Solidarity - a unity of purpose in 2024

Solidarity means caring for others - Photo - Shane Rounce (CC)

by Mateja Mihinjac

As I reflect on the past year, I’m listening to pyrotechnics outside. Despite calls to give up pyrotechnics for the safety and peace of people and animals, our cities still sound like a warzone during New Year’s celebrations. This brought to mind solidarity with our fellow citizens. 

This year has been yet another turbulent year for my country. One of the major events in 2023 was the August floods, the worst in Slovenia’s recent history. 

People died in the flooding and many others had to vacate their homes due to water and mud damage and unsanitary conditions. Some lost their homes completely. Infrastructure in some towns was demolished and bridges once connecting towns with the rest of the country were suddenly washed away. Factories lost their equipment. Pets and other domesticated animals were separated from their carers. 

A destroyed bridge in the village Strahovica during Slovene floods - Photo by Anže Malovrh/STA

Yet, during these difficult times, it was remarkable to see such solidarity amongst citizens, many of whom had previously never met. They organised themselves into groups and went out to neighbourhoods to help people with the clean-up. They opened their residences and temporarily housed others who could not return home. 

Firefighters, rescue and emergency workers both professional and volunteer, risked their lives and worked around the clock to help save lives and possessions. Sports personalities, popular musicians and other public figures donated funds towards the rebuild. Everyday citizens dug into their pocketbooks and donated cash and whatever else they could.

SOLIDARITY FOUND

This kind of solidarity and unity – known by other terms in SafeGrowth such as social capital and social cohesion – is not uncommon during major catastrophic events. In our forthcoming SafeGrowth book next year, we dig deeply into the power of social capital and cohesion and we show how SafeGrowth employs it to transform troubled neighborhoods.

Over the years, we have frequently been brought into cities following natural disasters to help communities recover. Building social capital and solidarity is at the core of our work. 

For example, we taught SafeGrowth to communities following the devastating 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Before that, we brought it to the residents of the Hollygrove neighborhood in New Orleans, USA following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

In Sweden, we discovered examples of community caring. This yellow area is called "A hello can save lives". It's a special space reserved for those who appreciate a friendly conversation - solidarity with others who might be lonely

Both catastrophic events served as a catalyst for solidarity among residents within the neighbourhoods as they came together to rebuild their neighbourhoods. In Christchurch, people received strong institutional support from the city, including former SafeGrowth practitioner Sue Ramsay in her work with the West Riccarton SafeGrowth group. 

In Hollygrove, residents received organisational support from non-profit organisations like the Louisiana chapter of AARP and the work of SafeGrowth practitioner and urban planner Jason Tudor.

SafeGrowth training in Palm Springs, California, 2023.
Residents and police working together for the common good 

SOLIDARITY LOST?

In both cases above, a strong voice and unselfish actions came directly from local residents. Solidarity, it turns out, matters a great deal.

While such expressions of unity in the case of my country, as well as Christchurch and Hollygrove, make me teary with pride for fellow humans, I always wonder… Why does it take a catastrophe for people to step together? Will this connectedness last?

Only a few years back we experienced a similar sense of connectedness during COVID. Those were hopeful times when we believed this would become the new normal. We could see people starting to care more about each other and appreciating more their effects on environmental pollution. But it did not last. 

Unfortunately, those “new” behaviours quickly returned to “normal”. Today people seem to be more alienated than ever. Analyses of that period suggest the initial wave of solidarity needs to be institutionally supported to retain its sustainability.

Kind greetings and saying hello - Solidarity starts simply 

2024

How can we increase solidarity and ensure it is not a fleeting phenomenon where people are strangers? How do we embed and teach social connectedness and ensure it flourishes not only when people are affected by a traumatic event? 

I was taken aback several times over the past couple of months when fellow forest walkers thanked me for my kindness when all I did was kindly greet and exchange a few words with them! I expect this to be normal. Why has it become unusual to notice fellow beings and appreciate their presence around us? 

Maybe, to enhance solidarity, we can start by simply paying more attention to people we meet outdoors, making eye contact, and greeting them. After all, they might just be the ones who save your life one day!

