A shot in the dark - murder under U.S. presidents

Detroit viewed from across the river in Windsor, Canada.
Detroit (popn. 649,000), 252 murders last year, murder rate 23 per 100,000. 
Windsor (popn. 229,000), 10 murders last year, murder rate 2.8 per 100,000.
Do national policies cut crime?

by Gregory Saville

Last week’s 2024 U.S. election ended with Donald Trump defeating Kamala Harris. It wasn’t a landslide, but it was not a cliffhanger. Some think crime will now drop, others think it will explode.

I am amazed at how frequently crime becomes a political weapon – a well-placed gotcha for a media soundbite in the middle of a campaign. Politicians love to promise solutions to crime waves but rarely offer practical answers based on research. It’s easy to claim that one president or another will reduce crime, but can a president actually achieve this? How does a president’s term in office truly affect national crime rates?

The data show that crime is declining. There are some upward blips here and there – violent crimes against young people are up, and mass shootings and school shootings have increased. However, on the whole, most crime rates are declining.

 

Detroit police use technology, surveillance cameras,
and other programs to attempt to prevent homicides 

HOW DO WE KNOW?

I examined U.S. homicide data to see if there was a pattern with different presidents. I’m not ignoring recent increases in a few city centers. I’m simply saying that most city centers have declining homicides this year. Denver is one of them.  

I know a few things about weaknesses in crime data. Yet,  even with the limitations, we can learn something. 

I collected homicide data from 1960-2022, and graphed the results and the tenures of 11 presidents. This method obviously bypasses all the other important factors affecting homicide and it only examines a President’s term and homicide rates. Even still, it shows something worth considering.

 

KENNEDY/JOHNSON

Homicide rates exploded during President Lyndon Johnson’s administration (and continued through President Nixon's term). He (and Kennedy) launched much-heralded social programs, many of which emerged from criminologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s book Delinquency and Opportunity. 

Many of the crime prevention strategies from the Kennedy/Johnson War on Poverty were successful and survive today such as Head Start, Job Corps, and AmeriCorps.

  

President Kennedy greeting Peace Corps volunteers in 1961 - one of the social programs from his administration - photo Abbie Rowe, CC via Wikimedia Commons

Those programs were founded on the belief that improving access to legitimate opportunities for disadvantaged youth could reduce crime. Crime, particularly homicide, was supposed to decline! It didn’t!

REAGAN

Consider this – a large portion of crime, like homicide, occurs via young male offenders between 18-25 years. The youngest in that demographic born in the War on Poverty decade reached their crime-prone years in the early 1980s. Perhaps they benefited from the War on Poverty programs? The graph above shows that the early 1980s was a period of dramatic homicide declines. By then Ronald Reagan was president! 

Could it be that Ronald Reagan benefitted from Kennedy and Johnson’s War on Poverty? 

President Reagan's inauguration speech, 1981
- photo White House Photographic Collection, CC Wikimedia Commons

Probably not. By the end of Regan’s presidency, the homicide rate began increasing again. Rates climbed through the presidency of George Bush with a small decline in his last year. So much for presidential influence over crime!

CLINTON 

The most dramatic impact on homicide was from 1993 to 2001. Clinton’s tenure saw the largest homicide decline in recorded American history. It was a decline across all crime categories and it continued through George W. Bush’s tenure and into the first term of Obama. 

Did that crime decline stem from Clinton’s all-encompassing and targeted anti-crime campaign called the 1994 Crime Bill? 

It was among the largest anti-crime bill since the 1968 Safe Streets Act of Johnson’s administration. Clinton’s 1994 bill created stricter criminal sentences and violence against women laws. It hired 100,000 community police officers and banned assault rifles. It implemented the National Police Corps, an ROTC-style university degree to improve police education – a program in which I was hired as associate director of the Florida Police Corps (the program was later defunded during the Bush years). 

 

President Bill Clinton shaking hands with Donald Trump in 2000 - photo Ralph Alswang, Office of the President, CC Wikimedia Commons 

OBAMA

Clinton’s crime bill is now criticized (even by Clinton) as a trigger to mass incarceration of minority populations (a trend that actually began long before 1994). It is also unclear that the Clinton crime bill was responsible for the homicide decline because crime also dropped in countries where there was no crime bill. For example, Canada’s crime rates also started declining a few years before this bill.

President George W. Bush and President-elect Barack Obama on the Colonnade to the Oval Office, 2008 - White House photo, Eric Draper CC Wikimedia Commons

After Obama’s election in 2009, police excessive use of force spread across social media. There were anti-poverty protests, the Black Lives Matter movement and riots in city centers. It seemed impossible to predict murder rates. In the first half of Obama’s presidency, the homicide rate declined. Then it rose. Exactly the same thing happened to Trump. 

TRUMP

During the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the homicide rate declined from 5.3 to 5.0 homicides per 100,000 people. In his last two years, homicide rates jumped almost 40%, from 5.0 to 6.9. Recent election disinformation claimed otherwise, but the fact is that homicides increased at the end of Trump’s first tenure. Was he responsible? 

