Building blocks for civic commitment - the key to safety

\

Reaching for livability and safety 
through civic commitment

by Larry Leach

The role of commitment in civic life is no different than the desire for a crime-free, livable neighborhood.

Do you feel emotionally tied to something? Maybe a sports team, celebrity, or politician? I do—with the British football club - Liverpool FC. The club’s unique culture is inseparable from the city’s history and tragedies. Before each match, as thousands sing You’ll Never Walk Alone, every supporter invests their own meaning. The song became Liverpool’s anthem in the 1960s, adopted from the version release by the famous Liverpool band “Gerry and the Pacemakers”. The atmosphere isn’t managed by the club—it’s owned by the fans. Why? Commitment!

Which came first, the club trusting the fans or the fans’ deep loyalty? I’d argue the latter. Commitment comes first.

More often than not, making connections between people
involves community events focused on food

What does this have to do with SafeGrowth? When it comes to building local capacity for cohesion, problem-solving and crime prevention, it means everything. Successful communities share the same backbone: history, shared experience, and commitment. 

SafeGrowth aims to help neighborhoods organize this energy and it does so by accepting that many of those people living there are the experts. As Mateja and Gregory wrote in Third Generation CPTED, it’s a holistic approach tying safety to public health, economic vitality, and quality of life—anchored in community engagement and ownership.

Maslow reminds us that our personal needs for safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization come from many different sources, but they all depend on relationships. 

Sociologist Robert Sampson clearly revealed in his landmark research about collective efficacy, how, in many places (especially high crime places), those community ties have eroded. To restore them requires personal commitment. I’ve seen it in twenty years with my Community Association: real progress happens only when people stop dipping toes and fully commit.

Psychologist Maslow's heirarchy of individual needs overlaps
with quality of neighborhood life described in 3rd Generation CPTED

When I was Soccer Association President, someone joked, “You can’t ask a coach what they’re doing for the next five years.” Yet if you want a coach who teaches life lessons and inspires kids, that’s exactly the kind of long-term dedication required.

COMMITMENT FROM THE GROUND UP

How do we build it? There are two keys:

1.     Recognize that each community must be itself—not a copy of another. New York isn’t Paris; Tokyo isn’t Sydney. Great cities learn from each other, but they thrive on uniqueness and history. Communities must do the same: discover their assets, embrace their story, and commit to the work ahead.

2.     Strong leadership draws in strong members. Projects completed together build pride and belonging. That is why SafeGrowth Livability Academies create a pool of community leaders and use problem-solving projects to start the process.

Every time I pass the youth centre where I volunteer, I’m reminded that commitment is not abstract. It’s bricks, voices, and faces. That’s the kind of belonging every community deserves to feel—and the kind of legacy we leave when we choose to stay committed. When we choose to stay the course together, we don’t just build places—we build meaning.”

Does nudging work in social media

Hectic, stress-inducing airports can nudge calm behaviour. The Long Beach airport in California uses quiet areas, plenty of greenery, and a playful environment

by Larry Leach

In my last post, I related the concept of nudge. In relation to SafeGrowth, the concept from behavioral economics suggests that human choices and decisions are triggered as much by physical designs as by education, legislation, or enforcement. 

While there are scientific disputes about nudge theory, there is little doubt the concept has mileage in contemporary community-building, whether the community is physical or virtual. This will increasingly become concerning as augmented and virtual reality devices expand. 

The concept of CPTED has always been led by a form of nudging. We see it in 1st generation CPTED. You improve the beautification, cleanliness, and image of an area and you nudge offenders away from that location by making it difficult for them to offend with impunity! 

In 2nd Generation CPTED, you engage neighbours in local cultural, art, and music festivals, and nudge them towards caring more for their community as they get to know each other – what sociologists call collective efficacy. Research shows how collective efficacy can nudge crime out and positive activities in. 