Have a happy, safe and peaceful 2024!

Propaganda, science, crime prevention - A New Year's Resolution

Police and prevention go together. Good crime prevention is based on evidence, not popular beliefs

by Gregory Saville

“No one marches on Washington because of a pie chart!” I heard a politician say that years ago during a campaign. So why does anyone march on Washington, or wherever? Many people march for legitimate reasons. Others don’t. Evidence informs some. Others just believe what they want.

Incredulous as it seems – despite the absurdity of magic pills – some people end up believing populist snake oil when confronted with social unrest, economic strife, or political periods of turbulence. It’s the same in crime prevention. Despite evidence that many prevention methods cut crime, some choose to believe otherwise. 

We need an objective system that depends on evidence and rational decision-making. 

Crime prevention has been a police mandate since 1829.
A 1931 family photo of Police Constable Tom Hopkin - my grandfather

WHAT WORKS?

I remember reading one of the first evaluations of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design in the 1970s – an elegant, pre-test/post-test research design with tons of data over several years. It examined problems like the maturation effect (how the passage of time taints a strategy) and selection bias (failing to collect random samples). Evaluators examined problems that researchers seldom examine even today, like compensatory equalization, (when a city implements other programs that affect the results). It was state-of-the-art in social science evaluation.

It was a demonstration project called Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design: Final Report on Residential Demonstration, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

That study, and a series of others that followed, were the most exacting scientific studies of CPTED of such size, scope, and quality. They are unrivaled, even today. They revealed the positive results from CPTED of that era. They showed how CPTED was successful when it was holistic and participative with the community. They also showed that CPTED was complex. 

What happened? Researchers criticized CPTED as too complex. They claimed it was too difficult to parse out the effect of specific strategies and to control one prevention effect from another. They complained it was too hard to isolate the role of the community from the police and the prevention practitioners. 

You cannot please everyone! Nor, in science, should you. The point is not to please people and appease their feelings. The point of science is to learn from mistakes and move closer to truth.

Since then, hundreds of CPTED studies have shown positive prevention results. The most recent claimed: “Reviews of collections of CPTED case studies have in general indicated CPTED interventions typically reduce crime.” 

Einstein's prediction about the bending of light. Many felt he was nuts - it offended their belief about the world. Scientific experimentation proved them wrong
- photo Creative Commons

BELIEF VERSUS TRUTH

We still lack the scientific rigor to find any “ultimate” truths. That doesn’t mean we cannot find some relative truths. Good scientists say this all the time. Yet, if such flaws exist in the physical sciences, imagine the ailments afflicting social science. 

In one review, a City Journal critic of criminological statistics found that “A detailed review of every regression model published between 1968 and 2005 in Criminology, a leading peer-reviewed journal, demonstrated that these models consistently failed to explain 80 to 90 percent of the variation in crime.”

I recently read an evaluation in Sweden that was so flawed, it read like propaganda. It failed to cite any prior evaluation research, provided no methodology, and quantified nothing. CPTED evaluations from 40 years ago put it to shame. Clearly, they have learned zero.

How can we build a library of evidence about effective crime prevention when even social scientists cannot figure out how to do proper science? 

Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment. One of the earliest cons in the Old West
- photo Creative Commons 

SNAKE OIL SALES 

If it is a choice between the snake oil propaganda of populist politicians (the “elites” are the problem; let’s go back to the old days), or an objective system that depends on evidence and rational decision-making, I doubt any fair-minded, democracy-loving, intelligent person, would choose the former.

There is no way to know for certain in social science how much more research is necessary. We also do not know whether more evidence, no matter how conclusive, will convince policy-makers to make rational crime policy. Regardless, none of that should dissuade the use of good research and the collection of decent evidence.

As we enter the New Year, I say we should carry on the difficult task of refining crime prevention methods, regardless of sham critics. We must remain vigilant against populist propaganda. We should continue to build, and learn from, libraries of success and failure. 

We may not know how to convince the political populists, but without efforts to learn from science, we will forever be in the clutches of one snake oil salesman or another. And, as we know from the history of violence in the 20th Century, that never ends well.