRE-ESQUE FUTURE?

Are Wire-esque nightmares in our future? Suburban ghettoes? A new kind of vertical poverty, growing in cities like LA, Chicago, Toronto and New York?

How can we build denser, environmentally friendly housing? How can we satisfy the needs of the future and make livable and safe habitat?

Intentional communities provide a proven answer. One successful version is co-housing. I've studied co-housing for 20 years and visited dozens in different countries. I've spent time with architect Jan Gudmand-Hoyer who pioneered the idea in the 1960s.

In North America co-housing has been around for a few decades. There are about a hundred in the US and Canada. In Oregon, Washington and British Columbia alone there are 24 projects, a third of which have been running for over 15 years.

McCamant and Durrett write about co-housing. Their recent book Creating Cohousing describes it.

Next blog: How can we make this a reality?

The Demise of Guys

2011-09-30T23:34:00.000-07:00

Philip Zimbardo presenting at TED Talks

Prisons are filled with young men. Make more arrests and prisons will fill up with them. Last blog David Kennedy's new book Don't Shoot described his anti-gang/drug dealer programs (gangs comprising, at least initially, young men).

Why young men?

Philip Zimbardo is one of my favorite living psychologists. He makes simple the complex world of behavioral research. He's no intellectual slouch - Stanford professor, author of the PBS film Discovering Psychology, former chair of the American Psychology Association.

In his latest TED talk last month he says growing numbers of young men are joining the military, watching TV sports, obsessing on events like Superbowl Sunday, and hanging out with each other in pubs. Of course men have always done that, just not to such an extent.

Ironically, for all their macho bluster about women, Zimbardo says young guys end up preferring male bonding to female mating. He thinks excessive video gaming, Internet porning, and explicitly male media obsessions are a major reason why.

I'm unsure how much of this holds up to evidence. I’m unsure how many of those Millennial malcontents end up in gangs or doing crime.

I am sure his TED.com talk called The Demise of Guys is well worth 5 minutes of your time to find out.

Don't Shoot - Ending inner city violence

2011-09-25T15:20:00.000-07:00

Professor David Kennedy [Center for American Progress photo]

Street drug dealing and gang violence isn't the only neighborhood crime problem. But it's at the top of the list.

I met David Kennedy a few years ago and liked him immediately. He's a professor at New York's John Jay College. He has no PhD or MA, yet today he is a leading voice in crime prevention policy. When he speaks about drug dealers and gang violence, people listen. I certainly do. Every time I've seen him he strikes me as the smartest guy in the room.

The New Yorker says he's onto something. Newsweek magazine says he is the only person "who has ever come up with a consistently viable and cost-effective strategy for helping the inner city" drug and gang problems.

If you don't know David's work on Boston's Cease Fire anti-gang project or the High Point, NC, drug dealer project, then you need to get caught up. No better way than to read his latest book -Don't Shoot.

I haven't read it yet but David is one of the few people whose book I can recommend before I have.

Malcolm Gladwell, of Tipping Point fame, says: "Don't Shoot will do for the fight against violence what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did for the environmental movement a generation ago".

When someone like Gladwell says that, it's time to pay attention.

Explaining homicide

2011-09-19T02:02:00.000-07:00

British Bobbies - first urban police in the world. How's it going?

I just came across a Wall Street Journal article debunking a poverty and crime theory called "blocked opportunities". Puh-leese! For op-ed writers, debunking crime theories is like stealing lolipops from tots. Simple, unethical and just silly.

Take criminologists (like me) who say routine activity patterns (road networks, travel habits, bar locations) produce higher/lower crime opportunities like crime hotspots. The routine activity theory suggests crime drops by disrupting routine activities and targeting those hotspots with arrests, CPTED, dealing with prolific offenders, etc.

The most comprehensive demonstration of a routine activity approach is Britain's Crime and Disorder Act, 1998.

The Act links crime prevention accountability to municipalities, creates partnerships among relevant agencies, sets prevention goals, and uses multiple strategies to tackle crime hotspots.

Convincingly, since 1998 UK police agencies have been finalists at the International Problem Oriented Policing Award program every year but two. They've won the coveted award eight times.

Some claim routine activity goes beyond street corners to whole countries. They predict Western countries have more goods, more cash for illicit drugs, more things to steal, and will therefore have larger criminal opportunities. This results in higher crime rates than in poorer countries. Voila: poverty doesn't cause crime - routine activities do. The International Crime Victimization Survey, they say, proves it.

It doesn't.

Why? Because that is a logic error called the non sequitur. Consider this:

I constructed this graph from that same survey. It shows the US homicide rate plummeting throughout the 1990s. Canada's rate dips slightly. In the UK, where the Crime and Disorder Act has been in place for the entire period, homicide flatlines and then slightly increases.

You could say this is because crime opportunities between the three countries is worse in the UK. That is unlikely. The US has more gangs, drugs, guns and plenty of crime opportunities.

It is more likely routine activity theory just breaks down at this scale and predicts nothing.

The 3 lies gangs tell - the Liz Elliott story

2011-09-13T01:34:00.000-07:00

Preventing crime and building safe communities is what counts. SafeGrowth is all those things. What happens if, in spite of best efforts, your home is burgled or a family member suffers violence?

What then?

Most people want payback. Mistaken for justice, it's really eye-for-an-eye, what the ancient Babylonians called vengeful retribution. Gandhi was fond of saying an eye-for-an-eye leaves everyone blind.

What do we actually get? The offender is removed from the community, tried, sentenced, and sanctioned (or not). LIttle, if anything, is actually returned (restored) to the community. Victims rarely feel satisfied. Without some kind of restoration, the offender eventually gets out of prison often worse than when he or she went in. That's the dilemma.

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Restorative justice (RJ) answers this dilemma. It still removes violent offenders so they cannot harm others. But RJ expects offenders to repair the harm they've caused. It provides a chance for the neighborhood and victims to participate in resolving the harm. It helps restore victims and offenders back to a more healthy and positive life.

For details on how, a good RJ source is HERE. Another is HERE.

The RJ story is best told by Liz Elliott, especially her YouTube story about the 3 lies gangs tell. Watch it HERE. Also, check out her recent book, Security, With Care.

RJ expert, Liz Elliott

Disclosure: Liz is a friend from a long time ago. She became an award-winning criminologist specializing in RJ. We were students in the same criminology program. Back then PhD students occasionally hung out and shared stories.

One afternoon, boating up the Fraser River with a bunch of other grad students, I remember being impressed by the ethics of Liz's stories. At a time when my own academic experience thirsted for examples of integrity, her stories showed me what moving forward should look like. We might have been on water, but her values were so well grounded.

She built an academic career on that ethical ground. A quote in Secure reads "the idea is to become more competent and engaged as citizens in our homes and communities, so that we need to rely less on formal government institutions to address our problems." Exactly right Liz, that's it!

Yesterday, Liz Elliott passed away. A light has gone out.

Thank you Liz for your stories. You'll be missed by many.

Me included.

Graffiti-mess-of-the-year award goes to...

2011-09-05T01:12:00.000-07:00

A plague of graffiti locusts in Victoria, BC

...and the winner of Graffiti-Mess-of-the-Year award goes to (drum roll...)

Victoria, British Columbia!

I've spent the last few days visiting neighborhoods across this fascinating city. I wrote a similar graffiti story in this blog a few years back including research on curbing the problem. The best prevention resource available is probably the ICA guideline Graffiti: Local solutions to local problems - guide books for design professionals.

None of that seems to have mattered. Victoria still reeks of graffiti tags like some biblical plague of locusts.

True, there are much bigger cities with more tags. There are also more troubled cities where gangs tag their hood like medieval warlords claiming turf, what Atlas calls "offensive space". Victoria is none of that, which in my mind makes it so inexcusable.

Victoria is a mid-sized, world-class city with booming tourism. It has high quality-of-life, good schools, and spectacular natural scenery.

Victoria also suffers persistent and pervasive tagging far beyond what I've seen in other cities of similar size. I'm not speaking of street art that the BC Graffiti website calls "momentary pockets of expression".

I'm not describing political graffiti that might make the odd alley risqué - even bohemian.

Tagging shops on the main commercial street

I'm talking about butt-ugly paint-spray for no reason but vandalism. Case in point: the underground BC Graffiti website has 54 graf photos from cities across the province - 39 are from Victoria (to be fair, those pics show much higher quality graffiti than I saw the past few days). Obviously in graf-writer world, Victoria is still Queen.

Why doesn't Victoria regulate the sale of paint-spray cans as elsewhere? Should we blame the catch-and-release British Columbia court system? The lack of restorative justice opportunities? Do we blame the decline of problem-oriented policing training there?

Victoria cannot be blamed for a lack of trying. The national anti-graffiti "Tags" conference ran here in 2009 (sadly, and obviously, to no avail). Conference lessons either didn't work or fell on deaf ears.

There are diligent paint-outs to clean the mess. Victoria also has an anti-graffiti program.

Unfortunately, all this is for naught. Tags are everywhere.

Has this city passed some graffiti tipping point after which preventive tactics fail? Does such a tipping point exist? It does for other types of crime (now THAT should be the topic of research).

Pole painting murals - one bright spot

One bright spot: neighborhood pole painting projects.

It's a neighborhood capacity-building initiative in which residents adopt hundreds of telephone and power poles and paint them with murals. Those poles were graffiti free and kind of cool.

If only we could get that kind of creativity on post boxes, walls, benches, signs, windows…

Adopt-a-pole murals are inventive and graffiti free

Bike trails and crime - The Pinellas Trail

2011-08-29T00:48:00.000-07:00

A Florida bike overpass rivaling highway cloverleafs

"The homeless man said he believes the trail ought to be closed at night for safety." That's an ominous quote from an unlikely source. It regards a new bike trail winding through a rough part of Seattle called The Jungle.

Concerns about crime near bike trails are not new. Beyond Seattle they have surfaced in Los Angeles, and Virginia Beach.

The takeaway message? There are ways to master bike trail design and ways to botch it.

This blog has shown how proper analysis and design can humanize and insulate urban designs, from ATMs and street furniture to lighting and trails.

Last month I spent time in St. Petersburg, Florida on the Pinellas Trail. It is an award-winning bike/jogging/walking trail that runs 40 miles from Tarpon Springs and Clearwater to St. Petersburg. The trail is 20 years old and I was impressed at the extent, quality, and resources the community invested in making this work.

Along the Pinellas trail you find art, bike shops, and bus stops located nearby for walkers who decide to bus home. Pinellas encourages vendor concessions and adjacent parks with places for wedding photos. In CPTED these are called activity generators.

Pinellas bike trail overpass

Parts of it run through downtown St Petersburg, where some crimes do occur. For example about a dozen robberies are reported each year, mostly teens stealing from other teens (but not always).

Consider that a quarter million residents in St Petersburg experience over 1,000 robberies each year, and crime on Pinellas Trail seems remarkably low.

The day I visited there were walkers, joggers and bikers. It has an emergency response system and fairly strict rules (no alcohol, daytime only operation, no headphones permitted while biking).

Here's the question: Do municipalities demand a proper crime analysis, safety consultation and CPTED review before they construct bike/jogging/walking trails? If SafeGrowth planning was part of municipal development, that question would be irrelevant.

Riot nights, city lights

2011-08-21T02:37:00.000-07:00

Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty - Loving Spoonful, 1966

Depressed from riot news, I silence static from clueless TV pundits by tuning down the volume. Just watching images it seems the worst violence and looting happens at night. Biased news reporting perhaps? I wonder how street lighting impacts the locations of violence and looting? Can we use that knowledge for prevention?

There are online clues. There is a problem-oriented guide for police on improved street lighting.

That guide is less about tactical design and more about analysis, evaluation, and public support (all valuable, especially for police). It lists 8 US studies in which half show no impact and 3 UK studies that show more promise. There are 2 examples of police-led lighting improvements, one of which cut thefts from cars from 27 to 4.

For urban designers and developers looking for specifics you'll find more tactical designs in the ICA guidebook for professionals, CPTED and Lighting: reducing crime, improving security by Randy Atlas.

In addition to diagrams, photometric maps, and site photos, Atlas provides details on perimeter lighting, new technologies like LEDs, lighting controls, and the IESNA lighting guidelines for minimum lighting levels.

LEDs to the rescue

According to The Atlantic magazine, the yellowish glare of sodium street lighting may be fading forever in favor of low-energy, white LEDs and crime had nothing to do with it. Energy saving and the recession did.

There has been an explosion of LED (light emitting diode) technology. Cities like Seattle and Pittsburg have been racing to install LEDs. LA will replace 140,000 of the city’s 209,000 streetlights with LEDs.

I have blogged on lighting and crime before, especially in Toronto, Oakland, and Los Angeles.

Photo from ICAs lighting guide. Atlas, 2010

Now Arlington, Virginia is replacing 4,200 high pressure sodium street lights with LEDs. Apparently they may switch out all 12,000 street lights to cut costs.

According to the LA Times, LED technology still has glitches. No matter. The Great Recession is charting our future in ways we don't expect.

For better or worse, street light LEDs are on our horizon.

Just a matter of time

2011-08-14T01:05:00.000-07:00

London's Tottenham riot - news photo of a dark night

An easy prediction following urban riots: authorities will blame anarchists and ne'er-do-wells for criminal behavior. Normal citizens, so goes the myth, would never do such a thing. (Sometimes they may be right. The Battle of Seattle in 2000 comes to mind.)

In truth, riots emerge from many causes, like middle-class blowouts following sporting championships. Vancouver's recent hockey riot comes to mind. One Vancouverite deludes herself, "this isn't the real Vancouver!"

Of course it is! Two championship losses, two Vancouver riots! Says one normal person caught rioting in Vancouver, "the riot would continue happening with or without me, so I might as well get my adrenaline fix." That's no criminal or anarchist talking.

In criminology I was once told it is too simple to blame poverty as a cause of crime because the eradication of poverty would eradicate crime. I have since learned ignoring poverty and deprivation is misguided for both crime and riots. Recent riots didn't break out in Beverly Hills, Greenwich, or Hampstead. They broke out in the poorest, most deprived, neighborhoods with the highest crime: Tottenham (UK), Villiers-le-Bel (France), Cairo, and Tripoli.

True, some criminals may seize on urban mayhem to loot and pillage. We must not let their opportunism distract us. Also, some short-term tactics might work, like tampering with rioters cell-phone planning. We must not let tactics for secondary factors distract us.

Images of failure in London. Are they images of our future?

Neighborhood capacity-building in communities must be the goal of economic policy. Political power that concentrates at the top and ignores local capacity-building cannot last. That is one message of recent riots.

Here's another: Festering poverty and neighborhood deprivation dries up community branches of goodwill, what Hobbes and Rousseau called the social contract. Silencing people through unfair economic conditions or political repression splays those branches into a tinderbox. A recent NY Times article describes that tinderbox - people in "an uprising fighting for an accessible future."

Igniting that tinderbox is not a matter of youth acting like a jackass on speed. It is not a matter of crime. It is a matter of time. We should not be surprised.

Some trails are happy ones...

2011-08-10T00:57:00.000-07:00

"UnHappy Trails? Where's the research?"