By now it should be obvious it is difficult to attribute homicide rates to any president. There are simply too many factors at play. And now, homicide rates are returning to pre-pandemic levels and crime is dropping. 

WHAT NOW?

Nothing here suggests that a forward-thinking presidential administration cannot make a difference. Sadly, few presidents deliberately craft a well-designed and properly implemented crime prevention policy based on proven community-building strategies. Kennedy and Johnson did that, yet it was poorly implemented, underfunded, and it largely failed. Clinton also did that and it might have cut some crime. Unfortunately, there were unintended consequences – exploding prison populations – and it’s unclear how much credit that program deserves.

The takeaway? There are well-designed, evidence-based strategies, like SafeGrowth, that do prevent crimes and sustain prevention effects for years. A presidential administration armed with the right tools and strategies can make a meaningful difference, but only through intentional and well-executed policy. History shows without that, it is a shot in the dark! 

Pictures in the sky - a vision for the unhoused in Prince George

  

Judge and Senator Calvin Murray Sinclair
- photo by Archkris, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wiki Commons

 by John Lyons

John Lyons spent many years as a patrol officer living and working in northern Canadian communities. A member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for 28 years, he served as a major crime investigator. For 10 years he was an international crime analyst with Interpol Ottawa. Post policing he consulted government on health care fraud. Now he brings his extensive experience to SafeGrowth, particularly in conducting search conferences to prevent crime and build collaborative networks.

This week, a giant died in Canada. I met him many years ago when I gave testimony in an inquiry that he headed as a judge. I have remained impressed by him ever since. How we could use his wise advice now! 

I speak of the Ojibway First Nations Judge and retired Canadian Senator Calvin Murray Sinclair who died on November 4th. His passing is a deep and huge loss to Canada. Judge Sinclair was a champion of crime prevention through First Nations community development. From 2009, he was a leader in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and he had a profound impact on how Canadians, such as myself, contextualize colonial abuse of First Nations peoples. 

He shaped my perspective on addressing crimes and incivilities by economic and socially marginalized First Nations people. The problems Judge Sinclair brought to light are still apparent in the cities across northern communities, especially in the northern Canadian city of Prince George, British Columbia, a community with problems of homelessness, street crime, illicit drugs, and drug overdoses. The blog "Innovations in responding to street drugs" described those issues last year. 

The Prince George story illustrates Judge Sinclair’s message most succinctly. Last year's blog was about the 2023 SafeGrowth Person of the Year, Jordan Steward, and her downtown safe inhalation, harm reduction site – The Pounds Project – which was largely defunded.

Aerial photo of Prince George, British Columbia
- photo by CPG1100, CC BY-SA via Wiki Commons

Today, when thousands of drug-addicted and unhoused people populate Canadian cities, far too many hail from Indigenous backgrounds. Where is Judge Sinclair’s perspective at this point in history when so many Canadian cities, like Prince George, are suffering from this social pain?  

WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN?

First, one of the persistent paradoxes we know that emerges from top-down government responses to the unhoused, especially with people from marginalized communities, is the problem of inaction and the false belief that one-size-fits-all. True to form, this paradox has now reared its head according to news stories about conflicts between the city of Prince George and the provincial government. 

Second, having spent a great deal of time in Prince George, I have learned that it is not enough to treat the problem as an eyesore disrupting downtown businesses. The city must go beyond displacing these troubled souls to accommodations outside the city centre. This blog has previously described cities like Wheat Ridge, Colorado and Victoria, British Columbia that experienced the futility of simply rehousing the homeless without wraparound services.

 

Housing encampment in Prince George

Third, bottom-up strategies were already emerging in Prince George, for example the harm reduction that Jordan Steward attempted through her Pounds Project. That is what should be expanded and supported. We know that relocating the unhoused and drug addicted must involve far more than pushing the problem around the city like some perverse board game. We also know, from prior blogs, that successful projects already exist in places like Finland.

All these examples teach us that any relocation plan needs to consider setting up safer physical environments using strategies like 1st and 2nd-generation CPTED. They must also reinforce historic Indigenous culture. If there is to be any hope of redemption, that is the way to make things right. 

The Grand Medicine Society in Ojibwa syllabics. Judge Sinclair combined his wisdom as a member of this traditional First Nations society and as a Judge,  Canadian Senator, and a Companion of the Order of Canada.  

LOCAL ACTION PLANS 

Over the years I have joined members of the SafeGrowth team in delivering search conferences precisely to create local visions of new approaches and to build local capacity to make them happen. This approach produces success. For example, last year SafeGrowth facilitator, Professor Tarah Hodgkinson finished a successful search conference for safety planning in Brantford, Ontario.  

I see the value of empowering those in the community by teaching skills in crime prevention, neighborhood planning, community investment, and rehabilitation. This is how you build local capacity. Diffuse government programs rarely fit the local context, as suggested by recent provincial/municipal government conflicts in Prince George.