 

Portland enhances collective efficacy by nudging people outdoors to common street gardens where they can socialize and meet neighbours in a positive way

NUDGING IN THE WILD WEST OF CYBERSPACE

If nudging works in the physical environment, what about cyberspace? I recently attended Calgary’s Cyber Summit with Law Enforcement and Cyber Security with companies from all over the world. Can the concept be used online since it is humans who mostly control social media?

Popular opinion is that social media is a cesspool! It’s destructive to mental health and can lead to crime. It continues to be a Wild West when it comes to regulation and the damage filters into the real world.

Those developing social media do not always understand the psychology of impulse behavior and its negative effects. Or perhaps their motives are only about sales or power and not about the harmful impact on daily life? Either way, the damage has been done. That means it’s up to us to carefully choose and decide how we should behave.

Can we use the concept of nudge to influence online behaviour?  Cyber security experts have been attempting to nudge their clients to adopt cyber security habits like using 2-step verification to protect our identity or installing security updates at a regular time. 

Cybersecurity experts are constantly attempting to nudge safer online habits

In other cases, it is possible to add “trigger words” to your preference sections of apps to filter out what you see. Your preference sections are probably filled with swear words, but you can choose to filter out other words that emerge with online scams. 

 

CYBER POWERBROKERS

What else might we do to limit the impact of negative nudging and enhancing civil behavior online? Perhaps we can assemble a community of informed online users who advocate filtering out trigger words that contribute to harmful behaviors? That would prevent negative nudging before it began. Perhaps we can prevent cyber threats like spoofing, deepfakes, and phishing by populating our preferences to avoid risky trigger words? 

We are waiting for the regulations of lawmakers, or the voluntary compliance of platform owners and powerbrokers, to figure out how to govern cyberspace. People should take the powerbrokers out of this equation and democratically decide how to govern each other online. 

There are obviously pros and cons to filtering words, but we need to have this important discussion about how cyber nudging can help, or hinder, our online experience. 

 

It is practically impossible to find any social space where people are not fixated on their phones or their computers - online behaviour matters in the real world

NUDGING A SAFER, MORE CIVIL WAY?

Are we capable of producing online communities that are there for the community and not for profit? These would be communities that don’t use your personal information for profit.

We should start with some stronger guardrails from our favorite online platforms. Imagine if each of us could adhere to the simple principle of being the positive change you want to see in the online world. If the owners of a platform put up their own guardrails, then the community would not need to call out the bad behaviour. Perhaps we can find some responsible platform owners and showcase how they focus on setting the example of what we all want to see in our online world? 

I am not advocating for a perfect, everyone-should-be-happy scenario. I am advocating for careful attention to the cyber nudges that cause harmful behaviour and responsible guardrails to protect the online community. What about more serious consequences for those who do harm for profit (scammers, deep-fake fraudsters, ID thieves)? 

An online community of civil discourse.
Showcasing responsible platform owners.

How about more information about the negative triggers that nudge behaviour in harmful directions (like suicide and harassment)? We already label the harms of tobacco. What about the online harms?  

How about creating a savvy user-base who participates in civil discourse. If this user-base ever comes to pass, we will offer up a quotation attributed to both Nobel Laureate writer George Bernard Shaw and US Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg. It is a concept we also teach in our SafeGrowth classes - it is possible to disagree without being disagreeable. That is the basis of a civil society. Otherwise, we end up with what we see online every day.

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?

Remembering what matters - neighborhoods and crime

 

Independence Day celebrations - remembering history
Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, courtesy of Flickr Commons license

by Gregory Saville

Today it is American Independence Day! Three days ago it was Canada Day (Happy birthday to my Canadian and American peeps). National birthdays are times of reflection about our past and lessons learned, which makes today’s blog about social amnesia all the more salient. 

I first used the term social amnesia in a blog where I described my C. Ray Jeffery Moments about how practitioners in Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design - CPTED - and more appallingly, the instructors who teach them, fail to read the original CPTED texts or learn from the original CPTED pioneers about the vision for CPTED. 

I thought myself quite clever in coining social amnesia forgetting that historian Russell Jacoby had long ago invented the term. Talk about a perfect, and well-deserved, pie-in-my-face moment! I digress. 