No doubt considerable fear exists on the streets of London after this week's riots. Whole books are written on urban crime and fear. What about rural places far from urban mayhem? The Gabriola Island murders from last blog suggest rural crimes too ferment fears of public places like nature trails.

This is ironic. Parks and trails are statistically far safer than bars at closing time or inside homes when domestic strife turns violent. Study after study tell us public trails are safe, such as Tod Schneider's article on bike trails back in 2000.

Yet those are urban studies. Research has yet to examine rural nature trails and crime. CPTED was born, after all, in the city.

I was recently interviewed by a horticulture magazine about trees and crime asking these very questions. The article, Trees Thwart Shady Behavior, described a study on crime and residential trees by examining 2,813 single-family homes in Portland, Oregon.

Controlling for visual appearance, presence of barriers, and street activity, the study showed "houses fronted with more street trees had lower crime rates". That was all crime rates, including vandalism and burglary.

Read it HERE.

Fall from paradise - Murder on Gabriola

2011-08-05T02:23:00.000-07:00

Gabriola Island, British Columbia - unlikely murder scene

Small towns are safe. Big cities are not. That's the myth.

Like many small communities in the Gulf Islands off the British Columbia coast, Gabriola Island is draped in lush rain-forests and magnificent beach scenery. It has miles of walking trails and hiking paths. Gabriola's 4,000 residents have the lowest crime rates anywhere. Until now.

With most myths, facts intrude. This week one shattered Gabriola's calm.

A knife attack left a mother dead and her son in hospital. Residents were ordered indoors and to stay off the trails. Today police apprehend a suspect hiding in some bushes near the scene of the crime.

This is Gabriola's second murder in 6 years. Two murders, of course, does not a trend make. Low numbers tell volumes about low crime risks.

Still, small towns do not necessarily produce low crime. Counting the current murder, Gabriola's murder rate is 25 per 100,000 (16 times higher than the rest of the country). What can be done?

I've blogged before about the catch-and-release courts in British Columbia. After sentencing, the murderer in Gabriola's last homicide served 2 years in prison (he beat his roommate to death with a hatchet).

Courts are clearly not in the safety or prevention business.

Walking outdoors next week may seem different on Gabriola. More frightening than last week. Lockdowns and wandering killers can have that effect.

CCTV and CPTED on forest trails?

True, these murders were indoors. Yet fear is insidious and civic places need a public space. How can small towns project confidence onto public spaces like paths and parks? Can we design out this problem? Do we really want cameras on hiking paths?

Is this the price we must pay for vigilance?

Natural surveillance by ducks?

City clean-ups and chutzpah in Sao Paulo

2011-07-31T13:58:00.000-07:00

Remnant of the ad city (photo Tony DeMarco)

Bureaucratic banality or Mayoral chutzpah? I recently learned about a remarkable urban experiment in Brazil.

Prior blogs discuss beautification and the CPTED strategy called image ("management and maintenance"). While image cannot stop crime, it can trigger positive change.

The town of Celebration illustrates how new urbanists and their form-based zoning take that one step beyond. Sao Paulo has another.

In 2007, Sao Paulo, one of the world's largest cities, instituted a radical experiment in beautification: a ban on unsanctioned, outdoor advertising. No billboards, no posters on buildings, and no brand advertising on busses. It is called the Clean City Law (Lei Cidade Limpa).

Rooftop garden, Sao Paulo (photo Eduardo Zarate)

Unlikely instigator of the law was conservative mayor Gilberto Kassab. Four years later, in spite of plans to reintroduce a few isolated advertising zones (and unsuccessful legal challenges by the advertising industry), the law is deemed successful.

They have removed 15,000 billboards and levied fines of $8 million for companies violating the new law. In a modern, free-market democracy a city without public advertising is an anathema. Yet, the law remains.

The difference between pointless and consequential in law is whether it works.

True, they are still working to clean up unsightly blank billboards. Sao Paulo remains poor and gang infested. None of that, of course, is what the Clean City Law was about. It was about visual pollution and civic pride in the public realm. Survey's indicate over 70% of Sao Paulo's population love the new law.

Beautification can make a place seem like someone cares. It's a small, consequential step to help residents feel pride in their city. And as we know, a sense of place and pride is the first step in the long journey to neighborhood engagement.

Central Sao Paulo. No ads (photo Eduardo Zarate)

Gun crackdowns or transforming violence? Choosing our future

2011-07-27T00:30:00.000-07:00

Monterrey mass murder scene

News this week of a mass killing in Norway depicts a racist flat-earther for what he really is; a murderous bigot. Small solace for the victims. Can community safety ever be immune from such madness?

Worried about events far away, I checked on a friend's safety in Mexico following the recent drug cartel slaughter of 20 people in a Monterrey bar.

Mass murder by lone bigots? Hard to see that coming. Drug violence and cartel gun crime? That's a different story with no simple explanation. Something can be done. But what?

Crackdowns?

Some still grasp at simple explanations. I just read a blog from a combat-cop acolyte suggesting more cops and crackdowns is the way to community safety. Facts and research suggests otherwise.

Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem Oriented Policing, published The Benefits and Consequences of Police Crackdowns, a study of 42 police crackdowns.

He found that carefully planned gun crackdowns did show some promise when "supported by problem analysis and conducted in a way to safeguard civil rights". Yet half (47%) of the crackdowns in his review had no impact, weren't evaluated or had mixed results.

Fast and Furious

The fact is too many crackdowns have unintended consequences, none more spectacular than the failure of last year's ATF operation Fast and Furious.

The idea was to target Mexican gun runners, provide guns through undercover sales, track and then catch them. That would, supposedly, help stem the flow of American guns feeding the Mexican drug war. The opposite happened.

Fast and Furious resulted in a dead US Border Patrol officer and over 1,500 guns missing, many in drug cartel hands. Some may have even been used in the Monterrey shooting. According to ATF's report to Congress yesterday, the crackdown spiraled out of control. An ATF attache to Mexico called it "insane".

So, what will stop the violence?

Emiliano Salinas

A short while ago Emiliano Salinas, son of the former Mexican President, provided ideas for the future on TED.com. Watch it HERE.

He gave examples about how to organize each community and act together. Says Salinas: "The problem is that we play the role of victims. We need a civil response against violence."

Made me think of The Tragically Hip's lyrics in Courage:

So there's no simple explanation
for anything important any of us do
and yea the human tragedy
consists in the necessity
of living with the consequences

Beauty, eh?

2011-07-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

Walkways between streets and beaches in Pacific Beach, San Diego

A number of years ago I was asked to write-up a government study on CPTED strategies in US cities. The results were asymmetric. Lacking political gravitas, most cities did little to implement CPTED. Arguably, it seemed like one of the greatest failures of any prevention policy in recent history (three-strikes laws notwithstanding).

I say arguably because failure is a generalization and generalizations can be a cagey thing. For example, the study also revealed some municipalities had taken major steps forward, now described in Atlas's book 21st Century Security and
CPTED in a chapter titled "Implementing CPTED".

Simple and pleasant, no dividers needed. Successful street benches in Palo Alto

Interestingly, the government study did show one CPTED strategy proliferated - management and maintenance, what Newman called Image. That was probably because Image emulates planning trends like beautification, streetscaping, and the form-based zoning of new urbanism (a trend now at risk in places like Winter Park, Florida).

Though it cannot stop crime, it can trigger positive change. Beautification is not to be ignored. I recently took photos in San Diego and San Francisco showing how simple beautification can be. Then a Canadian CPTED colleague (and International CPTED Association board member), Steve Woolerich, sent me this fascinating clip of a street piano in his Alberta city. Check it out HERE.

Beautifying with planters. Nothing complicated

Can research help cops prevent crime?

2011-07-10T23:41:00.000-07:00

Research seems to be the last place cops look for solutions. They appear to implement most new approaches without supportive research to back them up.

Having co-researched and co-authored (with Gerry Cleveland) the Police Training Officer program - first adopted in Reno and then nation-wide - I am sensitive to this argument. The PTO program (and its grown-up progeny, the Police Problem-Based Learning program) was fully funded by the COPS Office. They both were thoroughly researched and pilot tested prior to implementation. Along with Problem-Oriented Policing a few decades earlier, I believe this to be a rarity in the police world.

It is the same with crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED). CPTED was studied and evaluated many years ago by researchers. Studies exist today on its effectiveness and some progressive police agencies have adopted CPTED based on this.

But usually not.

Now there is a new movement called evidence-based policing that seeks to fix the disconnect between science and policing.

This week I chatted with Harvard's Malcolm Sparrow. He has just published a brilliant and provocative response to the Evidence-Based scholars in a paper called Governing Science.

This is a must-read for informed leaders. It is a must-read for social scientists too.

Here's one tasty tidbit:

"…the relationship proposed by proponents of evidence-based policing offers virtually no benefits for police. The best they can hope for is that the scientists they have invited in…will finally confirm what police thought they knew already: that an intervention or program the department had previously deployed did actually work. The downside risk for police is much greater."

The article explains why he says this and how he thinks it should work. Read it HERE.

The walkability breakthrough in New York

2011-07-02T12:52:00.000-07:00

7 minutes to Court Square (NYTimes photo)

Navigation, for most humans, isn't by GPS. At least not yet.

For most of us it is just a matter of getting around by looking where we are going. Sometimes maps help. Sometimes we ask for directions (even males do this occasionally)!

Designers call this wayfinding. In CPTED we call it "movement predictors". When it comes to urban safety and what people feel about a street, it matters. A lot.

A year ago I blogged on walkability, Jane's Walks, and the Walk Score to measure the walkability of your neighborhood.

This week a CPTED friend sent this NY Times article about City Signs to Help Pedestrians (they aren't just for tourists).

My favorite part is NY TImes writer Michael M Grynbaum's description: "One feature is novel for city maps: concentric circles that represent an approximate walking time."

Woo hoo! Honoring pedestrians over the car. A breakthrough!

Rebirth in Masdar City?

2011-06-27T20:03:00.000-07:00

Architectural rendering of Masdar City now under construction

Sometimes it seems like we have more problems than we deserve and more solutions than we apply. Whether Arab Spring, Sputnik moments, tea parties…whatever. Whether silly or sensible, we long for rebirth.

Take transportation. Crime loves transportation. It festers at bus stations and clusters near subway or rail stops. Parking lots make easy pickings for crooks. Poor design makes all this worse.

What might rebirth look like if we could rebuild from the ground up? Maybe with privacy, cool design, and the environment in mind?

Turns out the future is already here.

Masdar City is a city in a city - in this case in Abu Dhabi, UAE. It's the world's first zero carbon, zero waste city powered entirely by renewables. Construction - now on hold for the recession - is already well under way.

Masdar's podcars

Masdar transport planning is remarkable, one part of which is a fleet of driverless, free-moving podcars called PRTs.

A Huffington Post article says Nevada is changing laws to allow driverless cars. PRTs are already in operation at London's Heathrow Airport.

Masdar's system (built by Europeans) is planning for 3000 electric PRTs each transporting 2 to 6 passengers in privacy and safety. Wi-Fi computers maneuver them on dedicated routes, so no traffic congestion. The engineers say PRTs will get you there faster than cars.

Rebirth indeed! What, I wonder, does this mean for personal security and crime?

Vancouver's Hockey Bedlam - Justice after the riots

2011-06-22T15:14:00.000-07:00

Rommy Ghaly photo of Vancouver riots (Creative Commons licence)

Dr. Evelyn Zellerer is a criminologist specializing in restorative justice. She teaches part-time at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in greater Vancouver and is a restorative facilitator, trainer and consultant. She has done extensive work in a variety of settings on how to respond to conflict, crime and disorder with restorative methods. She sent this blog entry about the Vancouver riots.

I, like most others, was horrified by the Vancouver hockey riots last week. How should we respond? What is the healthiest way for us to move forward?

It’s time cities like Vancouver used restorative justice to meet the needs of victims, hold offenders accountable, support healing, and build community.

A recent Globe and Mail editorial describes one attempt to hold people accountable.

Vigilante justice is not the answer. Martin Luther King said, “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars”.

Criminal justice is another option, but what happens after police make arrests? Those who rioted are charged. Their crimes become against the state and lawyers and judges take over. An already overburdened court gets more cases. There is a battle between the prosecutors and defence. Plea bargaining will occur. There are few sentencing options: fines, probation, community service, or prison.

Criminal justice “success” means spending taxpayer’s dollars locking people up. Is this justice, healing and resolution? I don’t think so.

Have we and the offenders learned anything? Given the high rates of prison violence and reoffending, it seems not. In criminal justice victims are excluded, except as witnesses. And the community doesn’t have a place.

Another option

There is another option: Restorative Justice. Here, crime is a violation of people and relationships, not the state. All parties come together to understand what happened and determine how to respond, how to make things right.

Victims tell their offenders what they feel and need. Offenders face their victims and community. Offenders come to see the impact of their actions, make amends, and learn things of value. The community finds out what offenders need to be non-violent, healthy, contributing citizens. Offenders are a part of our community too. Even if they go to prison, they will return. There is no enemy. It’s only us.

Restorative justice is not soft on crime. For many, the hardest thing is to face those you harmed and sit alongside your family, peers and community to determine consequences. Restorative justice works with all kinds of conflict, including serious crimes like assault.

It is easy to punish people and think this solves things. Even in a riot…it doesn’t.

Charter Cities in the 21st Century?

2011-06-14T22:10:00.000-07:00

Rules can oppress or invigorate. Consider a satellite image of lights on the Korean peninsula. Look at what years of oppressive rules have done to the north compared to the open society in the south.

My recent blogs on homelessness made me wonder if cities fail the homeless because of rules? Why can't they do better?

Paul Romer has a fascinating idea. He calls it the Charter City.

Charter Cities are reform zones where people can escape bad rules of today's cities and opt for a new kind of city with better rules. In his first TED.com talk he described charter cities as special administrative free-trade zones. They will be safer, environmentally friendly, and will contain all the needed resources for residents, especially the poor.

Romer is no woo-woo slouch. He's an economist who transformed growth theory in the 1980s. He's also senior fellow at Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy.

His idea behind Charter Cities is this: It is easier to start cities from scratch on vacant land rather than get bogged down by the oppressive political rules, legal traps, and special interest groups blocking progress in today's cities.

The City Journal says once a host government designates an uninhabited land area and establishes an independent charter, anyone can choose the rules of a charter city and move there.

The full idea is described on the Charter City website.

Homelessness in the city. We can do better!

Apparently the idea is catching on.

This year the Honduras Congress adopted Romers idea and passed a constitutional amendment to create charter cities.

Will the rural poor move into these special economic zones and end up in 3rd-world styled sweat shops? Romer claims factory workers need not live in slums. Instead, Charter Cities will have laws to ensure proper utilities and decent low-cost housing.

Why not wait for technology to solve problems of poverty and pollution? Romer says new technology will come too late. Instead he says more relaxed rules and new ideas about how people interact will unleash creative potential. Creating independent and open cities allows that to happen.

Check out Romer's latest TED.com talk.

