The famous Pearl Street pedestrian mall in Boulder, Colorado - photo Creative Commons, Wiki
by Gregory Saville
In a blog last December, I wallowed in one of my annual whine-fests about the state of policing when I wrote about organizational amnesia and the post-Ferguson wake-up for police strategies.
Now I must retrace my steps, stop whining, and introduce one of the best antidotes to that cynicism.
Each year a group of the best in policing gathers to consider a new way forward for police. They examine innovative problem-solving, community collaborations, and how to use data and analysis to solve intractable crime issues. I am writing, of course, about this year’s 31st Annual International Problem-Oriented Policing Conference.
There are sessions on policing homelessness, reimagining campus safety, responding to active shootings, new approaches to field training and the PTO model, and crime prevention through environmental design.
In short, if we had police departments across the country with a much deeper dive into this form of policing in modern policing, we would have less community-police conflict and a safer community. It is really that simple.
Hilton Embassy Suites is the venue in Boulder - Photo Orbitz
I will be presenting both CPTED and SafeGrowth at this conference. As well, I am very excited to see some exemplary work of police officers around the world as they compete for top honors in the prestigious Herman Goldstein Problem-Oriented Policing Award program.
Professor Herman Goldstein was among the most thoughtful and caring police scholars when it comes to policing as if people matter. He delighted in hearing the amazing success stories of police working with communities to fight crime. His influential book Problem-Oriented Policing is a seminal text on how to do policing right.
The method is described in detail on the Center for Problem Oriented Policing website, led by Michael Scott, clinical professor and director of the center.
Budgeting for social agencies - Lessons from Calgary Photo Creative Commons
GUEST BLOG: Larry Leach is Executive Director of 12 Community Safety Initiative (12CSI), a non-profit crime prevention collaborative in Calgary, Canada, one of the initial sponsors of the 2015 SafeGrowth Summit. In 2018 12CSI won the Alberta Solicitor General's Award for Community Collaboration and the Ambassador program won it in 2022. Larry has been a Huffington Post blogger and is involved in the SafeGrowth Network. He was awarded with the Queens Diamond and Platinum Jubilee medals for his contributions to community-building.
I recently started analyzing the budgets of social agencies in Calgary and the numbers may stagger many not working within the sector. While my analysis is not yet complete, it is clear that the collective budgets of agencies serving the homeless and vulnerable sectors are well over $200 Million per year. Most of those monies come from the Federal Government (some through Calgary Homeless Foundation) to agencies with budgets ranging from $10 - $40 million.
While I wouldn’t advocate that those monies aren’t spent in a justified way or that less should be spent, we look at the scale of these local agencies with budgets over $10 million to examine their relative effectiveness. We ask the question: Can the system and the agencies employ these significant resources in a more community-centered way?
In many cases, community engagement starts and ends with a town hall meeting. That is not enough!
COMMUNITY EXPERTS
I heard a great quote at a Crime Prevention conference recently from a registered social worker, Kassidy Green from Boyle Street Community Services: “I am a member of the community first, then a member of my profession (social worker)”. That resonates with me.
I work with a team of Ambassadors that walk our neighbourhoods daily working with vulnerable people to help them access services. In that work, the thing we hear most is a simple thank you for speaking to them with respect and trying to help them. It is a one-to-one, person-to-person, holistic community approach.
Community action teams have direct involvement on the streets of their own neighbourhood
When considering CPTED and SafeGrowth, it is said many times throughout these blogs that the real experts are the people that live in these neighbourhoods. In many cases, these agencies may have once upon a time engaged communities they work in, but in practice, the relationships are nonexistent for most of them. Some of the methods they may have used to justify their approach to their funders are described in prior SafeGrowth blogs, especially They Won't Get Involved 1 and They Won't Get Involved 2.
Like many City of Calgary engagement sessions, you do not build community relationships by standing in front of a room and telling people that live in the community how an agency is going to improve the quality of life. That may help an agency check a tick box for the funders, but it does nothing to establish positive relationships. The best way to engage a community is outlined in They Won't Get Involved blogs mentioned above.
