The mastery of tradecraft in crime prevention - Why quick fixes fail

Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia

by Gregory Saville

On this July 4 Independence Day, I discovered something worth celebrating emerging from Philadelphia. And it wasn't the Declaration of Independence. 

Last week, I was dealing with a failed air conditioner during a brutal heatwave. Calling an A/C technician was fascinating. He was energetic, hurried, and confident (overconfident – it turns out). He glanced at the unit and announced it was too old to repair. He didn’t test the refrigerant, didn’t run diagnostics. He jumped quickly to a simple conclusion - it likely had a Freon leak requiring a full system replacement. The going rate? Over $8,000!

That was declined.

The next day, I called in a different HVAC technician — someone calm, experienced, and focused. He listened carefully as I explained the background of the A/C issue, then got to work. In under an hour, he had diagnosed the real problem, tested the system, checked the wiring, bypassed a strange connection, and replaced the dirty filter. The result? Cool air again — and all for under $200.

Something worth celebrating on July 4 - it all started with an air con

He also went a step further – he pointed to a website that ships replacement filters automatically, provided some education on how to self-diagnose simple AC problems, and made sure other parts of the system were not at risk. “That way, you can prevent future problems and self-repair when necessary.” 

That is mastery of tradecraft.

PRACTICING CRIME PREVENTION

It made me think, too often in CPTED, we meet the first kind of technician — fast talkers selling quick fixes at a high cost. What we need are more like the second — grounded pros who diagnose carefully, teach as they go, and work with the client, not around them.

Nowhere is the contrast between shallow fixes versus deep tradecraft more visible than in Philadelphia — between the neighborhoods of Kensington and Fairhill/St. Hugh.

Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood remains among the highest
crime communities in the city 

Kensington is infamous — a high-crime zone marked by open-air drug markets, encampments, and a long history of short-term government crackdowns. One of the most aggressive was Operation Sunrise, a year-long police campaign launched in 1998 that promised zero-tolerance enforcement aimed at gangs and drugs. Authorities were confident (overconfident, as it turned out).

The effort made headlines. It felt bold, but it didn’t last.

Early criminology research praised Operation Sunrise and its “place-based policing” model, highlighting short-term drops in crime and minimal displacement. But later analysis challenged the no-displacement finding and warned of widespread unintended consequences. One study concluded the operation failed to sustain lower crime rates and instead produced a “generation of fugitives” and widespread collateral harm.

Today, government research concludes that Operation Sunshine’s zero-tolerance policing and hotspot crackdowns failed to deliver sustainable safety.

The business towers of downtown Philadelphia.
Not far away, some of the nation's highest crime neighborhoods. 

MASTERFUL CRAFTSMANSHIP MISSING

There’s nothing masterful about these strategies. They are the equivalent of replacing the entire HVAC system when the real problem is a dirty filter, a lack of client knowledge and no self-capacity to resolve problems.

When you leave Kensington and travel a half mile north, you arrive at Fairhill/St. Hugh, a primarily Hispanic neighborhood anchored by the vibrant El Centro de Oro commercial corridor. 

In contrast to Kensington, the St. Hugh neighborhood has been growing and improving for a while and, while Fairhill has some crime and disorder challenges similar to Kensington, there is something very different happening. 

It is difficult to get the full picture from stats, and violent crime rates are notoriously difficult to measure, much less calculate. But by at least some estimates, the violent crime rate in Fairhill/St. Hugh is lower than in Kensington.

For example, one source claims Kensington's violent crime rate of 9.3 per 1,000 residents is 55% higher than the 5.9 rate in Fairhill/St. Hugh. Unfortunately, stats like this are bound to be imperfect and imperfect stats rarely tell the full story.

2023 Crime Density map for Philadelphia - Map from GIS Geography

Kensington and Fairhill neighborhoods overlay onto crime density map
- crime stats are notoriously difficult to calculate and tell only a small part of the story. In this version the dark red suggests higher crime rates in Kensington 

THE HACE STORY

Enter HACE, a community development corporation working in Fairhill/St. Hugh for over three decades. HACE was formed to combat disinvestment and preserve community culture. Their approach? Place-based strategies not limited to law enforcement. Instead, they use long-term investment, community leadership, neighborhood planning and strategies grounded in SafeGrowth.