Harbinger for better times - Winnipeg's fork at the river

2011-06-08T23:32:00.000-07:00

Water tours and a Winnipeg skyline

Far from a tourist's trip of the river, Downtown Winnipeg this week looks bleak and hollowed out. It's a story of one-way streets, homelessness, shuttered storefronts and drunken disorder.

There are bright spots like the Exchange District. And not far away a few other gems…Osborne Village and Forks riverside park on the historic Red River. Harbingers of what the city could be?

Elsewhere, downtown is another story.

A recent Globe and Mail article says "The city’s population in 2006 was 633,451, but of those, only 13,470 lived downtown."

Bicycle lanes are as rare as a prairie ski-hill. In peak hours streets are vacant. Are these vacant streets the same ones in a 1905 museum photo of a crowded downtown?

2011 - Downtown Winnipeg

1905 - Downtown Winnipeg

They are.

What befell this place?

A few years ago I wrote about some exceptional local initiatives by
the Winnipeg Committee for Safety and an award-winning prevention program that cut auto theft.

Sadly, that's not enough. Winnipeg still has the worst robbery rate in Canada.

Frontier Centre is a right-wing think-tank on public policy with views about rehabilitating downtown Winnipeg.

Be warned: Wide-angle views from Frontier can seem Twilight Zone-ish, for example reconsidering justice policies like zero tolerance for domestic abuse - a policy that research shows actually reduces future violence.

Yet zoom in a bit and Frontier's images are less scary. Two papers in particular are worth a read: Turf war between cops and BIZ patrollers about security patrols to reduce disorder, and Fixing Winnipeg's Downtown about subsidies for the poor, removing one-way streets, and new zoning to revitalize shops.

NHL Hockey returns downtown

This week the NHL announced a hockey francise will return to the downtown MTS arena. That might spark good times.

More good news: The city has been spearheading new construction, renovation projects, and a new mixed use zoning bylaw. Says that Globe article "Winnipeg is desperately trying to realign itself, drawing life back to its centre as a way to sustain its economic core."

Says Planetizen "Winnipeg has joined other North American cities in trying to reverse its suburban expansion by targeting its downtown".

Frontier published an article describing how immigration helped Winnipeg: Can the Winnipeg Model save Detroit?

From what I saw, Winnipeg should save itself before it saves others.

Beat cop shows skills at river Forks skate park

The power of few - Part 2

2011-06-04T21:35:00.000-07:00

Ghosts of the Power of Few

In Charles Dickens's classic work, three ghosts haunt Scrooge. My last blog described evidence-based criminology - particularly the power of few - as a path for policing in the future. It too has three ghosts.

The power of few emerges from evidence-based criminology and has morphed into the new vogue - SMART policing. Comstat (computer crime statistics) and intelligence-led policing are part of it. SMART policing is Strategically-Managed, Analysis and Research-driven, Technology-based. The goal of the SMART Policing Initiative (SPI) is to develop effective, efficient and economical tactics.

Three ghosts come to mind.

Ghost #1: What data?

Evidence-based approaches rely on data to prove or disprove hypotheses in an objective empirical way. Data are the thing.

Mike Scott said as much at the inaugural SPI conference; standards of proof for evidence of success are difficult to define. What happens when the data is far from objective?

I've done blogs on research-driven and technology-based approaches like the paralysis of analysis, predicting crime with superlinear scaling, and problems with comstat data.

Ghost #2: Tech-envy

The SPI website offers a proof of technology-driven success in the story of security cameras in London.

London's Ring of Steel is a system of 500,000 CCTV cameras resulting in, supposedly, an improved clearance rate for murder. The evidence? London's murder clearance rate in 2005 increased to 95% from 75% in 1999.

Unfortunately London's 2008 teenage violence increased to a record 29 teenage murders (an epidemic for London), a year in which six days of youth violence ended in 6 teen knife attacks (two fatal).

Also unfortunate is that London's robbery rate ebbed and flowed the past decade. Then there was the explosion of robberies from 26,330 in 1998 to 53,547 in 2002.

So much for the Ring of Steel.

The tool of science in the workshop of community-building

Ghost #3: Buy-in

It is rarely, if ever, advisable to proceed without public education and outreach, especially when targeting offenders or neighborhoods. SMART policing doesn't do that, but too many evidence-based methods do.

Some SPI advocates acknowledge this. "Smart Policing will benefit an entire community, not only through cost-savings and improvements to criminogenic problems, but also through the promotion of a sense of community and collaboration."

If done well, I think this is where SPI might flourish. Not just by promoting a sense of community. Rather, like SafeGrowth, by re-creating it and growing it from the ground up. McKnight and Kretzman describe this in Building Communities From The Inside Out.

Community capacity-building isn't an add-on after number-crunching is complete. It's not a tactic for strategic managers to craft their evidence-based plans. It is the very DNA of safe communities.

To ignore that DNA is to risk being haunted by ghosts of our past.

The power of few - Part 1

2011-05-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

The newest batch of NYPD recruits

Some criminologists believe a small number of places or people cause disproportionate crime. I wrote on this recently regarding Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto and chronic offenders in Vancouver.

For example, Professor Lawrence Sherman now shows up on YouTube with the title, How Criminology Can Save States from Bankruptcy.

He says preventing crime is not about expanding prisons. It's about targeted incapacitation of the chronic few and reinvesting in crime prevention.

Sherman claims we'll be better off encouraging governments to "cut the prison population, save that money and invest in local policing".

He's right about misspent funds. I'm just not sure policing is where the money should go.

For example, in Toronto collective bargainers raised the police budget to almost $1 Billion dollars for 5,700 sworn cops (compared to the 2010 NYPD budget of $4.3 Billion for 47,000 cops). No doubt police there do many positive things. But it is worth $1 Billion?

TARNISHED BADGE?

Lately, the Toronto badge is a tad tarnished by scandals like the G20 fiasco, slut walks, and race issues.

To be fair, controversy is no stranger to policing anywhere. Yet spending just under $1 Billion for the 2011 police budget begs the question, What's our return on investment?

On one hand, Toronto has a persistent low crime rate compared to large US cities. On the other hand, crime rate drops are ubiquitous. It's unlikely Toronto's police budget is responsible for dropping crime - similar drops are underway everywhere, including cities where police budgets are not growing, like New York.

Consider also worsening Toronto social ills such as vertial poverty that feeds crime, rising gun violence, and persistent street gangs.

Are we really getting bang for our prevention buck?

Toronto Police in the late 1800s

Criminologist Irvin Waller thinks not. He says it is municipal governments themselves who need direct accountability and more competency in crime prevention.

That begins with re-allocating who should direct and administer prevention and justice funds. Unlike Sherman, Waller doesn't seem to think policing is where the money should go.

In Less Law, More Order, Waller claims that

"Americans believe two to one that more money and effort should go into education and job training than deterring crime by paying for more police, prisons and judges...the majority believe that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

If only our decision-makers would listen.

NEXT: What criminology can offer

Solving vertical poverty

2011-05-22T12:30:00.000-07:00

What happens when you build low income residential units upwards and not outwards? Those familiar with CPTED will recall Oscar Newman's Defensible Space work in the 1970s and 1960s describing how this is usually a bad idea.

In places that do just that sort of thing like New York, Chicago and Toronto, you end up with vertical poverty.

The United Way in Toronto has just released a fascinating study called Vertical Poverty documenting disparity in 3-D urban space. Toronto has for decades tried to make the sprawling and cost inefficient suburbs more efficient with high rise residential. Vertical Poverty tells one chapter in that sad tale.

It also describes the San Romanoway apartments solution that led to some of the earliest breakthroughs in SafeGrowth. Check it out HERE.

Sidewalk sleeping in Toronto

2011-05-14T11:30:00.000-07:00

I'm with a Jeckel-and-Hyde Toronto this week. Like many successful cities, in some places there are vibrant and hip streets that absolutely fizzle with energy. In others, the homeless and indigent remind us nowhere is perfect.

Homelessness shows up in my SafeGrowth blogs on Vancouver, Seattle, and Houston.

...ignored in Toronto

I've also posted local solutions to homelessness in Portland and Colorado.

Walking downtown Toronto this week I saw more absolute homelessness than I've seen in a long time in this city.

In 1998 mayors across Canada declared homelessness a national disaster. Since then it hasn't improved. In many other countries, like the US, it is even worse.

In 2008 the University of Ottawa's Institute for the Prevention of Crime published a study called Homelessness, Victimization and Crime: Knowledge and Recommendations - a rather sterile title that seems to understate the tragic drama of an ignored person asleep on a sidewalk grate.

Luckily the report thoroughly lays out the dimensions of homelessness for Canada and urban places everywhere.

It reveals how homeless people are more likely to become involved in, and victims of, crime (mostly minor crime like public disorder). And while many homeless are incarcerated, a high proportion suffer from mental disorders and addictions rarely treated in the prison system.

...ignored in front of City Hall

The report offers up solutions like housing, shelters, social assistance, mental health treatment, and addiction programs. It offers controversial solutions like repealing laws that prohibit children with behavioral problems from attending mainstream schools. (It's those same kids who end up on the street.)

Sadly, as a walk in downtown Toronto and most other large urban cities confirms, four years after their report too many downtown streets are still the home of sidewalk sleepers.

Solutions on the page do nothing for tragedy on the stage. We need to do more.

Read their report HERE.

[NOTE: SafeGrowth's host site, Google's Blogger, has been offline this week for repairs]

The cult of the mouse - Celebration

2011-05-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

Idyllic design does not eradicate crime

This week I visited a lovely central Florida town. Annual family income: twice the Florida average. Poverty rate: same as similar towns elsewhere. Crime rate: low. (It did recently suffer it's first murder in 14 years and another troubled fellow committed suicide).

Of 100 homes sold this past year 40% were foreclosures, just like other towns suffering the Great Recession.

For a small town this is all fairly typical, except for one thing. This town is the world-famous, Disney-built, Celebration.

This is a model of new urbanism, a place of NY Times feature stories, and a place where best selling books are written.

Truman and Stepford's wives would love Celebration

Celebration is a cultural archetype; think films like Stepford Wives and The Truman Show. One Celebration street runs straight into Disney World.

Acolytes glorify Celebration as a return to Mayberry. In 2001 the Urban Land Institute called it the "community of the year". They ignored the lack of elected government and the control by a corporation that owns Celebration. Definitely not typical!

Detractors revile Celebration as the cult of the mouse. They describe an "oppressive Declaration of Covenants" restricting political signs, house colors, unruly pets and so on. They ignore that restrictive covenants are common in suburbs everywhere!

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

What I saw:

• A picturesque, downtown and enchanting lakeside boardwalk
• Relaxed strolling areas, rocking chairs, beautiful architecture
• Abundant shoppers and walkers - most, it seemed, were tourists
• No downtown grocery or drug stores (walkability?)
• A closed-down cinema but open ice-cream shoppe
• No visible graffiti or vandalism.

When it comes to urban habitat, we tend to judge everything. Our yardsticks range from aesthetics and walkability to prosperity and safety. By some measures (aesthetics and environmental sustainability here versus gas-guzzling suburbs) Celebration succeeds over other places. By other measures, less so.

Celebration offers a special kind of lifestyle choice. Some would not choose it. Others would.

It's fascinating. I've blogged before about urban scale and crime. As the recent murder and suicide confirm, idyllic large-scale design cannot eradicate all social ills. Yet I would probably try living there.

At least for awhile.

The future

2011-04-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

The study of the future

You may have noticed in these blogs my intrigue about the future. I believe thinking about the future is not only entertaining, but it is useful for visioning better forms of social life.

In architecture and planning I've more than once blogged on this:

Organic architecture
The Venus Project
The Rio Olympics
The archology of Arcosante
Project H\

A similar movement exists in policing. It is called the Police Futurists International (PFI)

PFI is an excellent organization in which I briefly participated in the recent past. PFI founder Bill Tafoya, an old friend, has been a pioneer in futures research for awhile. The Police Futures Working group is another leading organization thinking about directions for the future.

Check them out!

The story of dangling shoes

2011-04-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

Scene from "New York's Hanging Sneakers"

Why do people toss shoes over power and telephone lines?

Urban legend (and one of my own former blogs...oops!) suggests it's to mark illegal drug sale locations or gang activity. Really? I have dangling shoes in my community and yet we have no gang activity and practically no street drug sales.

A terrific new BBC documentary, New York's Hanging Sneakers, aired recently and discovered no clear answer. Drug deal locations are only one of many possible reasons.

A recent article in the Toronto Star followed four cases of dangling shoes and found four different stories - none conclusive.

In New York, dangling shoe mock-ups are the new urban chic

Cops typically describe dangling shoes and drug sales as urban myth. In the Toronto Star article one Toronto drug cop says, in his experience, the drug explanation is bunk. That's neither scientific nor surprising. Obviously drug dealers would spend only a very short time near their dangling shoe marker and probably depart long before cops figure it out.

To complicate matters, dangling shoes can mean anything from a local fad, a prank, drug activity or the death of a gang member. Snopes.com confirms the multiple explanation theory, a theory that started in 1996 when one writer described 14 different possibilities.

Truth is, it depends. It depends on street culture. It depends on the prevalence of gangs. It depends on bored local youth. Truth is, without a proper CPTED risk assessment, you can only guess. And as we know in prevention, guessing is never a good idea.

Frank Lloyd Wright's reminder - Beauty Matters

2011-04-14T00:59:00.000-07:00

Inside the Taliesin School of Architecture

I recently visited Taliesin West, famed American architect Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and school of architecture in Phoenix. It showcases his ideas for using local materials, linking outdoors with indoors and what he called organic architecture. Always interested in shaping buildings for the human experience, Wright's designs probably gave life to our modern demand for human scale streetscapes.

When it comes to urban design, scale is everything. It shows up in my blogs on large-scale planning and the freedom of performance-based zoning. It shows up at the opposite end when the Design Against Crime crowd re-think small-scale items like benches and ATM mats.

Nowhere is the importance of scale more obvious than in the lifelong work of famed American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Irregular and interesting shapes break the monotony of right angles

Wright is an icon. Between 1893 and 1957 his work firmly positioned him atop the American architectural scene. He rebelled against staid European traditions of the previous century and sought to create a brand new American architecture.

Except for one thankfully forgotten book (Broadacre City) he rarely overstepped his skills into large scale planning. There are some cranky critics (like me) who think his clumsy planning ideas in Broadacre City are culpable for the incomprehensible spaghetti-style road shapes and acres of monotonous single-family lots in today's suburbs.

That one leap in scale was a rare blemish in a tapestry of design innovation and pure architectural genius. It's kind of like hearing for the first time Mahatma Gandhi was cruel to his wife in his early years. It doesn't jive with the greater picture of a hero even though it may be true.

Scale, truly, is everything.

If you haven't visited Taliesin West - do so! Wright reminds us why we need beauty in our cities.

Forts, Shannon Gilbert, and a serial killer

2011-04-05T23:56:00.000-07:00

Shannon Gilbert

Sometime during the evening of May 1, 2010, a young woman named Shannon Gilbert, ran away from a house party in a neighborhood of Oak Park, NY. Later that night, she was stalked by someone in a SUV and ran to another home in that same neighborhood screaming "they're after me".