Judge Sinclair was a member of a traditional Ojibway medicine society and his Ojibway name was Mizanay Gheezhik. That translates to "the One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky”. If there was ever a time when we needed a new vision of something bigger and better – new pictures in the sky – now is the time! 

Judge Sinclair, we miss your vision. 

The Great Internet Migration - the life and death of face-to-face

Les Deux Magots café in Paris, the penultimate face-to-face meeting place. For over a century, this legendary café became a place of debate for modern art, philosophy, and literature with the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Ernest Hemmingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, and Jim Morrison. Much of our culture emerges from face-to-face conversations.

by Gregory Saville 

One way to reduce crime is to cut crime opportunities – make it tough to steal or harder to assault. Another way is to cut the motives to commit crime – improve living conditions, treat substance abuse, or build positive social relations between people. In either case, we need a functioning community with decent livability where people enjoy engaging in social life. That means creating places where social life encourages positive, productive, and secure face-to-face socializing (a goal of SafeGrowth). 

That brings me to my recent visits to a nearby movie theater, a bank, and McDonald’s. In each of these places, I noticed a new design and marketing ethos creeping up on us. I am referring to the trend of forcing people to migrate away from face-to-face interactions and towards the internet, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies are forcing us to shop online, deliver goods remotely, and replace face-to-face conversations with technology. It’s difficult to know how far this will continue.

Will we learn how to retain meaningful face-to-face connections in the face of new technologies?

NO ANTI-LUDDITE 

I am not making the claim of an anti-technology Luddite. True, of late I have admittedly been obsessively critical of AI, security technology, and the HiDWON future of high-security enclaves. 

In truth, I know there is an important role for advanced technology, especially in urban safety. In Nihlism Nixed, I wrote about the undeniable improvement in our overall quality of life globally from improvements in technology. 

But there is no denying the inexorable shift in how we build cities, run our businesses, entertain ourselves, and shop. We are being drawn away from face-to-face, a trend with an ominous outcome if we want a safer social life where people interact in a positive, productive, and joyful way. 

 

...out with the old! Old-style movie theatre seating -
 photo Jorge Simonet, CC BY-SA 4.0 Wiki Commons

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

Take movies! Films are no longer box office hits until they stream online. Movie-goers hardly seem to matter. Watching films on a smartphone, or streaming at home…that’s the thing. In a futile attempt to stem the tide of crashing ticket sales, brick-and-mortar theatres are ripping out their old-style seats and installing half as many seats designed as airline-style, 1st class beds/seats with nearby liquor lounges and boutique food.

 

... and in with the new!
The redesigned bed seat cinema as theatres struggle to recover lost seat sales from online streaming - photo by Startrain844, CC BY-SA 4.0 by Wiki Commons

Consider banks. Gone (or going fast) are counter stations with tellers to converse with, share stories, and learn firsthand about better interest rates. Wikipedia describes how in-person bank tellers are “most likely to detect and stop fraud transactions” and that their position “requires tellers to be friendly and interact with customers.” Apparently, banks have something else in mind.

Instead, banks want you online at your computer, transferring funds electronically, or standing in front of metallic ITMs, the new "interactive teller machines" (basically, a souped-up, quasi-AI ATM). Teller jobs are declining and banks are becoming nothing more than empty foyers, private offices, with no tellers at all. 

 

The new bank - no tellers, only empty lounges and ITMs 

Then consider McDonald’s, the world’s biggest fast food chain, the restaurant for excited kids, and the PlayPlace area for toddlers, with a busy counter/drive-in service. The last time I visited McDonald’s I could not locate an employee. I eventually found her in a small nook behind the electronic E-clerks. Another example of face-to-face extinction! 

McDonald's... few employees. Instead, meet E-clerks

Few chairs and no people. Internet migration is working!

The article Robots will Replace Fast-Food Workers describes the automation in the fast food industry: 

"In 2013, the University of Oxford estimated that in the succeeding decades, there was a 92% probability of food preparation and serving becoming automated in fast food establishments."

THE INTERNET MIGRATION

I have not checked the data, but I predict the internet migration I describe here represents the largest immigration problem in history. I suspect some of the techno-crime-opportunity reduction theorists might celebrate. They do so foolishly. 

The truth is that we are social beings to the core. Our relationships define us. As philosopher and psychologist Viktor Frankl once wrote, we gain meaning from the world around us and through our relationships with each other – that is where we ultimately find meaning. 

"Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose."

The lack of meaningful, face-to-face relationships, and the social connections that emerge from them, make our lives poorer. Sustainably preventing crime becomes an unsolvable equation. And in that equation, loneliness is the enemy of meaning and purpose.