Long before HACE adopted SafeGrowth, their results were stunning:

• Over $100 million in local investment
• More than 450 new housing units built
• 400+ vacant lots rehabbed and greened
• A community-run food distribution center
• Housing counseling programs that build generational wealth

Even more impressive, HACE now adopts SafeGrowth and crime prevention principles within their ten-year Goodlands 2025 plan — not as add-ons, but as core pillars of community design.

The neighborhood plan focuses on major areas of development activity, including housing, commercial corridor revitalization, improving the quality of life, and crime and safety. 

Celebrating the birthday of a Livability Academy member - a local police officer

They also train residents through SafeGrowth Livability Academies, helping locals become leaders in problem-solving, safety design, and civic engagement.

Academy classes lead local projects — clearing encampments, building safe walking trails, and working with police. Cops don’t arrest their way out of crime; communities and police build their way out, together.

PREVENTION TRADECRAFT

Masterful prevention tradecraft has a look: practical, visible, and led by the people who live there. It is grounded in self-help, local knowledge, rooted in evidence, and police are partners, not enforcers of one-size-fits-all solutions.

It’s patient work, unlikely to reveal itself to 6-month evaluations. Instead, it requires patience like slowly melting ice from frozen A/C lines. Like tracing faulty wiring until the real problem is clear.

And in neighborhoods, as in A/C systems, the difference between a temporary fix and a long-term solution is rarely visible at first glance — but unmistakable over time.

"It takes the whole village to raise this community"

Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Bridge
Skyline views at night mask the reality of neighbourhood life 
- photo Jeffrey Phillips Freeman Creative Commons Wiki

by Mateja Mihinjac

At a time when a rising tide of violent crime infects Philadelphia and so many other American cities, one small pocket in that city has discovered a different way forward. A few weeks ago, community teams from the HACE Livability Academy presented preliminary plans for improving livability in their neighborhood. It was like an early holiday gift to their city and their neighborhoods and I was enormously impressed with their plans. 

The HACE SafeGrowth Livability Academy has been underway in the Fairhill and Kensington neighborhoods for a few years and – although applied only to these two neighborhoods and severely challenged by the COVID pandemic – academy classes continued unabated thanks to the amazing work of HACE, the non-profit community development organization.

COVID has made life miserable for community development work. In 2020, we were forced to suddenly transition to a virtual environment that was not conducive to collaborative workshops. But a year later we’ve managed to better adapt to this new reality. Training from afar is not ideal, but the virtual environment does have advantages and we can now reach a wider audience.

WHAT IS THE LIVABILITY ACADEMY?

Over the past two months, I had the pleasure of co-facilitating the latest online cohort of HACE Livability Academy participants. 

HACE has been successfully running Livability Academies twice a year since 2018. Last year, the HACE team modified the curriculum to run virtual-only sessions. This year we were able to offer both face-to-face and virtual modalities. 

The Livability Academy is a 6–8-week program developed by AlterNation LLC  – the company behind SafeGrowth® – in which local residents and community representatives learn skills in community leadership, SafeGrowth and CPTED, community organizing, and project management.

The Livability Academy is an integral part of the SafeGrowth philosophy and it provides a constant flow of community leaders into neighbourhood problem-solving teams to address local issues. I found it empowering to see the kinds of complex issues that the latest cohort decided to tackle in their project work. 

Team project planning from a previous Philadelphia Livability Academy class

2021 PROJECTS

During training, participants identify an issue and in work teams they tackle a small-scale, real-life project in their neighbourhood. In this training, the in-person, face-to-face team produced one project proposal while the online virtual team chose to divide into two project teams. 

This past week all three teams presented their preliminary plans of the work they’ve done over the past few months. All three teams created inspiring projects directly within their neighborhood and they tackled persistent problems that were made worse during COVID.

Cover of the project report from the Fairhill United for Livability team

Fairhill United for Livability 

The first team’s project focused on activating the neighbourhood park to create a space for people to come together and build connections. They envisioned a more united neighbourhood that fosters community pride, strengthens connections between residents, and partners with neighbourhood groups, schools, and businesses to promote livability. 

They divided their plan into 3 phases over the next year: outreach, clean-ups, and community celebrations. The goal is to create a movement of people to fix broken social connections, a problem made far worse by COVID. The team concluded with their slogan: “No one can do alone what we can do together”.