Since then police looking for Shannon have found the bodies of eight young women nearby, apparent victims of the so-called Craig's List serial killer. Shannon has not been found.

Some reports say Shannon was a prostitute hired to work that night. Others say she was bi-polar and a drug addict. Criminologists tell us high risk lifestyles are a factor in murder. All those things might be true. Of all the things that matter most, those things don't.

What matters most is Shannon deserved protection from violence and harm. How do we get that protection?

Shannon may have been "on the job", but she wasn't on the street. The Oak Park house Shannon fled was in a gated community.

Gated communities - sometimes called "master planned communities"

Gated communities, or master-planned communities, have a notorious history. A decade ago planners Blakely and Snyder claimed 8 million Americans lived in gated communities (GCs). In Fortress America, they wrote gated residents are "retreating from their neighbors by locking themselves behind security controlled walls, gates and barriers."

Some GCs sell exclusive enclaves of leisure and prestige. Most sell the promise of neighborhood defense and suburban security.

Research suggests GCs offer no more security, possibly less, than well run, crime prevention programs.

Shannon's story suggests this is true.

A millennia ago Feudal Europe forted up in hundreds of walled, medieval castles. Robin Hood (at least in my childhood imagination) saw forts as protection for those with power and oppression for those without. Back then democracy did not exist. It was also an age that offered up the Black Plague.

One hopes we have progressed since then.

One wonders.

May Shannon be found safe.

Magic carpets?

2011-03-31T22:54:00.000-07:00

Privacy mats for ATM safety

Sometimes things come along that are…well, just plain cool.

I've written before about the design against crime movement in the UK. They have shown us how to use inventive ergonomic design to curb bad behavior, reduce loitering on public benches and cut crime at bike racks.

My friend and colleague, UK professor Lorraine Gamman, recently sent photos of her talented colleagues work at the Design Against Crime Research Centre in London. They have come up with a method to cut ID theft (shoulder surfing) and ATM crime through a privacy mat.

It's simple enough. Stick a 3M mat to demarcate territory around ATM machines. Says one article, the mats can "be laid directly onto pavements or the floors of shopping centers. They take just 20 minutes to lay and no planning permission if they unbranded." People are "controlled" through subtle messaging to keep far enough away to protect your PIN and far enough to make it difficult to snatch and run with your cash.

More on privacy mats in the upcoming issue of CPTED Perspective

It won't stop everyone, but I'm told it seems to work. Why?

The first thing you learn in CPTED is something called proxemics - how people use their own sense of personal space to ensure their privacy. That subtle messaging is precisely what privacy mats accomplish, albeit in a subtle and inexpensive fashion.
I've said before territoriality doesn't happen without social capital.

When it comes to small scale design, it seems I'm wrong.

According to one European ATM security survey, over 85% of respondents indicate privacy spaces help reduce crime at ATMs. Loraine tells me more rigorous evaluation research is underway.

Like I said - simple, cheap and effective.

Cool!

From desolate to dynamic - northeast Philadelphia

2011-03-24T00:37:00.000-07:00

Scene from Desolate to Dynamic

"If it wasn't for the recreation programs, where would the kids be other than hanging out on the corner, selling drugs?" [Daniel Clark, neighborhood recreational organizer, Philadelphia]

Exactly right, Daniel!

Eastern north Philadelphia is a "community service desert" with few recreation centers or playgrounds. With a quarter million residents, it is less a neighborhood and more a mini-city of rich and poor. For much of it, years of divestment have left few services for kids and families. Handball courts are rare and parks, obsolete. One community worker claims there are 40,000 vacant and blighted properties.

The asset map below shows only 5 community asset hotspots (in black). They are surrounded by large swaths (in grey and white) where few community services exist anywhere within walking distance.

Asset map showing lack of services

In such a place it can be easy to lose hope. Unsurprisingly crime flourishes in such places.

Last year, as part of a larger neighborhood redevelopment project underway, I worked with LISC and ran a SafeGrowth training. I met remarkable community development workers in the training. They chose field projects to improve the quality and safety of depleted services in northeast Philadelphia, particularly a local handball court.

The LISC Community Safety Initiative website describes what happened next. Click HERE.

Local playgrounds, shown above, were in need of care and repair. This month they released a video describing how their work is turning the desolate to dynamic.

In the video you'll note that the transformation unfolds during a time of stark budgets. According to program officers the city has "a capital-spending program that is barely large enough to maintain existing facilities, much less build new ones."

Still, they find paths forward. If you want to see them, check out their video from Desolate to Dynamic HERE.

The best part of the video was Kiki, listening to this charming young lady and watching her amazing basketball skills.

I've said it before about youth in the city - it's kids like Kiki who will show us the way forward.

Safe Alex - Eyes on the prize in Alexandria LA

2011-03-20T01:46:00.000-07:00

Alexandria, LA on the south bank of the Red River, Perego Realty photo

I've always been frustrated by top-down, bureaucratic logjams and academic abstractions in crime prevention practice. SafeGrowth counters that by targeting neighborhood assets, partnering community groups with police, and using prevention science.

I presented SafeGrowth last December at a public summit in the city of Alexandria, Louisiana. Alexandria has now set the stage to do exactly that. They call it Safe Alex.

Alexandria has been aiming to cut it's high crime rate for a few years. Two weeks ago Mayor Jacques Roy launched the Safe Alex program at a public forum I helped facilitate. It was an exciting event with terrific response. A new team of local residents and experts will lead the charge. Still, the way ahead will not be without hurdles,

One hurdle arose in a newspaper editorial. "Safe Alex attempts to seed a new sense of responsibility in a crime-ridden neighborhood," it says, "and then, over time, grow different behavior to achieve new, positive results."

True.

It concludes: "The idea is laudable, but it will not take root under current conditions. When a house is on fire, you call firefighters and pump water until it's out. The police should lead the crime prevention effort, not the community."

Not quite.

Unlike a house fire, high crime neighborhoods rarely combust from simple factors, like bad wiring. They combust from years of social and economic decay, family breakdown, gangs, drugs, and so forth. Police can momentarily tamp the flames with enforcement.

Yet enforcement is only the first step. In an Op-Ed response last week I replied, "The faith in targeted interventions and zero tolerance is a case of myth over the reality. Cookie cutter strategies do not work."

You can find my Op-Ed response HERE.

Police may even sprinkle some water on combustible causes with situational prevention or problem-solving tactics. Of course as Gerry Cleveland said in a guest blog two years ago, aside from enforcement, police are not the only one's who can lead that.

So too can functional neighborhood groups partnered with the police. Especially if taught how, those groups are more familiar with local assets to remove the causes of crime combustibility. And they are more likely to take personal, long-term ownership in the solution.

That is the prize on which we must keep our eyes.

The Venus Project

2011-03-14T02:26:00.000-07:00

The Venus Project design for a water city

When I first saw Jacques Fresco's futuristic designs I thought of the 1960s architecture called Doo-Wop found occasionally in real life (think Saarinen's TWA Flight Center at JFK) but more commonly in The Jetsons.

You just know something interesting and provocative is underway when new age and rap groups alike write songs of the same visionary. Primitive Soul wrote Come Tomorrow - The Ballad of Jacques Fresco, a new age musical history for this little known social reformer.

Conversely, Lost Children of Babylon's The Venus Project use Fresco's project name to title their signature rap album.

Then there are films, documentaries, books and tours - virtually all by countries outside the U.S. Except for one documentary newscast we know little about this domestic urban visionary. How is this possible when he has been designing new kinds of cities, transport systems, underwater habitats, and futuristic buildings for decades?

In the Venus Project mag lev trains replace highway traffic. In real life Shanghai's 310 mph high-speed mag lev train was inaugurated in 2005.

Fresco's signature work, The Venus Project, comprises 10 buildings on his central Florida property where he gives tours and shows his design models. Fresco portrays a similar environmental sustainability imperative found in Paulo Solari's Arcosanti.

Fresco adds a stinging critique of our monetary system and suggests we get rid of it. Considering the suffering caused from this Global Recession, it's a tantalizing thought.

Labelled neo-communist and attacked as anti-liberty (he's neither) it's as though critics can't figure how to prop up their own views in the radical face of his.

Fresco suggests we more rigorously apply the scientific method to social concerns. Sounds reasonable. The website says the most "valuable, untapped resource today is human ingenuity." No argument here.

When he calls for abandoning money and eliminating the professions it sounds like fun (though I suspect a tad challenging in real life).

No matter.

Sometimes what matters most with visionaries is the canvas they paint and the view it offers of the future.

City of the future?

Political revolt - Middle east splendor

2011-03-08T23:55:00.000-08:00

World's tallest building. Icon to the future.

This week we watch political revolt sweeping the Middle East and we scarcely think of urban spectacle and splendor. It's a twist of history that some of the grandest construction projects ever built (the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge) were constructed during the worst years of the Great Depression.

It's a twist long forgotten in the west but now being reborn in the Middle East.

At 2,717 feet, and taller than any human-made structure, the Burj Kalifa is the world's biggest skyscraper. Completed in January, 2010 it dwarfs former titans in China (Canton Tower at 1,968 feet) and Toronto (CN Tower at 1,815).

Designed by Americans and built by South Koreans, it is a monument to power and urban spectacle.

Tallest structures in the world

The Burj Khalifa is in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Not far away the region continues to explode this week with social upheaval. The global financial crisis has also been unkind to Dubai. Foreclosures and vacancies knocked the financial stuffing out of the Burj last year. Dubai, for that matter, nearly went broke but for a bailout by neighbor city Abu Dhabi.

Yet the Burj truly is magnificent architecture. Economic crash aside, the government clearly wants to rise as high above oil dependency as the Burj rises from the ground below. It wants to create a luxurious tourist Mecca in the desert.

In a blog last year I wished everyone could visit the world's largest, and most beautiful, musical water fountain at the base of the Burj. Now my wish is for the whole region to rise high above the violence they now suffer to find the peace and safety we all deserve.

The Dubai Fountain and the World's tallest building

Transforming the police - Part 2

2011-02-21T01:30:00.000-08:00

Scene from "PTO is the Answer"

The last blog was on change. A gulf exists today between two policing styles. The Back to the Future crowd want traditional roles: just the facts ma'am; answer-the-call-and-move-on; tactics and weapons. I call them Combat Cops (no slight of professional military is intended).

Combat cops live in a past long gone. They cling to a simplicity that was never there. In the 9/11 era, this style receives funding and attention. I have blogged on this HERE.

Conversely the problem-solving crowd wants critical thinkers. Emergency response is balanced with finding community partners to solve difficult crime problems. I call them the Community Cops.

Why does this matter?

Over a hundred police agencies have adopted the new police training officer program (PTO) described in the previous blog. Over the years a few agencies have dropped PTO. Sometimes they were combat cop agencies. Sometimes they were taken over by leaders sympathetic to combat cop values. In every case they offered up sneers for PTO unaware that isn’t the same as offering up a legitimate critique.

This is dangerous to community safety. Why?

A University of Illinois PTO evaluation study discovered that survey respondents who rejected PTO were worried about the "development of a soft or kind and gentle officer":

"Survey and focus group respondents reported a preference for the officer who responds to a call, prescribes guidance, and serves as report takers, not an officer who collaborates with members of the community or utilizes its resources to solve problems."

What?

You mean like in the 1960s, the good old days of Dragnet? Or, perhaps Terminator 3: The Rise of The Machines?

Dichotomies are fictions. There are critical thinkers who retain tactical skills and combat cops who solve problems. The danger here lies in a pendulum swinging toward the latter and away from the former.

Police leaders in the video PTO is the answer, get how PTO strikes a balance. They get how powerful values (combat vs community) derail forward motion. Far too many executives don't. They cling to the past.

The Police Society for Problem Based Learning promotes PTO

Research about PTO and video testimonials isn't enough to convince Combat Cops. As Rick Shenkma says in Just How Stupid Are We? given the choice between a harsh truth and a comforting myth, most people will choose the latter.

Two of the leaders in the video have retired (Reno’s Ronald Glensor and Charlotte’s Darryl Stevens). Reno’s current Chief will be gone next month. What will happen next? Which path will the next regime follow?

Transforming the police - Part 1

2011-02-16T13:38:00.000-08:00

Reno Gazette-Journal photo of Chief Steve Pitts

Building safer communities has many dimensions. Police leadership is one of them. I've blogged recently about one excellent example: Indian police Chief Kiran Bedi.

Here's another.

Next month, Reno Police Chief Steve Pitts retires from duty. So what! Police executives retire every day and drop off the public radar screen. Why should we care?

Unlike TV's RENO 911, the real Reno police have been progressively reforming into a community-based, problem-solving agency. A decade ago myself and Gerry Cleveland worked with Pitts (then Lieutenant) and his colleagues to create a new recruit field training program called Police Training Officer (PTO). Technical aspects of the program are described HERE.

A new video has been released called PTO is the answer. It provides testimonials from leading police executives about PTO success.

In the video, Louisville Police Chief Robert White says:

The whole premise behind policing, as far as I'm concerned, is crime prevention and the key to that is to have a relationship with the community…the PTO program with its core values, speaks to the importance of working with the community and making them part of the solution.

To provide scientific evidence, Pat Rushing at the University of Illinois is conducting a PTO Evaluation Study on the impact of PTO. Her preliminary results are remarkable.

PTO officers in her study were able to think creatively, solve problems in their community, complete their duties going beyond the basics and follow-up with members of the community. They searched for non-traditional solutions knowing they had the latitude to do so. Above all that, she writes, PTO turns out to serve as good leadership training.

Those familiar with traditional field training systems will appreciate the vast contrast between these PTO results and what is currently offered elsewhere. Since 2005, PTO has now led to a new transformation in police academy training called Police PBL: Blueprint for the 21st Century.

All good news, right? Not quite. So what's the problem? In short, fear. Specifically, fear of change. The departure of executives like Pitts leaves a vacuum too often filled by a new breed who return Back to the Future. That is dangerous.

We wish you well Steve Pitts. We just wish we didn't have to lose an ally.

Next blog: Where's the danger?

Stumble Safely! Crime maps to the rescue?

2011-02-11T00:47:00.000-08:00

Morning sun in Washington, DC

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."

Websites to prevent crime?

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.

Seen and Heard: Kids in the City

2011-02-07T00:35:00.000-08:00

A scene from Seen and Heard

Last spring I mentioned the film Radiant City, a documentary about the plight of kids in the suburbs.

I just watched another about kids in other parts of the city. The film is by Demos a UK-based think tank on social and political affairs. Their YouTube Seen and Heard says it all. Click HERE to view it.

I rarely see young people at conferences, public meetings, or workshops that I attend. When I ask why I'm met with silence. When I ask for their inclusion in a fun and engaging way, I'm usually met by the question: But this isn't for kids!

Really? Then why does so much of our planning, policing, and crime prevention work circle around them?

Demos claims over 70% of today’s adults played outside on the streets as kids. Only 21% of today’s kids do. True, they may be too obsessed with texting, cells, and other virtual places. Then again, a galaxy of creative talent builds interesting and fun adventures in that virtual space. By contrast, only a microscopic dot of creative talent goes into building equally interesting and fun places for kids in our public realm.