Desire paths to real paths... User-generated urbanism

Walkways and desire paths - a major player in urban design and safe walkability

by Mateja Mihinjac 

In our urban design work, we often confront the issue of pedestrian mobility, which is referred to as desire paths (or desire lines). We have previously discussed desire lines and their impact on crime in our blog on Happy Trails. We have also touched on the related CPTED concept of movement predictors in our blogs on laneways. All this comes down to the concept of walkability.

If we are serious about increasing walkability in our cities and towns – and if we listen to the CPTED message of increased safety through “eyes on the street” – then we must pay attention to the formal, and informal, paths that exist to get people from one place to another. 

Sidewalks, one-way or two-way streets, paths, gates, and trails are only one part of the movement picture. Desire lines are equally important since they predict how movement can trigger, or eliminate, crime opportunities. Leslie Malone’s urban design book Desire Lines calls them “the paths people create through simple usage.” It all depends on how we do them!

 

Ease of access, simple travel routes, or pathways to crime?
Desire lines are everywhere and offer CPTED clues to prevent crime

USER-GENERATED URBANISM

We tend to expend as little time and as little effort as possible to achieve our goal. This least effort principle also translates into our choice of routes traveled. This often results in the emergence of desire paths, what wiki calls the unplanned convenient shortcuts humans create on frequently navigated routes.  

Why don’t traffic engineers or landscape architects incorporate these desire paths into their designs and engineer the streets as people naturally use them? It turns out an approach termed user-generated urbanism might do just that.

John Bela, an urban designer and landscape architect, describes user-generated urbanism as: 

“the synthesis of top-down and bottom-up practices engaged synergistically to cultivate greater participation. This synthesis help us achieve the goals we outline with the adaptive metropolis of resilience and social justice.”

He suggests desire paths should inform the installation of permanent routes - but not before the users indicate their preferred pathways. This is similar to tactical urbanism, a community-driven style of permanent public infrastructure. However, while Bela refers to tactical urbanism as DIY urbanism, user-generated urbanism stresses the importance of combining bottom-up and top-down planning practices.

 

The  Ohio State University "Oval" today - a sophisticated network of user-generated walkways. It began in 1914 when urban designers paved the pathways on new laws that were created by users - Photo Google Earth 

One of the most famous successful examples of this strategy emerged in 1914 at Ohio State University. 

The University intentionally had no plan for the walkways between buildings across the campus and only paved them once the most eroded routes in the lawn – desire paths – clearly communicated to the architect where the routes should be installed. This resulted in an interesting intersection of routes across the large campus lawn, the Oval.

Listening to the principal users of streets may help us avoid the mistakes and unintended consequences, including potential issues such as vandalism and movement predictors, the concerns that Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) practitioners often deal with. 

 

Ad hoc attempt to block a natural desire path across public lawn

COLLABORATION DRIVES SUCCESS

In an ever-changing world user-generated urbanism teaches us the importance of adaptive designs and designs that serve the purpose of their users. This is why collaboration in designing our streets is as important as ever. In Second Generation CPTED and SafeGrowth we teach the concept of Connectivity, which ensures the neighbourhood is connected to outside actors including the government and agencies to realise their goals. 

Engineers, architects, planners and landscape architects should therefore strive for collaborative practices as much as possible – doing so might just give them the answers they’re looking for when designing the streets the users want.

We're Using Our Streets All Wrong 

- Dead Metal versus User-Generated Urbanism 

The "nudge" factor in CPTED

by Larry Leach

Larry is Executive Director of Calgary’s 12 Community Safety Initiative – a non-profit crime prevention collaborative. He was awarded the Queens Diamond and Platinum Jubilee medals for his contributions to community-building. He is a member of the SafeGrowth Network and now joins our blogging team.

In 2021 a book was published called Nudge: The Final Edition. Prior to that, there are several videos and TedTalks on the topic going back over a decade. Prof. Richard Thaler won the Nobel prize in 2017 for the theory. Nudge has become popular in behavioral economics studies. The concept is simple: Most people want to do the right thing, but instinctively take the path of least resistance. A reminder or nudge can put us all on a path towards doing the right thing. 

For example, after a sporting event or concert, I have often left garbage behind under the seat (like everyone else). My thinking: 'We all know they have cleaners coming in after, so no guilt'. One day after leaving a game, my friend picked up his beer can and plastic cup. I turned back and did the same. We then waited while many others put their recycling in one bin (the beer can) and the plastic cups in another. Simple, yes, but ultimately, we must be the change we want to see in the world. We can’t expect (or guilt) others to join us, but we can nudge them.

WHAT IS A NUDGE?

When translated, the sign in the above photo in Helsingborg, Sweden reads “A hello can save lives”. Mateja Mihinjac from our SafeGrowth team came across this yellow-painted bench in a downtown park. It was part of Helsingborg's "Friendship Benches Project" and it was an attempt to nudge those feeling alone and alienated seeking conversation to sit at the yellow part of the bench to encourage empathetic passersby to have a friendly conversation.  

According to research from the National Center for Suicide Research,“talking is one of the ways to prevent someone from actually attempting suicide”. It is a classic example of "nudge" design to encourage positive behaviour. And Swedish research suggests it is working.