Literally Literacy (Increasing Adult Literacy)

This team chose adult literacy as a key liveability issue. They identified low levels of literacy as a key barrier to job access, high earning potential, and access to better healthcare. Illiteracy is one of the major contributors to overrepresentation in the criminal justice system. Illiteracy is an obstacle to personal growth and this team decided to do something. The main objective of the project is to empower adults to seek assistance with reading and increase their self-esteem while eliminating the stigma associated with illiteracy. 

Data from the Literacy team's research project

The highlight of this team’s presentation was their inspirational personal stories. 

• One member shared how her aunt learned to read late in life because she was unable to visit school as she had to prioritise caring for her family. 
• Another member shared the experience of returning to college in her senior years and helped her expand her knowledge and reading capabilities. 
• Another member recollected how it was once illegal for African Americans to read and she had to self-learn how to read. 
• Finally, one member shared a story about how she remained a single young mother when she left her illiterate partner who was unable to provide for the family aside from selling drugs. 

They summarized their stories with the phrase: “You can be all that you can be; all you have to do is take the first step.”

Teen Trauma

This team focused on the struggles of youth that (if not addressed early) can cause long-term damage to a young person’s life and the neighbourhood quality of life. They outlined multiple consequences of trauma such as emotional and behavioural issues, internalised stress, engaging in unsafe behaviours, substance abuse, and mental illness. 

They proposed a 6-week program with various topics to address traumatic events. They also proposed creating a safe space with a support group for teens experiencing trauma. Two young team members, who themselves went through traumatic events, were especially inspiring in their quest to help their peers turn a new leaf. The team summarised the objective of their program: “To go from dysfunction to function.”

Research chart on trauma from the Teen Trauma team

A HOLIDAY GIFT 

I was extremely proud of all three teams for the work they completed within this short time. It is amazing how a group of people who know little, if anything, about each other, were able to take steps together and share the common purpose of improving life in their neighbourhood. 

This is the true spirit of SafeGrowth and the Livability Academy. There is no better holiday gift to Philadelphia, to their community, and to themselves.

As one Livability Academy participant concluded: “It takes the whole village to raise this community.”

Congrats to Philadelphia's 2021 HACE Livability Academy grads!
(photo courtesy of Sierra Cuellar)

Steel palms and transformation in Philly

One of the more offensive ideas I’ve come across in criminology is the theory that some high crime neighborhoods never change. Giving the lie to that myth is the above photo from new affordable housing by the non-profit housing group HACE in a transformed Philadelphia neighborhood. Yet, the criminology theory suggests such neighborhoods remain crime-ridden for decades and they are impervious to recovery. Equally offensive - and no less true - is a belief that zero-tolerance enforcement in crime hotspots or hardening targets in those high crime neighborhood is the best we can do.

No doubt crime persists in some places. Enforcement and situational prevention too can help. But they are far from the best we can do. Places do change and we can be part of that change. To peddle the inevitability of crime persistence or the impossibility of neighborhood rebirth is to embrace empirically unsound, intellectual funk.  

PHILADELPHIA PROJECTS

That was my thought last week in Philadelphia where we worked with Philadelphia LISC, the Philadelphia Commerce Department, and Police Department to launch more SafeGrowth community development projects.

We’ve been here twice over the past few years, most recently last year where impressive project work is still underway. One of those SafeGrowth projects started four years ago - Rainbow de Colores park - won accolades and was featured in an award-winning video for reducing crime and transforming a drug infested, shooting gallery at a handball court into a safe place alive with neighborhood life.

Last week energetic and dedicated commercial corridor managers, police officers, architects, city officials and residents began SafeGrowth projects in commercial corridors across the city. We did our training on 5th Street North, an area called El Centro de Oro, often associated with high crime and some of the highest drug dealing hotspots in the city.

Safety Audit walkabouts during our SafeGrowth training in Philadelphia

There is much to be done here (and elsewhere). The truth is that positive transformation is no more inevitable than stagnation. Fortunately work is already underway.

5th STREET NORTH

For example on 5th Street positive things are happening: street-scaping, thriving restaurants, an active arts and music scene, and vibrant community groups such as the innovative HACE (the Hispanic Association of Contractors and Enterprises) where we held our training. This corridor is revitalizing. Things are looking up!

You know something special is going on when you hear that local residents and shop owners take it on themselves to clean graffiti from the decorative, steel palm trees lining 5th Street North. To one author those hand-crafted trees are “a beloved symbol of the many Latin American islands represented in the local population.”

Obviously, undeterred by obsolete criminology theories, local pride and cohesion is where neighborhood transformation begins.