Young people in the public realm? Bleak stats

Says Demos: Public space is failing our younger generation. "Those responsible for making playful places find it difficult to work together and struggle to engage with children properly"

A month or so ago myself and a half dozen local residents watched a TED.com show at a nearby community high school with 20 teens and their teachers. We listened to experts talk on the environment, education, and other topics after which we took turns sharing thoughts and ideas. They had great ideas, great frustrations, and great energy.

In short, there was no lack of creative talent. All that makes me ask this: If our public space is failing our young people, shouldn't we be asking them how to fix it?

Rio and the Olympics - Designs for the Future?

2011-02-03T23:21:00.000-08:00

Cities of the future?

Will the future look like this?

Story 1 is that the future is already here - it's just unevenly distributed and still emerging. Story 2 is a Mad Max dystopia where a new dark age returns to haunt us with religious and ideological barbarism.

I'm an optimist, so I choose more chapters from Story 1 than Story 2 (although unrest and riots in Egypt this week demonstrate how quickly the plot changes).

Sometimes large global events trigger futuristic imaginations, the Rio 2016 Olympics and 2014 FIFA Cup for example. In preparation, Brazilian police are gradually winning "pacification battles" against gangsters in the squalid, gang fortified shantytowns of Rio.

All this is preparation for some remarkable futuristic designs, including this solar tower/waterfall/landmark.

The beauty of design-the beast of favelas

The Solar CIty Tower is a design proposal and, while it's a long way from being actually built, it sure looks interesting. If chosen it will generate energy for both the Olympic city and also Rio itself after the Olympics. It makes solar energy during the day with water turbines and the surplus energy pumps sea water over the tower exterior giving the effect of a giant, beautiful waterfall. The falling water is also used by turbines to produce energy at night.

That is a fascinating future: Ingenuity, beauty, and environmental sustainability.

The proposed Solar Tower from the beaches of Rio

Public walking areas on the tower

One hopes they find equally ingenuous and sustainable solutions for the poor, gang-controlled favelas of Rio.

Solving the city with math?

2011-01-31T02:28:00.000-08:00

Solving city problems: math or hard work?

Click your heels - solve the city! If only math solved our problems so simply. The TV program Numbers will have us believe it is possible.

I just read a fascinating story in the New York Times magazine (December 17, 2010) about Geoffrey West, a retired physicist - "A Physicist Solves the City."

Every now and then a thinker from one field jumps into another. Sometimes the field-jumper creates new genius, such as Gavin Menzies the ex-submarine commander who posed a new history of how the European Renaissance was ignited by a Chinese fleet in his best-seller 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (2002).

Other times the field-jumper creates Frankenstein. Such is case with ex-lawyer and amateur anthropologist Madison Grant who wrote The Passing of the Great White Race (1916) to explain white racial superiority. Hitler based Mein Kampf on that pseudo-scientific nonsense.

It's too early to tell which version emerges in Solving the City. Ex-physicists West and Luis Bettencourt apply a mathematics known as “superlinear scaling,” to explain patterns in large cities. Superlinear scaling is not dissimilar to threshold theory in criminology proposed in 1994 to predict tipping points in crime areas.

“What we found are the constants that describe every city,” says West. “I can take these laws and make precise predictions about the number of violent crimes… I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it."

West sees cities as a sprawling, uncontrollable organism (though apparently, a predictable one. It's a fascinating paradox unanswered in the Times story).

The City - An urban ecosystem

West joins a long line of urban thinkers who express the belief that cities are a kind of urban ecosystem, thinkers such as Jane Jacobs and Amos Hawley.

Human ecology is, incidentally, the same theoretical proposition on which SafeGrowth is based.

Solving the puzzle of how cities "work" with the mathematics of superlinear scaling sounds simplistic and naive. Then again, my favorite West quote makes me think he may be on to something:

“Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive.”

That's the same thing Richard Florida suggests through his "creative class".

Read the article on West HERE.

The Soft Cage - Surveillance in America

2011-01-26T23:12:00.000-08:00

A community-led CCTV control room from Joseph Morales presentation at ICA

I just finished reading the 2004 book, Christian Parenti's The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror. It shows how public surveillance started with a trickle and turned into a torrent. While generally well-written, he lapses into some obtuse theory and heavy-handed politics. Still, the message is worth the torment.

Parenti starts by echoing a common sentiment: "what harm is caused by the proliferation of everyday surveillance?" He ends by concluding: "There are risks in social anonymity, but the risks of an omniscient and omnipotent state and corporate power are far worse."

The story travels the fascinating, historical journey of surveillance: metal slave tags during the antebellum years, the birth of the mug shot, biometrics and face-recognition technology, DNA fingerprinting, invasive Internet cookies and so forth.

I was especially fascinated by the sections on CCTV. TV's NCIS will have us believe Big Brother can see all. Parenti's research suggests there is a reality gap the size of the Grand Canyon when it comes to the effectiveness of existing CCTV technology. Still, it proliferates. Over 30% of American high schools have CCTV. Like a growing number of other cities, Washington DC Police use cameras for surveillance of public streets.

Then there is the UK! I've reported in previous blogs about millions of CCTV in British cities, London's Ring of Steel, and the role of CCTV in the crime triangle.

Parenti claims those millions of cameras scanning for decades haven't caught a single terrorist and are still a threat to civil liberties. Findings like this make Soft Cage a worthy read.

Conceptually, Parenti draws on the unintelligible, circular theories of French historian Michael Foucault.

One painful sample: the fetishism of home security, while clearly being about actual security and target-hardening, is also a cargo cult of individual defense against social disintegration of the sort described by Katz [where] imaginary, or magical, forms of agency are acted out in the face of massive and nebulous threats.

Apparently Parenti has never been victim of a home invasion or burglary.

He also makes some fundamental errors such as misidentifying Oscar Newman as a promoter of target hardening and completely missing the entire crime prevention through environmental design movement. It would seem fiscal cost cutting at Soft Cage publisher Basic Books ran too deep in their editing and fact-checking departments.

The book could also use updating. I'm thinking of Joseph Morales and his presentation Not Quite Amish at last year's ICA CPTED conference. Joseph described how his community organization democratized public CCTV and became an effective crime prevention tool.

Overall, Soft Cage is worth the read. Surveillance has its place. We just have to make sure we choose the right place. Books like this help us choose.

Oz Graff and Banksy

2011-01-22T20:44:00.000-08:00

Stencil graffiti can be annoying and funny at the same time

This week I'm at the University of Sydney, Australia for a Crime and SafeGrowth workshop.

It gives me a chance to wander the streets of this beautiful city and compare it to my experience last year and a decade ago. In 1998 Sydney was a city of graffiti. Last year, not so much. Much has happened in Sydney, and in the world of graffiti, in the past year.

Some of the trends appeared in blogs I've written on train graffiti, murals, and the ICA Graffiti Guidebook.

Graffiti is called graff by practitioners of this underground über-chic, street artists, wanna-be street artists, and just plain sweaty vandals. Graff is pandemic in both virtual and real space all over the world.

Take for example the stencil graffiti trend started by Britain's anarchist Robin Hood, Banksy. Stencil graffiti now makes appearances in art galleries and in art books. Graff-folk gather on websites to advertise their wares or simply look for cities to "practice". Says a graff-writer in one post:

I'm from Los Anzgeles and will be out in Sydney next week. Although I'm not traveling for graff I would DEFINITELY like to paint while I'm there (as well as stickers)... If anyone can give any info on ANY cool spots to paint as well as GET paint I would greatly appreciate this...

Police and prevention specialists tinker at the edge of graff, sending in the enforcers, writing new laws and installing CCTV. Police map it along with other crimes. But it seems they simply don't get what is going on.

Graffiti mapping in Sydney, Australia

In Sydney, like elsewhere, traditional enforcement tactics hold back the tide: anti-graffiti teams, resistant sprays, CPTED lighting, and so forth (probably why graffiti has somewhat declined in Sydney).

The truth is, like most large cities, in Sydney resistant pockets flourish - some interesting and inventive, most just blight. Example: Around Sydney's central train station where CCTV watched everywhere, I counted 31 public murals, every one graffitied.

Most public murals are not graffitied. Then again, these were not "community-based" murals painted by local artists. They looked corporate, perhaps designed by city or train station officials.

Banksy's documentary film, Exit Through The Gift Shop premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year. It is well done, glorifies the good, bad and ugly, but more importantly it provides insight; insight we need to better understand the future of the public realm. To watch a clip, click HERE,

It also suggests to some degree, like it or not, the once-maligned is now going mainstream.

The Roseto Effect

2011-01-11T03:13:00.000-08:00

Gladwell's contribution to the community discussion

Recently my urban planning colleague Megan Carr sent a story of a remarkable town a hundred miles west of New York. The close-knit, Italian-American inhabitants named the town after their ancestral home in Italy. It is a small town with a strong sense of community. It also has a special kind of story; for a very long time it had a virtual absence of heart disease. As it adopted modern habits, it fell from grace somewhat. But even today, it remains remarkable.

The town is called Roseto. It is well known in medical circles as the Roseto Effect.

The public most recently came to know Roseto because of a story in Malcolm Gladwell's fascinating book "Outliers: the story of success".

In a November speech Gladwell describes Roseto in which one researcher:

"realized he’d stumbled on a place where the sense of community was so strong, and so powerful, and so supportive, that it enabled people who lived there to effectively deal with the stress of modern life and live a kind of magical life. They had created community bonds that were so extraordinary that they were able to overcome the pattern of illness and mortality in American life."

It is a great story. It is all about the very things most important to community developers, prevention specialists, police, and anyone else interested in safe places.

Gladwell is clearly an ally of what we are trying to achieve. Read Gladwell's speech HERE.

Catch and release - Swimming upstream in Vancouver

2011-01-05T04:15:00.000-08:00

Vilfredo Pareto's 80/20 Principle

What does a 19th century Italian economist have to do with neighborhood safety? Consider Vilfredo Pareto's principle that the majority of a phenomena can be explained by a minority of causes. Sometimes called the 80/20 Rule, criminology has long demonstrated a small number of chronic offenders cause a significant portion of crime.

Reflecting on my Comstat and police leadership blogs recently, I came across a fascinating news documentary Pareto would have loved. It's called Lock Em Up.

It's about competent policing and quality leadership in an unlikely place - Vancouver, BC. I say unlikely because, with all my harping on the skid row tragedy in that lovely city, one might assume I blame the cops or their chief. Not so. In Vancouver at least, I don't think that's the case. Jim Chu, Vancouver's Chief and their Chronic Offender Unit - COU - have put research to good tactical use. Similar to the Winnipeg auto theft solutions project I mentioned two years ago, this seems like a winning ticket (though, as you'll see below, in Vancouver there is a number missing from their lottery ticket).

A DENT IN CRIME

Property crime is rarely seen as a serious matter, yet it comprises 75 percent of all crime. In 2009 Vancouver had over 21,000 thefts and 5,000 break and enters. As Pareto might warn us, chronic offenders with multiple offenses cause a significant number of those crimes.

What is a chronic offender? Vancouver defines a Chronic as someone with over 39 convictions (that's a lot of convictions). There are also Superchronics, a group with over 79 convictions each. That's convictions, not crimes. They committed far more than that. One offender interviewed in the film below says he has broken into well over 1,000 homes.

How many chronic offenders are there and how many property crimes to they cause in Vancouver?

The COU and the Vancouver Police planning section report that over 5 years, 379 chronic offenders were charged with over 12,000 offenses, roughly 10% of all yearly property crimes. It is of course much higher since chronic offenders were not charged for all of their crime, only a small number. The reality is probably more like 25% - an educated guess I'm sure both Pareto and COU detectives would confirm.

Hidden in Vancouver beauty: 379 offenders = 10%-25% property crime

In other words, out of a half million people only 379 cause between 10% to 25% of all property crime in Vancouver! Their research report is available for review by clicking here.

If there was ever a case where chronic offenders should be removed to protect us, this is it. Remove them for drug treatment, incarceration, or both. But, get them off the street.

What do police do in Vancouver? Since a small number of chronic offenders create a significant portion of crime, police strategies target habitual offenders to break that cycle. Vancouver Chief Jim Chu is behind the approach.

Criminological research, where it is done well, is fairly clear. It shows that arresting Chronics and getting them off the street works, at least until the courts release them again. That's the missing link in this chain - the Vancouver court system, one of the most lenient in Canada. Stunningly, their study showed length of incarceration actually got shorter as the Chronics committed more crime. Worse still, over half of the Superchronics received less than a month in jail - and 25% of the Superchronics received less than a day in jail.

CATCH AND RELEASE

In short, cops caught them so judges could release them. Talk about frustrating! The report says:

as these offenders tend to specialize in low‐level property offences, their sentences tend to be relatively short. These short sentences do not serve to incapacitate them and protect the public for any significant period of time, nor, in most cases, are they long enough to allow for admission into appropriate addiction treatment programs.

Makes one wonder, who are the real culprits? Unaware, ill-considered and lenient judges? That's what the CTV documentary suggests. What about criminologists failing to inform decision-makers? Where is the Canadian research? Of 30 habitual offender studies cited in the report, only 4 were from Canada (two of those were graduate student theses).

As I said in a previous blog, when social tragedies happen like the public housing fiasco in St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe and gang infested Jane-Finch corridor in Toronto, someone is asleep at the wheel.

In Vancouver, it's definitely not the cops.

Arcosanti - Our future?

2010-12-29T15:20:00.000-08:00

Arcologies - a model for a new kind of city

This week we end the first decade of the 21st Century. What does our future hold for safe and vital urban places?

This time of year prognosticators creep out from under crystal balls and offer us variations on Mad Max, Bladerunner, or a United Federation of Planets. Rarely do we get practical, real-life models on what that future might look like in our cities.

Not so for architect Paulo Solari and his urban laboratory called Arcosanti. This week I re-visited this futuristic arcology in the Arizona desert.

Arcologies show up in popular fiction such as William Gibson's Zero Count, and Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty.

It's where the future noir sci-fi film Bladerunner took inspiration for the Tyrell megacorporation HQ (now a popular staple in cyberpunk literature).

Arcosanti is the first-ever model of an arcology. Real-life versions are now planned near Abu Dhabi (Masdar City) and near Shanghai (Dongtan - halted during the recession).

Touring the real arcology is much more modest than the visions

Arcosanti was the first - an urban laboratory for creating lean alternatives to sprawl. Arcologies are future cities that fuse architecture and ecology. While 60 percent of land in today's city is for cars, roads, and auto services, a similar sized archeology eliminates the car entirely within the city. Since arcological land development grows 3-D (upwards as well as outwards) no place is farther than a half mile from the natural environment - rivers, lakes, trails, agricultural fields, forests. That is, no farther for all city dwellers, not just the privileged few.

When I went to criminology grad school I learned nothing about futures like this. There was plenty of abstract theorizing in windowless rooms. But few of the theorizers had the foggiest about crime in such future places. Classes were blind to the crime potential in the future.

I originally traveled to Arcosanti 18 years ago and took a course in arcological design. I learned how it was possible to place living, working and public spaces within easy walking distance. I asked Paulo Solari what he thought about crime and prevention in such a place. He told me the future residents would need to create their own methods - he was the piano maker, not the piano player.