When I hear behavioral economists and behavioral scientists talk about this topic I can’t help my mind wandering over to the CPTED space. Both CPTED and Safegrowth have behavioral elements. Designing a space to nudge others into doing what is best for the environment around them, not what is the most immediate personal win. Spaces to encourage gathering and community building will be activated by someone and followed by others to create a critical mass.

Research suggests that certain colours at night might trigger less violent behaviour

For example, an experiment was described during a TedTalk where a speaker put up signs that said, “Your mother doesn’t work here, clean up your own mess”. The result was a mess left everywhere. 

A successful example was putting three garbage receptacles on a beach in a high visibility area with different colours and signs above with examples of what to put in each colour bag. The latter was FAR more successful. A Nudge (subtle) is greater than an order or ultimatum. It gives the individual the agency to make their own decision to do the right thing. Do you ever hear anyone boast that they did the right thing because a sign told them? Rather do you hear “I always do that”? It can become a big part of someone’s personal brand or narrative. 

Prior SafeGrowth blogs have described the subtle impact of
coloured lighting and crime

HOW DO YOU NUDGE A SPACE? 

Nudging and CPTED take time to change people’s behavior and for most people, it will work. We all need to be patient to see the results over time. In Safegrowth the goal is stated on the website “If Neighborhoods had the skills, tools, and resources to remove, wherever possible, the motives and opportunity for crime.” A lofty goal, but certainly worth the time it takes to understand who and what assets your community has and what assets are needed to accomplish this.

One might think that a survey asking behavioural questions is a good idea, but the problem goes back to the YouTube nudge example above. Putting instructional signs up sounds like a good idea. People would likely answer 'put up a sign' in response to irresponsible behavior. That notion comes from the premise that we all want to do the right thing, but when we see others not do the right thing, we all follow. 

The Thaler and Suntein book "Nudge" revolutionized
how urban designers think about space

Therefore, it is not simply asking the question but instead, it is understanding what behavior needs a nudge. How often have you heard someone explaining bad behaviour by saying, "others do it, so why can’t I?" In criminology, this is known as the techniques of neutralization.

It is not enough to hope for good intentions. In SafeGrowth and in intelligent CPTED, when we look at designing spaces and activating spaces to create community, we always must keep in mind human behavior. For people to comply, they might need a little nudge or two.

 

Here's to our students - a life of purpose

Baltimore's Penn train station during our class night-time safety audits

by Gregory Saville

I taught my first CPTED seminar at my home university in Toronto while in graduate school when I was still a police officer in 1986. It launched my teaching, researching, planning, and consulting career. Since then we have modernized and expanded the CPTED program far beyond lights, locks, territorial controls, and target hardening. 

In recent years, with the help of the many smart and experienced members of our SafeGrowth Network, along with some leading academics, practitioners, community residents, researchers, and police officers, the SafeGrowth method has flourished as a powerful way to transform places. But today, after all these years and all this progress, I remain powerfully impressed by our students.

Landing home at the Denver International Airport - reflecting on past training

Landing in Denver last week after a flurry of training projects it struck me that I still revere the intelligence and tenacity brought to our crime prevention classes by the residents, police, city organizations, and community associations. Our recent courses in Madison, Vancouver, Baltimore, Palm Springs, Saskatoon, and New York City again reaffirmed my faith in our students. They have the most to gain and lose because they live in neighborhoods afflicted by crime. We affectionately call them SafeGrowthers, and they are remarkable.

They hold a mix of professional and personal skills and they bring a wealth of experience to the table, often with humor and passion. 

Reading, talking, walking, and thinking
- they engage the SafeGrowth material with full attention

Our students are an impressive bunch

Fighting crime and building neighborhood livability is a massive undertaking with many obstacles. And yet, even when faced with the miracle stupidity of government red tape, jumbled media distortions, and political manipulators, they still somehow manage to stay the course and get the job done. 

Outdoor Safety Audits are a popular part of the training

This year, once again, I listened to the obscene wickedness they face in the crime, drugs, and violence plaguing their neighborhoods. They tell us our training offers them tools and methods to succeed, and for that we are grateful. Yet their stories cause goosebumps:

• In one city, residents and police tackled a high-crime city-owned parking structure and presented the results to the city council, hoping for action to improve safety. A year later, after no action, a resident was robbed and murdered in exactly the way they predicted. Crime prevention is not always easy! 
• In one New York neighborhood, students came to class the day after a shooting homicide of one of their neighbors. 

Some of our students are already engaged in incredible prevention work, such as the Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence organization

• In a Baltimore class, one group tackled school violence in a high school where school administrators refused to collaborate with them. 
• In another city, residents were asked by some managers not to deliver their findings at final community presentations regarding violence at a homeless shelter. They did so anyway and, in doing so, they learned how to speak with diplomacy and candor. They ended up with a positive reaction from the shelter and charted out practical steps forward.
• In some cities, police shone as stellar leaders who engaged with the residents. In others, police never bothered to attend or participate (this being a free class in proven methods of preventing crime). 
• Some students themselves were victims of violence in their own neighborhoods. Others had once been incarcerated for violence, had reformed their lives, and were now community leaders. 