I have written about social amnesia a number of times – for example, while reviewing the book Designing Out Crime by Garis and Maxim. Those authors ignored an entire golden age of CPTED in British Columbia, where they live, in describing crime prevention abroad. 

 Making Cities Work: The Dynamics of Urban Innovation
by David Morley, Stuart Proudfoot, Thomas Burns. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado (1980)

Reflecting on that, a question came to mind: What do you get when you put a political scientist, an urban planning scholar, an ethicist, and a criminologist in the same room? Sometimes, when you put brilliant minds together, you get a breakthrough in how to prevent crime, feed people, deliver health, and protect the environment. I’m referring to a chapter in an urban planning book from my past – Making Cities Work.  

The book emerged from a conference in 1977 at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, Toronto and one of the organizers, and co-author, was my former graduate supervisor (one of those brilliant minds) urban geographer, and former Dean, David Morley. The innovation I’m describing is a chapter by four scholars with the seemingly innocuous title: "Institutions for Neighborhood Self-Development”.

Neighborhoods need places that are safe, seatable, and social 

READING HISTORY

All that to say, it is important to read history. It is the lifeblood of our future success – or failure. I have just seen yet another droll website on “innovations in CPTED” from a security consulting firm. It claimed the “latest in CPTED” but that turned into another gross misreading of what CPTED is all about. The author spoke of lighting and target hardening. She referenced her trainer who clearly has not read the foundational documents of CPTED. More amnesia! 

Too often people engaged in day to day projects, jobs, and research ignore (or don’t read) the history that led to where we are now. This is shameful – especially for those who should know better. That is why academics include literature reviews within their studies to ensure they acknowledge their history. 

It brought to mind the message in that book chapter from Making Cities Work on urban innovation, and how it ties into all the work we do in CPTED, especially with a SafeGrowth angle. 

 

When it comes to preventing crime,
neighborhood greenery and walkability matters

NEIGHBORHOODS MATTER

The authors of the urban innovation chapter wrote about the neighborhood as the center of urban life – as did the original CPTED writers. For proof, read Newman’s Communities of Interest, or Fowler’s ground-breaking evaluation of the Hartford neighborhood CPTED project. Like the CPTED pioneers, the urban innovation writers also knew that the neighborhood must be the center of service delivery for health, education, environmental concerns, and security. To them the neighborhood was where everything mattered, a theme we replicate in SafeGrowth. 

This all seems so obvious today. It is commonplace in urban studies and crime prevention research. The language of these professions references neighborhoods as the center of interest: collective efficacy to improve neighborhoods, asset-based community development, neighborhood capital, and activation and community engagement.

But 40 years ago when they wrote their chapter, neighborhoods were not seen that way. Interestingly, these four brilliant minds all became famous, thought-leading scholars. 

• Louis Mascotti, held professorships in three disciplines including economics, political science and real estate. He founded Northwestern University’s Center for Urban Affairs and the Real Estate Center. 
• John McKnight, a well-known scholar of urban affairs, created asset mapping, one of the tools we use extensively in SafeGrowth. He also co-authored the seminal book Building Communities from the Inside Out and authored The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits. 
• Stan Hallett, an urban planning scholar and ethicist at Northwestern University marched with Martin Luthur King, Jr in the 1960s. 
• Frederic Dubow, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Illinois, wrote that crime prevention was the community responsibility and it is the means by which citizens exercise their civil rights. He was one of the first criminologists to write prominently about citizen participation in crime prevention. 

Neighborhoods need a core landmark, or something to remember

IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED

Each of these authors, in their own way, built on the premise that the neighborhood – as the primary unit of geography - is the key for preventing crime and improving livability. Notice that they did not mean community, that nebulous phrase that means everything and nothing. Rather, they meant neighborhood as a specific place with geographical boundaries, an identifiable population, and unique buildings, parks, schools, businesses, and residential areas. A place people call home!  

That was the original focus of both CPTED and urban innovation. We emphasize in our work that geography matters. Too large and programs get lost in the policy or politics of the day. Too small and you end up with target hardening to prevent drug deals in the park, but then you just move it elsewhere, fail to address fear, or leave the important questions unanswered. The key is in the middle…right-sizing. That means the neighborhood. Remember the lessons of history.