Lunch at Arcosanti

At the time that seemed reasonable. Architects cannot account for every social eventuality. Still, as we know in CPTED, criminologists, planners, and architects were sound asleep in the 1950s when modernism led to public housing like the crime infested Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis and the San Romanoway apartments in Toronto.

Clearly we must tread carefully.

While futuristic thinking may be difficult - and futuristic modeling rare - we owe much to visionaries like Paulo Solari for helping us to think ahead in a bold, new way.

If you want to learn more about arcology as planning for the future, read Arcosanti: An Urban Laboratory.

And...Happy New Year.

"I dare" - an antidote to the naysayers

2010-12-22T21:34:00.000-08:00

Autobiography of Kiran Bedi

As we saw in my recent blogs of New York's Comstat program, police leadership can make a difference in community safety. But what does excellent leadership look like? How about the fIrst female police officer, and police chief, in India - Kiran Bedi! Watch Kiran in her TED.com presentation this month. See it HERE.

Naysayers whine: "Look what happened to her, she didn't last!" Didn't last? For decades she worked on the streets and in the police organization to make things better. How much more can we ask?

Naysayers complain: "But she didn't change Indian society! What is different?" Change India? Even Mahatma Gandhi didn't do that. But he, and she, have made a huge difference.

Naysayers criticize: "The statistics from her prison reforms didn't get better under her rule!" It's important to remember statistics are not always used in the service of honesty.

What is the truth about the first woman police officer in India? Who is this leader? What can she teach us about policing, crime prevention, and being a decent human being?

Always the naysayers. It's easy to listen to their lullaby of cynicism. It's easy to miss the point.

Don't be fooled. Find out for yourself.

Helen Mirren narrated a documentary film about this remarkable woman. See a trailer HERE.

Her autobiography is online HERE.

Sunset on the Arabian peninsula

2010-12-19T07:15:00.000-08:00

The world's largest dancing water fountain

Getting people to use public spaces seems like a lost art. There are many ways to create intriguing public spaces. Water is among the best tool. A family member recently sent me a YouTube of the Dubai fountain, the world's largest.

Musical fountains with dancing waters have been around for many years. The most famous stateside is probably the Bellagio Hotel fountain in Las Vegas, made famous by the film Ocean's Eleven.

Not to be outdone, last year the city of Dubai opened the world's biggest fountain with dancing waters. Copying some of the Bellagio's musical themes, the Dubai fountain shoots water 50 storeys high and uses over 6,000 lights.

It is beautiful to watch. For the latest Dubai sunset show, click here.

Untapping kinetic energy - civic potential under the surface

2010-12-15T22:30:00.000-08:00

The SPARC Philosophy - Alexandria, LA

When it comes to community development, it's easy to miss the latent capacity under the surface. I call it social kinetic energy and it's visible only for those who look carefully. Or for those special leaders who make it work. I met one this week.

Case in point: Alexandria, Louisiana.

As with many cities, this community has some terrific areas and wonderful downtown architecture. It also has some not-so-terrific challenges. Between those two polarities are anomalies that often arise in the public realm.

A beautiful streetscaped downtown, but no pedestrians

A street sign meant to protect pedestrians, but blocking the sidewalk forcing them onto the street

It's weird what we do in urban places.

KINETIC ENERGY AND CIVIC POTENTIAL

After my photo tour of surface issues, I attended Alexandria's SPARC planning and safety summit. There I saw fascinating speakers on thoughtful planning. Later I ran a SafeGrowth session and met engaged, committed participants from the community, city hall, police, and others.

Then I met one of those rare leaders committed to making that kinetic energy work - re-elected Mayor Jaques Roy. He absolutely got what SafeGrowth can mean in his community. He is also just the quality of civic leader to muster the community energy to make it happen.

Watch some clips on YouTube.

This is how positive change happens. We need more civic leaders like Mayor Roy!

New chairs at the Comstat table

2010-12-03T11:22:00.000-08:00

The headlines proclaim victory. Are they right?

Last blog I talked about what caused dips in NY crime. There is no doubt something remarkable began in New York during the 1990s. It coincided with a wholesale reform in the New York Police Department. There is doubt whether those reforms caused the crime declines.

In NYPD Battles Crime, Eli Silverman says it was those reforms that did the job. Conversely, in The Great American Crime Decline Franklin Zimring suggests demographics and other factors probably triggered most, but not all, of New York's (and the entire country's) declines.

Most, but not all? He tantalizes us by adding that NYPD's reforms may have accounted for up to 35% of their decline. If that's the case he says, "it would be by far the biggest crime prevention achievement in the recorded history of policing."

There were many parts to those reforms, for example the broken windows theory (which I argue is less a theory and more a group of descriptive symbols). The most famous of those reforms was called Comstat (sometimes called Compstat).

Crime maps are the cornerstone of comstat

Comstat is short for comparison statistics, Comstat uses current crime statistics and maps to hold mid-level supervisors accountable for cutting crime. They do this in regular (sometimes heated) meetings at the Comstat table with the Chief as inquisitor. As my last blog suggests, senior officers often hate being hauled on the Comstat carpet for crime increases.

Today, some police executives have adopted it, such as in New Orleans, while others doubt that it works. Baltimore police suspended it at one point.

Advocates war with critics and journalists eat it up. This is especially the case in recent scandals.

I think sitting at the Comstat table did bring the neighborhood crime pulse to mid-level commanders in a new way. Accountability for crime is not a bad table to sit at even though it is a lopsided table with missing chairs. Why lopsided? Because cops can't do it all.

Police can tackle crime as it happens, catch bad guys on a crime spree, or stem a flow of drugs and gun shootings. Comstat helps them do that better. It's an overdue step forward. Sadly, as with all progress, one step forward can become two steps backwards.

HOLDING THE CENTER?

As Silverman describes, as time went on cops resorted too often on heavy use of force, alienating some of the community. Surveys showed a downturn in public confidence. About the future of Comstat and the leadership reforms Silverman asks: "Can the center hold?"

That's the wrong question. The police are not the center - the community is! Police are untrained to tackle the roots of crime, the social, economic and psychological causes. The comstat table needs chairs for those more able to tackle those roots: non-profits, business associations, faith groups, and community development organizations. Consider the importance of schools, social services, housing, cultural activities, transportation, and investors.

It won't be easy to sit at the same table. Not all crime data and discussions are appropriate in public. Neighborhoods are not always representative or properly organized. For their part police are accustomed to re-acting, not pro-acting. After all, comstat crimes are always after-the-fact (otherwise they wouldn't show up on a crime map). And the Intelligence-Led Policing folk might think of the new chairs as eyes and ears for cops rather than smarter brains for everyone.

Still, because the discussion is difficult doesn't excuse others from the table especially given what's at stake - creating opportunities to develop communities and combine the roots with the branches of the crime tree.

The incoming New Orleans police chief has taken a small step forward by inviting community representatives to observe his comstat meetings.

Geller and Belsky's new book provides a more thorough path to tread

Bill Geller and Lisa Belsky's new book Building Our Way Out of Crime shows what the next step might look like.

Ultimately, when it comes to tackling crime, holding the center is easier when it is more thoroughly and legitimately shared with resourceful hands outside the organization.

Shazam! New York's crime solution?

2010-11-27T01:28:00.000-08:00

For a decade NYPD has claimed credit for lower crime

This week America celebrates Thanksgiving. Among the multitude of things for which to be thankful is lower crime rates than in the 1970s and 1980s. An article in the New York Times says this year the NYPD offer thanks for yet another dip in the annual crime rate. Wonderful. Except for one thing. Crime didn't dip. At least not violent crime.

According to the NYPD 2010 crime stats, murder is up 16% since last year, rapes up 14% and robberies up 5%. Only when combining the violent crime numbers with much more numerous property crime numbers like burglary and larceny, does the crime rate "dip".

Is Thanksgiving the moment when the decade long crime decline finally stalls? It this the turning point for a city once celebrated as poster-child for effective policing? Is this when the Great Recession finally triggers a tidal crime shift from ebb to flow?

The good news? Perspective. Even a 16% increase this year is a light-year away from prior decades. In 1990 New York there were 2,263 murders. In 2009 there were 471. All this in spite of a population increase.

More good news - research from Vera Institute's Michael Jacobson suggests "effective policing in New York has made some difference - even though the statistical effects, if they are there at all, are small." At least some policing strategies have some impact, though it's unclear to what extent NYPD's version of those strategies deserve applause.

The bad news? Cooked books.

COOKED BOOKS

One (admittedly narrow) research survey released last month says retired senior officers are now raising questions on the veracity of NYPD crime stats. That's not new. I remember this kind of thing in some Canadian police organizations 20 years ago. Those familiar with police research have for years read the literature about these kinds of shenanigans - literature politicians tend to ignore.

The most notorious tactic is the Great Reclassification Scam: Crime reports in one category get reclassified into a lower category. Last month's study described how theft reports with expensive stolen items were checked against web sites such as e-Bay to find similar items with lower prices. Stolen items in the reports were repriced with lower values in order to reclassify them from felony grand larcenies (thefts over $1000) down to misdemeanors.

Shazam! Lower felony rates!

Granted, some of the retired senior officers surveyed may have had an axe to grind. Some also offered the slippery ethical reasoning that reclassification scams resulted from pressure to keep improving their crime stats each year.

Interestingly, most officers surveyed said New York was now a safer place and the Compstat strategy, the statistics and management system producing those stats, was partly responsible. As well, other research studies contradict the scam allegations and conclude NYPD stats are generally accurate.

Who to believe? Crime up or down?

Perhaps the more important question is, What did police do differently under Compstat to tackle crime?

Next blog: Compstat!

Small is beautiful

2010-11-23T00:56:00.000-08:00

Night-time Moscow from the International Space Station, NASA photo

When viewed from space, cities look beautiful, exciting and filled with energy. It's easy to forget they even have crime. Those who focus too much on that big picture look for big city solutions with a wide-angle lens.

Close-up, the picture of the city looks very different. Turns out it's the close-up picture with the zoom lens that provides the best opportunities for creating safe places. One example was provided at the ICA CPTED conference by Jim Diers, Seattle's neighborhood guru. His presentation is on-line at the ICA website.

Dead spaces, such as deserted nooks beneath overpasses, are isolated, not maintained, and ideal for drug dealing, robberies, and nefarious crimes. The neighborhood folks in Seattle decided to turn this one into something more interesting and fun.

Underpass no-man's land

After a long public dialogue one favorite design was chosen - the underpass troll. It is today among one of the choice tourist spots to view. It is also far safer than it was.

Re-activating dead spaces with fun, collaborative design

Fine tuned design with collaborative public input can produce beautiful results. Another ingredient for success.

Project H - A starting place

2010-11-16T17:55:00.000-08:00

Low cost playground designs that mesh math skills with physical activity

How do we start community building in a place of rapid decline? How do we create social capital where none appears?

Tough questions. One answer is to learn from others with great ideas. Here is a great idea using community design.

Emily Pilloton is a brilliant, young activist architect (Watch her TED.com video. You'll see what I mean). Her book Design Revolution set the stage for how she works.

She and her partner have now launched the next act: They moved to the poorest county in North Carolina and created Project H Design, a strategy to put their ideas into action.

Emily describes Bertie County, North Carolina as the poster child for the demise of rural America. A place where downtowns are hollowed out - a "rural ghetto" with no shared vision for a collective future.

They have already done some pretty cool things (see photo above) Now they are teaching high school kids how to start transforming their own neighborhood through community design.

There is a New York Times article about it here.

My favorite is her appearance this past January on the comedy show The Colbert Report. Wait for the buffering - it's worth it.

I have added the Project H group website to my LikeMinded list in case you want to follow them. (I do!)

I can't imagine a group more likeminded to SafeGrowth.

The Bonnie and Clyde Effect

2010-11-12T11:01:00.000-08:00

The bullet ridden car of Bonnie and Clyde, 1934

Do bad economies cause crime waves? The infamous Bonnie and Clyde saga in the 1930s happened during the biggest economic downturn in history. It was covered in the national media and it stirred fear of rampant crime. The economy was a mess and more crime comes with it. Gangsters were everywhere. At least that's how the story went.

Whether rampant crime was a reality (it wasn't) didn't seem to matter. It sold lots of papers.

Today we again see local crime stories on the national media during a time of economic challenge. They too stir fear about rampant crime. As before, those stories sell lots of papers (or today's equivalent).

Is crime getting worse with the Great Recession? When they feature horrific local crime stories that convince us we're off to hell in a handbasket, are national news editors getting it right? (Hold the sarcasm. I know that's laughable. Bear with me a moment)

Back in January I wrote about crime rates. Turns out this year's local crime picture has been blurry. Nationally, official crime rates continue their decades long decline. In some cities and regions it is the opposite.

Criminologist James Allan Fox recently told the Huffington Post that economic downturns generally result in some crime increases. Check out the national crime rate store here.

Fox says "there is a connection between an economic downturn and crime: Budget cuts create significant challenges in keeping crime rates low." True, economic downturns tend to correspond with youth crime and street level drug activity. One example is the crack cocaine epidemic during the economic decline of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

On the other hand Criminologist David Kennedy thinks it isn't downturns, but rather boomtimes when crime peaks. "Just look at the 1920's,' he says, "It was a period of booming economic prosperity…and very high crime. The 1950s and 60s were the same. The economy was great, but crime rates rose every single year."

Check out the Huffington Post story here.

Bonnie and Clyde made for readable, and sellable, national news

The Bonnie and Clyde effect blurs what matters most. National, or for that matter citywide, crime rates detract us from getting the job done: the task of building safer communities in our own neighborhoods. Generally speaking, it is crime in our own neighborhoods that matters. It is fear of crimes elsewhere that keep us inside. National news stories on horrific local crimes tell us nothing about our neighbors and less about our local safety.

Who, I wonder, holds national news editors accountable?

Suburbs: The Fix?

2010-11-07T23:21:00.001-08:00

Suburbs: The Fix is in

Tonight the CBC broadcast a news documentary about the increasing political power of the suburbs.

In every planning or human geography grad program there is a course on urban studies. In that course there is usually a debate about the urban/suburban divide, a divide that runs deep in popular culture. It cuts deep into the environmental wastage from long suburban drives to work in rush hour. It surfaces in a dwindling downtown tax base from out-migration.

Best-selling author Richard Florida recently wrote "the challenge is to remake the suburbs, to turn them into more vibrant, livable, people-friendly communities and, in so doing, to make them engines of innovation and productivity."

For many years growing suburban populations and a dwindling urban tax base resulted in downtown deterioration and high crime rates.

The picture is no longer so clear.

Suburbs not only represent a place of increasing political power, they have also seen increasing crime rates. In places like New York downtown crime rates have declined while Memphis recorded a suburban crime blip after the demolition of a downtown public housing project.

There is now some light at the end of the tunnel.

Toronto's Jane/Finch suburb has long been a hotspot for crime. Last year I published an empirical study on one SafeGrowth project I helped launch there - the San Romanoway Apartments.

It was one of the first times the crime trend was halted in a small suburban pocket. There is now a fabulous documentary film about San Romanoway's chief community organizer Stephnie Payne called "The Fix" explaining how it works.