In New York, training occurred in multiple neighborhoods in different parts of the city 

When we speak to our students in class, online, or during virtual office hours, we work to provide the best resources and the latest research findings on preventing crime. Usually, we end up providing emotional support and encouragement. 

During this election season, I know who deserves our vote and whose cause we should ensure politicians support. It should be these peace warriors who do this magnificent work. To all our students from your instructors and from everyone in the SafeGrowth network... Thank you! Thank you! 

A Catalyst for climate action and sustainable communities

Alberta's glacier-crowned Mt. Athabasca, in Jasper Park - a symbol of connectedness. Water runs west to the Pacific, north to the Arctic, and east to Hudson's Bay. The nearby town of Jasper was recently destroyed by climate wildfires
- photo courtesy Florian Fuchs, CC BY 3.0 Wiki Commons

by Anna Brassard

We have often stated that SafeGrowth is less of a crime prevention strategy and more of a neighborhood planning method. True, we usually begin by tackling crime and using tactics like 1st and 2nd-generation CPTED. But from the beginning, we have built many of our ideas on the urban planning Smart Growth movement, which has at its core a sustainable environment and a response to climate change. 

CPTED, of course, is none of those things. That we are able to have such a potent impact on reducing crime and building cohesion convinces us that climate change programs are a powerful magnifying force with benefits far and wide.

 

Climate change fire near Los Angeles. Our neighbourhoods need to
learn resilience strategies - Photo Eddiem360, CC BY-SA 4.0 

EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS

Some of our earliest SafeGrowth programs began due to extreme weather events, such as our work in the Hollygrove neighborhood following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We are increasingly seeing extreme weather events with increased flooding and wildfires. Our cities are getting hotter and hotter with few places for reprieve from the heat. Concrete jungles, indeed! Forest fires burn around the world, displacing many. 

Jasper National Park, in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, was recently evacuated due to out-of-control wildfires that consumed 30% of the historic town of Jasper.  Alongside extreme weather, aging infrastructure is beginning to fail. The need to address climate change is becoming increasingly evident. 

A recent study measuring the effectiveness of worldwide climate policies that significantly reduced emissions over the past twenty years provides guidance for meeting climate targets. It concluded that a mix of carrots and sticks is required. Policy is one piece of the puzzle. 

How do we approach sustainability at the community level?  This is where SafeGrowth arises. A pioneering initiative, SafeGrowth aims to empower communities to address climate change and build a more sustainable future. By focusing on a range of interconnected issues like transportation, housing, streetscapes, and land use in conjunction with crime prevention, SafeGrowth helps communities identify and implement solutions that address climate change and enhance the overall quality of life.

 

The Glenmore Reservoir supplies Calgary with water - until an outdated water feeder line failed in June leading to weeks of shortages  - photo Qyd, CC BY-SA 3.0

WATER DISASTER IN CALGARY 

Calgary recently suffered a catastrophic water main break of its main waterline that provides water to 40% of the city. Montreal also recently suffered a significant water main break with the subsequent flooding of homes and businesses. In Calgary, residents and businesses were placed under Stage 4 water restrictions to reduce water usage by 25% until repairs to the water main could be made. 

Fortunately, the community stepped up in this emergency and found ways to reduce water consumption including flushing their toilets less often, installing rain barrels to water their gardens, and taking shorter showers. Initially, residents worked together and there were few tickets for violations issues. After an extensive review of the entire water system, it was discovered that many segments of the waterlines needed immediate repair to prevent another imminent failure. The city returned to Stage 4 water restrictions so repairs could be made. 

Recent news headline about water feeder line failure in June, 2024

This time around, residents and businesses were less enthusiastic about reducing water consumption, and many tickets were issued for water usage violations. Apparently, social cohesion is not easy to sustain in climate emergencies, possibly since residents have only limited experience with intensive community collaboration. 

AN EARLY EXAMPLE OF COHESION

SafeGrowth offers a path forward for communities seeking to create a more resilient, equitable, and prosperous future. When we teach our classes, including a recent training in Vancouver, our team was taught 1st, and 2nd CPTED as tools to address the physical, and social aspects of the neighbourhood. This is the beginning of connecting with the natural and built environment. By working on long-term neighbourhood plans and crime reduction projects on a regular basis, different groups within the community learn the skills of project development. 

Our Livability Academy is the next step in furthering collaborative programming as we discovered in New Orleans and Philadelphia. That is a longer-term program of free, weekly public education classes in which dozens of community members learn the skills and power of collaboration. Now that 3rd Generation CPTED has been introduced, there are specific tactics for economic, public health, social, and environmental sustainability – the very core principle of environmental resilience. 