There is a whole section of the SafeGrowth website on the characteristics of some great neighborhoods we have seen over the years. Let’s not lose the important legacy of the first efforts to rebuild community life and prevent crime. 

In the meantime, Happy Birthday! 

Uncovering the Great Murder Mystery

In 2010 Vanessa Barker published an intriguing study just released on the internet: Explaining the Great American Crime Decline.

I love this study.

Barker reviews three studies on the crime decline: Frank Zimring’s The Great American Crime Decline, a report by Goldberger and Rosenfield and a book by Wallman and Blumstein, The Crime Drop in America.

You might think the crime decline topic is old turf with explanatory paths we’ve walked many times: less street cocaine, bigger and fuller prisons, tougher policing, smarter policing, legal abortions.

Alas, says Barker, none of those standard stories emerge from the research intact.

INSIGHTS FROM URBAN ECOLOGY

Barker moves away from standard stories onto Insights from Urban Sociology. Crime theorists will recognize references to collective efficacy and neighborhood structure. For those unfamiliar with crime theory, SafeGrowth is a megamenu of these same insights. Probably why I love the study...duh!

The changing structure of downtowns and changing youth culture falls squarely into these insights. Such changes help build more cohesive neighborhoods, not in places like Ferguson but in enough places to make a difference.

These insights include social and environmental factors this blog has held front and center, like business associations, non-profits, schools, social services, cultural activities, transport systems, and housing. They include examples of collaborative commons and social cohesion.

THE IMMIGRATION BOMB

That’s when Barker drops the bomb! When she re-examined urban ecology studies on immigration she discovered how increasing immigration has helped reduce crime, not increase it!

“Sampson…suggests that increased immigration in the 1990s sparked urban renewal and economic growth in immigrant-dense neighborhoods like Queens and Bushwick in New York, the West Side in Chicago, South Central Los Angeles, and cities like Miami. The influx of immigrants corresponded with increases in income and decreases in poverty.”

THE NATTERING NUMPTIES

I’d love to see that debate in elections now underway in Canada, and next year in the U.S. Sadly what we get instead is hollow sound-bite nuggets from a bunch of nattering numpties.

Case in point: Last week the NDP party in Canada proposed to hire 2,500 more cops. They want to cut crime on Canadian streets…streets where most crime is still declining!

Pockets of Crime expands urban ecology theory -
collective action by residents can turn the tide,
but only when physical conditions are right

INFINITE MONKEY THEOREM

Sadly the standard stories persist, lately in the theory that crime declines resulted from increased security worldwide (in technical terms, guardianship). And we are served up a buffet of advanced statistical techniques that hit and peck at data in shiny, new datasets.

It’s a kind of infinite monkey theorem for big crime data. Remember the theory that predicted the monkey who hits and pecks keyboard keys for infinity will almost surely end up creating Hamlet.

I say leave the monkey alone! Barker and colleagues are onto something, something we’ve known for a long time.

Talent - from potential to kinetic energy

Albert Cruz's time lapse photo of Philadelphia City Hall

We insist our students spend time assembling asset maps before they come up with strategies during their crime prevention work. We call it tapping into the latent neighborhood talent.

That talent staggers the mind. It represents an untapped source of potential energy waiting to be transformed into its kinetic form, what social scientists call community efficacy. Read the social science description of this effect in Robert Sampson's epic Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect.

Roberto Contreras' photo from surrounding mountains overlooking Santiago, Chile

For firsthand evidence check out these fabulous cityscape photos taken by talented photographers - students participating in, or connected with, SafeGrowth trainings over the past few years.

John Thurston and Roberto Contreras kindly provided birds eye views of their respective cities in past SafeGrowth trainings. The latest offering is at the top of this blog; a beautiful time lapse portrait of City Hall by Philadelphia police officer Albert Cruz.

Photograher John Thurston from San Diego took this photo of City Heights