Perhaps this is one future for our suburbs?

Malaise - the real threat to safety

2010-10-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

Our local Halloween parade and scary costumes

Today we celebrate Halloween, that ancient Celtic harvest festival marking summer's end. Today it's signalled by masks and scary costumes hiding the faces of kids looking for goodies.

Last week I ran a SafeGrowth training in Milwaukee with the Community Safety Initiatives folks at LISC. (Students: Assignments will be posted in the Toolkit section below on Wednesday)! During the training I had interesting chats about the difficulty implementing tactics in an environment with poor resources and even poorer political support.

Then I thought of the scariest ghoul of them all when it comes to safer places: malaise.

Malaise is a feeling that things are just not going right. It's the social disease which President Jimmy Carter once called a fundamental threat to democracy.

Malaise is similar to anomie, the social pathology described a century ago by famous sociologist Emile Durkheim. It's the alienation felt by people from by an inability to reach legitimate goals, in this case caused by resources or politics.

I see malaise occasionally in the faces of practitioners who confront significant challenges. Perhaps they've been beaten back by setbacks. They get to a point where they lose faith that their work matters, but still they put on a brave mask. They may think to themselves; there are no treats from prevention work, only political tricks.

That is malaise at its worst!

No doubt this is a real feeling. But is it a real thing? Can someone not suffering malaise accomplish what others cannot? Is it like the spooks on Halloween - more contrived than real? There is no doubt obstacles exist. In fact, there is probably truth to the idea that some regions are more (or less) likely to solve problems creatively, what Richard Florida calls The Creative Class.

Yet, like Halloween, we can choose belief in one thing or we can choose belief in another. There is just as much to be gained from persisting and seeking more creative options. That is the exact opposite of malaise. It is called vigor.

Vigor is the magic I see in successful practitioners. Vigorous practitioners exist in all regions. I've posted many examples over the past year. Here are a few:

1. Seattle's neighborhood governance described by Jim Diers.
2. The Westville neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut.
3. The Oregon District neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio.
4. The Hollygrove neighborhood story in New Orleans.
5. The San Romanoway apartments in Jane/Finch, Toronto.

Interestingly, Milwaukee has a great example as well. The SOHI District, a main street program in Milwaukee sponsored by the city and the Local Initiative Support Corporation of Milwaukee. Some of the SOHI folks attended the SafeGrowth training a few years ago. Their work has been remarkable. There are websites of SOHI as well as a SOHI YouTube channel of their successes.

There is even a crime review article published in the April, 2009 CPTED Perspective newsletter

Perhaps the very best person to exemplify vigor was a young woman in a Cincinnati SafeGrowth training 6 years ago. Her name was Sarah and I titled that blog An Ode to the Sarah's. For the sake of tackling malaise, and the sake of our neighborhoods, it's worth a look.

Visions of the future - the 2010 ICA conference

2010-10-23T23:56:00.000-07:00

Calgary - a dynamic growing city flush with oil wealth. Site of the 2010 ICA Conference

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.

A book worth reading

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!

Deep Diving into Creative Prevention

2010-10-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

The ASIS Convention Exhibit Floor, Dallas, 2010

Chris Landauer, MIT aerospace scientist, challenges the story of five blind men who touch an elephant in five different places and then describe it in five different ways. It all depends, says Landauer, on our assumption there is an elephant.

There might not be.

Our traditional criminal justice system (CJS) also assumes things, for example we must punish offenders or find guilt in court. Does this kind of thinking limit creative solutions to crime? Maybe there is no elephant?

This week I was in Dallas at the American Society for Industrial Security convention, the largest security trade show of its kind. Security technology isn’t always new, creative, or the best solution. But competitive high tech can be a breeding ground for creative solutions.

Case in point: TecGarde Mobile Solutions, a firm I worked with at the show. They are an innovative, tech start-up and Blackberry alliance partner with the Blackberry folks. I enjoy working with cool outfits like TecGarde. They sport some of the most creative smart-phone devices in the world. Creativity, it seems to me, is the foundation upon which a safer future rests.

Canada-based TecGarde display

It reminds me that truly creative cultures rarely flourish in rigid hierarchies, especially CJS organizations that ooze chain-of-command thinking. Nowhere is this message truer than with Ideo, the industrial design firm featured in the ABC documentary, The Deep Dive. By deep diving, Ideo comes up with fantastically innovative ideas. Deep diving is inherently non-heirarchical. That’s what outfits like TecGarde are all about.

THE ELEPHANT

Which brings me back to the elephant. True, creativity can occasionally seep through the CJS chain-of-command. Successful problem-oriented policing projects prove it is possible (check out motel crime in California or homelessness in Colorado). But these are not the rule, they are the exception. It's hard to be creative when trapped in hierarchies. After all, elephant assumptions may not be real.

Where do we find truly innovative strategies? How do successful organizations become creative? I think we need to peek at the technology world more closely, especially how technology firms do creativity.

Postscript: On the final day a number of laptops were stolen from display exhibits. Remember - this was a security tradeshow with CCTV firms operating thousands of security cameras in plain sight at their exhibits. Unsurprisingly, the crooks were apprehended the next day and their loot was recovered quickly.

For these brash, Mensa-challenged crooks it seems the security elephant was real. In this case it sat on them.

Flash mobs and urban chaos

2010-10-07T01:13:00.000-07:00

Over the past few years the Flash Mob has been an odd, chaotic marriage of mobile phones, social networking and Twitter-something kids. I blogged on one that went wrongish on Philadelphia's South Street.

Urban creativity need not be nasty and Flash Mobs are usually fun. If left to the creatives with a sense of civility, they can be downright amusing. As long as they remain unstapled by the self-interested, they represent an urban chaos that makes urban life fascinating.

Example: In April members of the Opera Company of Philadelphia Chorus thought it might be fun to treat the Italian Market Terminal with an impromptu performance of La Trviata.

It's pretty funny. And terrifically creative.

Check it out.

Click here for Market Mob Fun

Tent city teardowns, family reunifications, and jobs

2010-09-30T11:52:00.000-07:00

Homeless tents - 1930 or 2010?

CPTED tells us a great way to enhance safety is to improve the maintenance and image of a place. In policing they call it fixing broken windows. We rarely hear how to do that. Is there a specific way that works better than others? One might think image and maintenance is a simple matter. Perhaps that's true in clean-ups for short-term gain. It's less so if you want long term sustainability.

This week I saw a clean-up and enforcement project that did it different. As SafeGrowth suggests, it demonstrates the importance of a rigorous collaborative process. Yesterday that project won the 2010 award for excellence in problem-solving at the International Problem-Oriented Policing Conference in Dallas. It is the Colorado Springs Police Department Homelessness Outreach program.

A year ago I described that one fallout of the Great Recession was the exploding number of homeless in squatter settlements like Tent Cities. I described an interesting innovation in Portland called Liberty Village.

Homeless tent prior to cleanup in Colorado Springs

Now Colorado Springs has begun to come to terms with it.

Like many cities, hundreds of homeless people were squatting in unsafe and unsanitary conditions in Colorado Springs. Life in makeshift tents (or in nothing at all) is a miserable experience; there are no provisions, sewage, water, nor protection from the elements. Not to mention the danger from crime.

Police tried clean-ups, arrest and removal of abandoned property. When they were criticized for civil rights violations, they stopped. Then the sanitation problem worsened with piles of litter, garbage and human waste. At that point over 500 people were living in a homeless tent city.

The police formed a special team to apply problem-oriented policing. The key, they say, was collaborating with numerous groups. They spoke to a hundred homeless people to discover their needs.

ANALYSIS - DOING THEIR HOMEWORK

They examined programs across the country and researched new laws. They analyzed and mapped the scope of their problem and found a majority of related calls for police service clustered around the homeless camps. In other research conducted on the local homeless they discovered 21% had severe mental illnesses and another 23% suffered substance abuse.

Their homework paid off. When clean-ups took place, they happened in the context of a much more rigorous collaborative process. What did they do?

• They created referral programs to mental health agencies, alcohol treatment programs, shelters, and jobs programs.
• They connected homeless people with family and obtained funding to reunite them.
• They worked with civil rights groups to draft an ordinance prohibiting camping on public property when social strategies failed.
• They met weekly with homeless, service providers, civil rights leaders, and homeless advocates.

In their report they say the team has worked with "nine shelter agencies, 11 food providers, 6 mental health care providers, and a number of other agencies providing medial treatment, drug and alcohol treatment, clothing and other services."

WHAT HAPPENED?

Over the past year there have been only 29 felony arrests and about 80 minor arrests. Concurrently, of 500 people living in tents, 229 families have been sheltered in better living arrangements, 117 people were reunited with family, 100 people were successful finding jobs, and 40 clean-ups of camps around Colorado Springs were completed.

I've mentioned before the problem of displacement. Because they were able to help with social service referrals and family reunifications, they managed to minimize displacement

Incidents and problems have diminished and police related calls for service have declined.

Congratulations to the Colorado Springs community and it's police department.

Train graffiti

2010-09-24T00:47:00.000-07:00

When is the last time you saw a freight train? When is the last time you saw a freight train without graffiti?

Remember a time when freight trains did not have graffiti? I think it was about 25 years ago. Why and when did graffiti show up on trains? Did Fixing Broken Windows programs and anti-graffiti strategies displace graffiti out of cities onto these traveling billboards?

I just watched a documentary film about angst-ridden Gen-X street "artists" who started the whole thing back in the 80s. Or so they say. Kids at the fringe. At 35 they are no longer kids and no longer on the fringe.

The rest of us are left with their legacy. A contribution to urban culture. Thanks.

Then again, if the sum Gen-Xer legacy amounts to painted freight trains (it doesn't!) is that so bad? Compared to the legacy of the "Greatest Generation" and the Boomers - vanishing fish stocks, depleted forests, genetically-modified food and the human-caused carbon nightmare driving climate change - painted trains are not so bad.

That, of course, is a conceit. Gen-Xers (like all other generations) owe, and deserve, much more. For me, painted trains are little more than the latest manifestation of contemporary culture. In this case they just happen to be ugly.

It need not be so. Why not capitalize on the fringe tendency to paint trains? Train murals. (Why not?) Traveling train-art competitions. (Such possibilities!)

I wonder why train companies have been so lethargic to move beyond "catch them and charge them"? Given the utter failure of that strategy over the past few decades, it would seem obvious something more intelligent is in order.

Look what Canada Post came up with...

Hard to graffiti when it already looks graffitied

If bureaucratic stasis were real, a large federal bureaucracy like Canada Post (or the US Postal Service for that matter) would be poster child. Yet, even here, innovation is possible.

So why are train companies silent?

The devil is in the details

2010-09-19T00:46:00.000-07:00

Green walls are eco-friendly, attractive, and deter graffiti

Oregon's famous urban growth boundary experiment in regional planning has detractors and cheerleaders. There is, however, little doubt that limiting suburb size and preserving farmland has created one of the most successful city's in the nation. I am not being Pollyannaish. It has dreary and rainy winter weather. It still has a homeless problem and crime. But overall, it's hard to argue about the success of Portland.

This is largely a function of zoning, something I've been discussing of late.

It came to mind this week during a business trip to Portland. I mentioned Portland's successes last year during a visit. The list of laurels is long but it among them is a very low (and declining) city crime rate. All this is in spite of a nasty higher-than-normal unemployment rate.

My walks last year were in the residential neighborhoods. This time I stayed downtown where there are lively and safe downtown streets at night. There are safe public areas, parks and well-used transit. There is a wide mix of pedestrian traffic and though one-way streets dominate, unlike other cities I've visited lately, in Portland they tend to be narrower with a dense proportion of shopping variety. As in Philadelphia's South Street, shops here cater also to local residents (grocery stores).

Does regional zoning explain this success? In Portland's case the zoning style tends to the traditional form, though the urban growth boundary concept was revolutionary for its time. By law all Oregon cities must establish urban growth boundary beyond which urban development is prohibited.

An urban growth boundary limits sprawling suburbs like those elsewhere. That, more than other cities I've seen, results in intense attention to urban amenities (free public transit downtown) and a preponderance of grassroots local action (such as the local City Repair movement).

Portland's simple bus stop designs with no-ad clear glass and safety intercoms

It also results in far more interesting urban forms than I've seen elsewhere (streetscaping and architecture) which makes downtown walking fun, activity-rich, and culturally interesting. For example, street lighting does not replace decorative sidewalk lighting. Parking lots were uniformly well lit, clean, with good sightlines. Grass walls deterred graffiti. It had well designed bus stops with CCTV and without unsightly billboard ads. All these little details added to the safety mix downtown.

This week Portland reminded me that the style of zoning, though important, isn't enough to create a safe place. It's the little details of the urban fabric that matter too. In safety, we do sweat the small stuff.

Completing the equation - part 2

2010-09-11T18:34:00.000-07:00

We must rethink land use zoning

There were interesting comments to my last blog about CPTED, design guidelines and the incomplete equation.

My view is that without social capital, territoriality doesn't work well. Offenders usually want to avoid detection when they steal, burgle or rob which is why natural surveillance helps prevent crime. But that is only true when offenders fear someone will apprehend them (or get the police). In other words, someone must care enough about their neighborhood to do something. That's social capital.

To cultivate social capital we must re-learn how to better build and re-create neighborhoods from the ground up.

Jane Jacobs champions this idea in her famous incantation when she says the public peace is kept by an intricate network of voluntary controls and standards among people themselves. That is why we created 2nd Generation CPTED.

WHAT IS SOCIAL CAPITAL?

Social capital is the idea that within healthy neighborhoods there is a subtle system of what anthropologist Edward Hall called social dos and don'ts. It's the idea that there is wide range of social activities, people, services, businesses and cultural events that encourage local folks to share, sell, play, and relax. Social capital helps them tackle their own neighborhood problems. Service providers (e.g. police) are still available, but the majority of issues are dealt with internally.

There are plenty of neighborhoods where this happens. Westville in New Haven and the San Romanoway Apartments in Toronto are two. Last month I discussed Hollygrove, the New Orleans neighborhood where impressive improvements have been underway for a few years. Last year Louisiana AARP asked me to introduce CPTED in a SafeGrowth format.

SUCCESS IN HOLLYGROVE

This week, AARP posted an article and video about the residents and their work in Hollygrove. The video shows what in 2nd Generation CPTED we call "social stabilizers". My favorites are the "Hollygove Originals" and the walking club.

Click here to watch the AARP video of social capital at work!

CPTED-styled, urban design guidelines are a small step in that direction. But guidelines will not create Hollygrove, Westville or San Romanoway. Design guidelines fall short.

How can we encourage local interest and ownership, community driven initiatives such as community gardens, artists moving into and reusing old areas, and locally improved public spaces? Can urban planning help?

The world of land use planning (distinct from other forms of planning) is usually the world of zoning. Traditional zoning is done through setbacks, floor-space ratios, and restricted/permitted land use categories. It can be very restrictive and changes (variances) to it can be awkward, difficult and politically dangerous. From a CPTED perspective, traditional zoning says little about safety.