Collaborative teams using the SafeGrowth model create innovative visions and plans for a more resilient, safe, and sustainable neighbourhood future. The latest water crisis in Calgary reaffirmed the need to train neighbourhood residents across the city in collaborative action before the disaster shows up. 

 

The neighborhood effect - A contextual social science

  

New York, Greenwich Village Park at night. When it comes to preventing (and understanding) crime - neighborhoods have always mattered. 

by Gregory Saville 

I was thinking about my recent blog Do we know enough about crime to prevent it? Then I remembered some writing from Stanley Leiberson, former president of the American Sociological Association and member of the National Academy of Sciences. He wrote the book Making it Count: the Improvement of Social Theory, about the logic and reasoning in social science. That was a publication I wrote about during my doctoral research and I was mystified my supervisors knew nothing of it nor seemed interested in it. 

Decades before the evidence-based/crime science movement was around, Lieberson showed how social science went wrong by searching for a way to mimic classical, physics-style research. 

The doctrine of the undoable

He coined the term the doctrine of the undoable. In his book, he asked: “are there questions currently studied that are basically unanswerable even if the investigator had ideal nonexperimental data?” He discussed non-experimental, and yet rigorous, ways to answer difficult questions while still remaining scientific.  

Lieberson claimed social research sought to mathematize every factor, replicate findings in a lab, and deploy randomized controls (the same points I made last blog). While some of those have a place, Lieberson thought a more fruitful approach was the holistic methods emerging during breakthrough scientific discoveries, especially those used by evolutionary biologists. Biologists use rigorous observations and then construct logical systems (hence, my point on typologies). 

Scientists like evolutionary biologists and ecologists use holistic methods of research to study the natural environment through history 

Collective Efficacy and Chicago’s neighborhoods 

Lieberson was on to something fundamental, a discovery made real in Sampson's, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Robert Sampson is the recipient of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, (the “Nobel” award of that field), and something of a phenom when it comes to sociological work on cities. 

If you care about neighborhood safety and health, read this book! It virtually re-invigorated the famous Chicago School of Urban Ecology from the last century, an approach that led to most modern sociological theories about the city. Among them, collective efficacy and social cohesion are integral principles within the SafeGrowth planning method.

Between all the towers, smaller places thrive. All cities are congregations of one type of neighborhood or another

Sampson’s work followed many of the principles that Lieberson espouses.  Sampson's findings seem to use a Lieberson-style methodology to revive the idea of neighborhoods as a powerful way to create safer and more livable cities. We have seen this repeatedly in SafeGrowth neighborhoods. 

Contextual causality – a new scientific concept 

In one powerful chapter titled “Neighborhood Effects and a Theory of Context”, Sampson concludes, “We require a more flexible conception of causality than that offered by individual experiments and their mathematical counterparts”. 

Then he adds a concept that aims straight back to the social ecologists of the 1940s and their focus on the interactions between neighborhood residents and how that can create a crime-resistant neighborhood. 



“Consistent with a pragmatist philosophy of science and the idea that causality can only be understood in a context, I believe this book taken as a whole has demonstrated a family of neighborhood effects and examples of contextual causality.” (page 383 in Great American City). 

Sampson’s work, particularly regarding neighborhood effects, is a watershed in the theory of crime prevention. It puts to rest many of the old criticisms that questioned the power of neighborhood organizing to prevent crime. Even notable scholarly works like Wesley Skogan’s Disorder and Crime: The Spiral Decay of American Neighborhoods,  take a derisive turn on community organizations when it comes to preventing crime. 

Skogan offers two case studies on community organizations tackling disorder and crime, neither of which were successful (page 155, Disorder and Crime). Then again, both cases used “neighborhood block-watch groups” as the strategy and surveys as the method of evaluation – which takes us right back to the problem of research methods and context.

 

Neighborhood Watch groups and traditional neighborhood associations
are not always well suited to create plans to prevent crime

To be clear, Skogan’s work includes some penetrating insights into the dynamics of disorder, particularly the struggles by community policing to address it. Putting aside the reliance on public awareness as a measure of effectiveness and the curious dependence on statistical "path coefficients" (a popular statistical fashion of the day), it is a pretty good read.   

But, two decades later, looking back through the prism of Sampson’s neighborhood effects and social cohesion/ efficacy theories, it is clear that a new dawn has emerged in neighborhood research. Context causality methods, first suggested by Lieberson, now offer a more powerful context-based research program for neighborhood crime prevention (and, possibly, a more pragmatic social science).

Sociologist Stanley Lieberson - a giant in sociological thought
Photo Harvard Emeritus Faculty

Lieberson died in 2018.  It would be fascinating to travel back a few years and report to him just how ground-breaking he was in triggering this new movement in neighborhood-based research and crime prevention. I wonder if he had any idea?