Unlike traditional zoning, form-based zoning controls the physical look of a place through design guidelines. For example the shape of building facades, types and sizes of streets, and the scale of architecture prescribes the what the neighborhood will look like. For CPTED guidelines, form-based zoning is ideal. However, this does not lead to social capital.

ZONING FOR PERFORMANCE - THE FUTURE OF CPTED?

Performance zoning is another alternative. Where traditional zoning specifies the types of use, performance zoning specifies only the intensity and results of that land use. It deals not with the type of use, but the performance of that development and how it impacts surrounding areas.

Performance zoning is already working in a few places. Early adopters include transport planners aiming to require roadway builders to adopt designs to cut traffic fatalities.

Performance zoning is more flexible than traditional or form-based zoning. It better accommodates market principles, social activities, and environmental protection.

Performance zoning in Breckenridge, Colorado

It's not difficult to see both CPTED guidelines and social capital as performance measures in such a place. There are helpful websites to learn the pros and cons of performance based zoning and the international experience with performance based planning.

Today's zoning denies certain uses or forms when developers submit their plans. Performance zoning evaluates the impacts of land uses directly. Property owners have the obligation, cost risk, and duty to fit the required performance to their land - and the freedom to use their own creativity in an innovative way.

As Jacobs often noted, one of the first ingredients of social capital is local innovation. Richard Florida says the same thing when interviewed on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Perhaps that's how we solve the safety equation in the 21st Century city?

An incomplete equation

2010-09-04T11:49:00.000-07:00

Clean, efficient design with great sightlines, yet empty streets.

I spoke to a planner friend this week who told me about the pending publication of some CPTED and SafeGrowth Design Guidelines for developers and architects. She is with the city of Saskatoon and last fall I researched and crafted these design guidelines from best practice around the world.

Could a similar approach work at a larger scale, for example in urban zoning?

If you study different types of zoning it is clear that most forms of zoning align with architectural design guidelines. Then I realized there is a problem with zoning.

In Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs says, "No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, causal enforcement of it has broken down."

Jacobs used the ideas of territoriality and social capital as part of her equation for safe streets. Unfortunately early CPTED used only half of that equation - urban design.

Basic urban design to reduce crime opportunities (now called 1st Generation CPTED) has three components:

1. We See You: Natural surveillance is lighting and landscaping that puts eyes on the street. The purpose is to see offenders or to signal to offenders they will be seen.

2. You Are In Our Place: Access control is gates, fences, roadway barriers, or walkway placement to limit the number of people into or out of an area. It allows people to see who is entering or to signal to visitors - we live/work here.

3. You Can't Get Away With That Here: Territorial reinforcement divides public space to semi-private or semi-public areas - for example, paving patterns and floral landscaping to demarcate a building entry. Clean-ups are another way to signal someone cares. These make it difficult for offenders to offend with impunity.

All three components hinge on one simple (and debatable) idea: It's our turf and we care. Design guidelines fit perfectly into this part of the equation. Zoning – not so much.

Here's the problem

In the absence of social capital, territoriality doesn't just happen. It is not necessarily true that people care simply because their space encourages it.

There are plenty of places where access control, good lighting, and natural surveillance provide a very poor sense of territory. Urban mega-projects like sports stadiums and casinos are notorious for plenty of crime (pick pocketing and robbery come to mind).

Large box stores are another example where there may be many eyes on those streets, all sorts of branding, signs, and territorial markers and yet crime can flourish (auto theft comes to mind).

Territoriality can help but it cannot ensure crime is absent. The intimate personal space of a residential living room or bedroom is already "owned" and controlled yet that is precisely where most domestic violence occurs.

The fact is territoriality does not work without social capital.

Next: How zoning can help.

Fun theory

2010-08-31T23:57:00.000-07:00

Bottle Bank Fun

After some serious blogs of late, I thought I'd lighten up a bit. A thought occurs: How do we make the street fun?

One of my favorite answers is fun theory. It's an interesting program by Volkswagen. I've highlighted some of their innovative urban designs last year such as the piano stairway and the deepest garbage bin in the world. This is a fantastic fun way to get people to engage.

The Bottle Bank Arcade is their latest offering.

Check it out.

Watch the Bottle Bank Arcade

Wounded Knee

2010-08-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

Entranceway to the past

One of the four principles of Second Generation CPTED explains how neighborhood culture can create a common purpose and passion. That can become the glue that binds people together to work against problems like crime.

Attaching culture to neighborhood safety can be tricky as I discovered this week on a tour of South Dakota. Sociologists say culture is everything beyond genetics passed from one generation to the next. In their view language, religion, values, law, and fashion all fit.

In my experience, it is much more tangible for each neighborhood to define its own sense of culture and then build on that common definition. It narrows the list considerably. When that happens music, art, sports, and historical events show up most often. A great example is the Intersection Repair programs in Portland.

There is another angle to this I hadn't considered. I discovered it while visiting an unforgettable and deserted place on the Lakota Pine Tree Indian Reservation. I'm referring to the haunting, windswept cemetery overlooking the valley when hundreds of Native Americans were slaughtered by 7th Cavalry Regiment in 1890.

I'm referring to the run-down graveyard, where a single faded monument notes the inconceivable tragedy that was Wounded Knee.

What lesson can such a place tell us about community culture? How can good arise from such evil from so long ago? Can a remote, rural locale of such political furor offer anything helpful to urban dwellers seeking a cultural touchstone of their own?

Some will say no. Yet I cannot so easily dismiss the lesson of Wounded Knee. It is a lesson worth studying and remembering for its exhibition of human folly. I struggled to make out the fading inscription on the lone monument which recounts the words of Sioux Chief Big Foot "I will stand in peace till my last day comes."

That, more than any definition, is the point of a shared, community culture. At least it should be.

Perhaps this is where the truly difficult work of building a community culture begins. Such places can be a warning for civil vigilance - we must not allow prejudice to infect our civility.

As I watch the latest CNN "controversy" about Ground Zero and a nearby mosque, I am again reminded this is a message relevant in rural and urban places alike.

Monument at Wounded Knee

Bus Stops - crime hot spots or community building blocks?

2010-08-13T13:43:00.001-07:00

Clean, good sightlines, territoriality - What is this bus stop missing?

Guest Blog

  Megan Carr is a Livable Communities Specialist interested in SafeGrowth, particularly transportation’s role in shaping vibrant and safe communities. She runs her own consulting firm, Civitae, LLC. Megan recently participated in the AARP SafeGrowth programs in New Orleans and delivered a presentation to transportation authorities regarding safety and bus stops. A longer version of this article will appear in the upcoming ICA newsletter CPTED Perspectives. 

 Why is it that some bus stops act as hot spots for crime while others can serve as building blocks for community?   Two studies by Loukaitou-Sideris in 1999 and 2003 examined the physical attributes of high crime bus stops in Los Angeles. What’s interesting about the findings is that of the nearly 20,000 bus stops, 18 percent of the total incidents occurred at just ten stops.

Findings at these ten stops indicated they were:
 • Located at intersections involving inactive land uses such as empty lots and surface parking lots
 • Lacked adequate lighting or nearby shops, public phones or police sub-stations 
• Located near dilapidated and/or vacant buildings (83%)

  Furthermore, movement predictors such as nearby alleys had an almost double crime incidence rate. Crime was also significantly higher at intersections near bars, liquor stores, check cashing establishments, and Single Room Occupancy hotels.  

The Other Side of the Coin

 In Los Angeles following the Rodney King riots in 1992, Mayor Riordan launched the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative designed to restore people’s sense of ownership in their communities. Recognizing that bus stops can function as focal points for communities, the organization developed community plans starting with placemaking improvements at bus stops.

  Project for Public Spaces was hired to assist neighborhood groups who were each given a grant to develop a bus stop area plan. Many positive outcomes followed as a result. From the initial $100,000 seed investment, a vacant lot in North Hollywood was transformed into a beautifully landscaped transit park with illuminated bus shelters, matching benches, information kiosks and kiosk art. Eight new businesses were attracted to the intersection filling formerly vacant facilities.

An additional $500,000 was invested in property improvements and $60,000 in private funding was invested in the park. Consequently, 30 new jobs were created in the vicinity of the bus stop.  

The project employed a placemaking approach that encompassed what 2nd Generation CPTED calls Community Culture. It included façade improvements, pedestrian walkways, pedestrian-oriented lighting, public art and plentiful landscaping providing needed shade and defining pedestrian areas.

By making improvements to the site, riders today benefit from natural surveillance and amenities from nearby businesses in addition to a more aesthetic and comfortable bus experience.

These examples provide valuable lessons on the importance of site design at bus stops. From reducing the opportunity for crime to supporting local economic development, investing in quality public spaces at bus stops is a worthy focus for community redevelopment.

The crime triangle - a veneer

2010-08-09T00:23:00.000-07:00

Proper analysis is the first step to prevent crime

I like the crime triangle. It is popular among crime analysts. It helps analyze crime hotspots. It is also part of problem-oriented policing. Sometimes too it is part of the prevention practitioner’s toolbox. It has elegant utility and simplicity.

The crime triangle emerges from "routine activity theory" (RA) in the early 1980s. RA explained some behavior quite well, like predatory crime (stalking). It did so with a simple premise: crime converges at the intersection of likely offenders, suitable targets and an absence of guardianship (or, more recently, "handlers").

In lay terms, picture the three sides of a triangle with an offender, a victim, and a target/place. When those things come together, so the theory goes, crime goes up.

The crime triangle is useful. Break the triangle and you prevent the crime. Want to increase guardianship? Get property managers to keep better control of their properties. Improve bar management in bars that over-serve. Simple. Elegant.

So far, so good. Except for one thing; that is where it typically ends in the RA world. The crime triangle does not dig deeper into the causes of crime.

Why? Because routine activity (and its crime triangle progeny) is one of those crime and place theories.

RATIONAL CHOICE

RA is less a causal theory explaining why and more a descriptive symbol predicting when, where or how. It ignores why someone becomes motivated in the first place. RA assumes an endless supply of motivated offenders. They are motivated for some reason; we just don't know why. The only "explanation" of motive falls back to rational choice theory.

Rational choice assumes offenders are rational actors who weigh risks against rewards. From the window of RA (and the crime triangle), crime looks like a "normal" condition of life.

True, some criminal behavior is “normal” in the sense that as events, products, and social affairs change, so too do crime opportunities. But as a causal theory, that’s rather trifling. It’s a bit like saying with enough water, sun and moderate temperature, certain environmental conditions will produce rain.

Then again some criminal behavior is not normal at all and RA just doesn’t work. Consider the story of the Connecticut mass murder in the news today.

As the NY Times says, this is “the latest in a series of American workplace tragedies”. It is a sad story about a workplace shooter who killed numerous workmates and then himself. He may have snapped from perceived workplace injustice. Perhaps he was clouded in a drug stupor. Maybe he was insane.

Routine activity theory might suggest how to remove opportunity for future incidents like this. That is a good start. Baby steps.

But RA theory will never actually know why because it will never ask. In cases such as this, the risk and reward assumptions of crime-and-place theories look rather silly. What does a suicidal shooter “risk”? What “reward” was this shooter gaining? Vengeance? (If so, we’re back to motive.)

Motive is a key piece of the puzzle

WHAT CAN THE TRIANGLE DO?

What will the crime triangle tell us in cases like this?

1. Capable guardians - cameras, plentiful supervision, and so forth. Unfortunately this shooting occurred at shift change when there were lots of employees and supervisors about. As for CCTV, how often do we watch nighttime news clips of robbery/shootings on corner-store CCTV? Cameras don’t stop shootings.

2. The time/workplace environment – preventing guns in the workplace. Will metal detectors work? Perhaps, but how difficult is it for shooters to become bombers. What then? Bomb sniffing dogs? At some point Orwellian paranoia replaces civility. Where do we stop? Body cavity searches?

3. The offender – modus operandi (not motive. Remember, RA is motive-neutered). The crime triangle asks if "handlers" like armed security might have intervened (that actually might have helped). Or maybe we could have prevented the shooter from getting guns in the first place? Others can argue 2nd Amendment rights. I won't bother here.

Crime triangle questions just don't do it. Instead, we must also ask this: Why did the shooter shoot? What can we learn about motive to prevent such tragic events in future?

The crime triangle is a useful and elegant baby step. I like it and I use it. But it is veneer. It is short term. It is not enough.

Our analysis of neighborhood crime must include a more robust analytical dialogue. If our analysis does not encompass action to move social life forward, it is not robust. Ultimately, if our theory fails to include motive, we are cluttering our dialogue with junk and the analysis of junk.

LEDs - New technology to light up your life

2010-08-05T00:22:00.000-07:00

Night-time lighting in many cities is awful

GUEST BLOG

When it comes to safety on the street, we've talked about the role of walkability and lighting. Last week we talked about sustainability and green spaces in our civic DNA. Today guest blogger Randy Atlas introduces a new technology that combines natural surveillance with environmental sustainability.

Randall Atlas is a nationally recognized criminologist and architect specializing in CPTED. He is author of numerous publications about CPTED including his most recent book 21st Century Security and Crime Prevention: Designing for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Crime Prevention.

A similar version to this blog will appear in the upcoming CPTED Perspective newsletter.

The LEED rating system has become the driving force behind the green building movement in America. This program is a voluntary, consensus-based national standard for developing high-performance, sustainable buildings.

One of the most effective methods in CPTED is the use of natural surveillance. Natural surveillance limits the opportunity for crime by taking steps to increase the perception that people can be seen, thereby naturally reducing the risk of crime. Jane Jacobs formulated the natural surveillance strategy based on her work in New York’s Greenwich Village.

Nighttime lighting helps promote natural surveillance. A well lit parking lot or outdoor area is an extremely important feature of public spaces for numerous reasons. Not only does it deter crime and vandalism, it can attract customers, facilitate traffic and pedestrian safety, and increase economic development. Proper lighting provides an individual with choices on movement: whether to go forward or back from a particular area.

Lighting can also be energy draining and costly, harming the environment. The Light Emitting Diode - LED - is a new technology appearing in North American cities with superior energy efficiency and excellent lighting characteristics. LED also is more durable and has lower operating costs than traditional outdoor lighting.

New LED technology is so efficient it can light up sports stadiums

THE OAKLAND EXPERIMENT

The Emerging Technologies Program of Pacific Gas and Electric Company in Oakland, California recently studied the applicability of LED luminaries in a street lighting application.

After concluding from the first phase that “no significant concerns (were) so identified” of the likelihood of any negative safety impacts from the installation of the LED luminaries on a public street, the project moved into the second phase. This involved the replacement of fifteen 121 watt high pressure sodium lights in an Oakland, CA neighborhood with the same number of new ‘Beta’ LED 78 watt lights from Ruud Lighting.

The results indicate that the LED lights drew an average 35% less power than the standard high pressure sodium lights used by most cities. Over the course of a year each LED light saves 178 kWh.

Lighting that is poorly planned may waste energy, decrease vehicle and pedestrian safety, and may result in light pollution. It is important first to identify energy efficiency and safety goals and then explore all the options, such as LED lights. That is the key for finding a proper balance between LEED and CPTED. It is also how we will improve urban developments and our way of life in future.