Oath of fealty and our HiDWON future

Sci Fi novel by Niven and Pournelle - Oath of Fealty. Our future?
photo Amazon.com

by Gregory Saville  

The world has 8,172,746,366 people and, since I wrote that sentence a moment ago, it has grown by tens of thousands. It grows every second. While the rate of growth is slowing, estimates place the global population at 10 billion by mid-century. Where, and how, will all those people live?

In many countries, housing and rental costs have skyrocketed. And in a country with an ethos of the “American Dream”, (now adopted in China as the “Chinese Dream”) the single-family home is becoming a thing of the past. In my city of Denver, the majority of new buildings comprise tens of thousands of high-density condos, apartments, or townhomes. The new building motto: Fewer cul-de-sacs, more density. 

Sadly, developers construct physical buildings at the speed of light, but they do not understand neighborhoods. When neighborhood planning takes a back seat to the home construction derby, absent any thought of a livable neighborhood, we are left with a bleak future. If you know anything about the history of CPTED, remember the crime catastrophe emerging from 1950s high-density public housing and modernist architecture. If you don't, read Newman’s Defensible Space! 

Giving rise to Newman's Defensible Space, the Pruitt-Igoe public housing apartments in St. Louis in the 1950s, before demolition.
High-density public housing with a new architectural style - modernism. 
- photo US Geological Survey, public domain, via Wiki Commons

HISTORY NEED NOT REPEAT

Are we building another crime-ridden, future catastrophe?

There is no shortage of city utopias in modern design publications. The cities they describe look futuristic and slick. They seldom describe what people will actually do to make ends meet or how they will live surrounded by thousands of others with nowhere to walk. Are there are stories about such places or the consequences of such places? There are indeed and every year, I ask the members of our SafeGrowth network to read a book that tells such a story. It is no utopia!

Larry Niven is an award-winning science fiction writer of the famed Ringworld series, among many other well-known novels. Larry Pournelle worked as an aerospace psychologist before launching into his writing career. Together they published Oath Of Fealty in 1981, a book considered among the top 100 best sci-fi novels. 

Oath of Fealty is a dystopian story set in the near future about a massive high-density structure called Todos Santos – a city within a city – surrounded by a crime-ridden and blighted Los Angeles. Todos Santos is an urban design concept called arcology, originally developed by architect Paulo Solare. In 2010, I wrote Arcosante – Our Future? about an actual arcology under construction in Arizona. 

[Note: I spoke to Paulo Solare in depth about his planning philosophy and I am certain he would be horrified by the Todos Santos style of arcology]. 

Dining area at Arcosante - a real-life arcology under construction in Arizona. Completely different from the arcology depicted in Oath of Fealty
- photo license Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 

TODOS SANTOS IN REAL LIFE

The Todos Santos arcology is miles wide and deep and a half-mile high. Solare told me he imagined arcologies as dense urban beehives with beautiful architecture and plenty of greenery. Because architecture in Todos Santos comprised an enclosed 3-D city constructed as one structure, it is easy to control access and establish territorial control (the basic principles of CPTED). Surveillance in all forms is a simple matter, especially with the permission (the Oath) of residents. Within such a high-tech, massive security castle (think of gated communities on steroids), controllers can protect a million inhabitants with their own security – as long as you swear an oath of allegiance to constant surveillance. 

Liverpool One development in the UK - photo courtesy of Wiki Commons 

In 2014 I wrote a blog titled A Few Years After Tomorrow about a development scheme in the UK to privatize 35 downtown streets, limit public streets, and control safety via a private security force and CCTV. Called Liverpool One, it was as close to Todos Santos as I could imagine back then – private corporations buying up the public realm and controlling security. Today, Liverpool One is now built, albeit with plenty of public access and without the private streets. It is not an arcology, but it does hold the promise of a safer future.

Oath of Fealty suggests that when faced with terrifying blight and crime (or at least the fear of them), a rarified, high-tech, comfortable life within the arcology is worth an oath fealty by residents allowing constant surveillance and monitoring to keep everyone safe. That lifestyle offers security that public police cannot provide because arcology dwellers choose to forgo their anonymity and privacy to secure their safety (at least, in the Todos Santos version). 

 

Promotional painting from the 1927 German film Metropolis - an urban utopia that came true. It looks remarkably similar to large, downtown skyscrapers today. 
- image Wiki Commons 

OUR HiDWON FUTURE

Oath of Fealty also suggests that those inside the arcology are shackled by Big Brother. They forgo their civic responsibility and collaboration with others to ensure safer streets – the very thing we work to reinforce in SafeGrowth programming. Instead, they trust technology and rely, not on each other, but on the Todos Santos corporation. 

It all sounds very AI-like in tone. An electronic parent is always watching...just relax and let your fears subside. Your Oath of Fealty will keep you safe. Trust the massive global expansion of public CCTV and security AI. 

I am calling the new high-density redevelopment movement, which lacks neighborhood building and relies on technology for security, the HiDWON movement (High-Density WithOut Neighborhood). Will this new HiDWON movement lead to Todos Santos-style cities? Is this future really so distant?