Community engagement should also mean fun activities, socializing, and food
OUTPUTS AND OUTCOMES
Let’s go in a different direction. What if the scale of these agencies prevents them from spending time building relationships with communities? What if these monies went to smaller groups or directly to the community itself through the social agency to solve social issues one block, one person, and one community at a time?
Let’s consider outputs vs. outcomes. Often, when you look at agency reports, they speak about how many things they gave out, from food hampers to safe needles. Does that show a good outcome? How were people’s lives affected? I heard a great example at a conference by Daniel J Jones, Chair of Justice Studies, NorQuest College. When the Police hold a press conference and stand in front of a table full of illegal drugs that they confiscated on the street, does the price of cocaine go down?
Going forward in community funding, I think we must consider the following fundamental questions:
How are we affecting people’s lives?
Are we improving people’s lives?
How does what we do affect the community around our work?
How do we empower the community to be part of the solution?
Is what we are doing keeping people from improving their lives?
Is what we are doing supporting everyone in the community?
Police are not the answer to prevent shootings - photo Rosemary Ketchum (Pexels.com)
by Mateja Mihinjac
Here in Europe, we would often watch in horror weekly reports of mass shootings from United States. Now, sadly, we understand better than ever we’re not immune from them in Europe either. Last week Europe followed in disbelief similar horrific events that unfolded in Serbia.
First, a 13-year-old boy shot and killed eight school children and a school security guard and injured another six pupils and a teacher in a Belgrade school.
Less than 48 hours later, a 21-year-old man shot and killed eight people and wounded another fourteen from a moving vehicle across several locations southeast of Belgrade.
Following a silent march to protest against gun violence Serbian leadership had no choice but to vow immediate action to toughen gun control measures in the country. In the wake of public scrutiny, the Serbian Education Minister has also resigned.
THE AFTERMATH
In the aftermath of the Serbian events, my country of Slovenia has also been anxiously responding to potential threats from within. There is now increased police presence around schools across the country. There were even some discussions about installing metal detectors at schools.
Teens watch police tactical officers from a distance
One school has also received anonymous email threats, which prompted the initial placement of police patrols around two schools and the absence of some children from schools on that day.
The Serbian events have now added to calls for urgent focus on the problem of youth violence, its detection and prevention, which had been in the media spotlight since last month when peer violence in one Slovenian school was caught on camera and shared on social media.
QUALITY NEIGHBOURHOODS – QUALITY RELATIONSHIPS
Feeling connected to peers, neighbours, and their neighbourhood, I believe, acts as an antidote to feelings of loneliness, alienation, and feelings of not belonging. The International CPTED Association’s recently published CPTED Guidebook for Schools similarly acknowledges the importance of social and psychological environment – in connection with physical – for children’s wellbeing and prevention of violence in schools. In fact, an ICA webinar on school safety delves directly into these problems.
SafeGrowth specialist and city planner, Elisabeth Miller, engages school children in planning and crime prevention early in their education
I believe that a positive neighbourhood environment and a healthy community environment are even more crucial for children and youth. We as adults have the responsibility for ensuring healthy environments for their positive emotional development.
Moreover, they should be actively engaged in neighbourhood life and encouraged to participate in decision-making activities concerning their neighbourhood, and their schools. This is why in SafeGrowth we insist on the diversity of our neighbourhood SafeGrowth teams also in terms of age where children and youth can become active participants in neighbourhood life.
The quality of our neighbourhoods depends on the quality of relationships we have with our neighbours – and children are also part of that equation.
Relaxing in Central Park - dogs are part of the scene
By Tarah Hodgkinson
One of the most common complaints I hear when working with neighbourhood residents around community safety is not what you might think. Generally, we work in neighbourhoods with some of the highest crime rates. One might assume that when asking residents of these neighbourhoods about their biggest concerns they would raise issues like gun violence, youth gangs, or drug trafficking.
Nope. They talk to us about dog poop.
Surprising right? Not for us. The inability of a neighbourhood to deal with the droppings of their four-legged friends highlights many of the same issues that contribute to crime and violence. These issues include a lack of territorial control and maintenance, an unwillingness to intervene, and a failure to work together to support the needs and values of the community.
A proliferation of pet feces is often indicative of other issues.
WHY IS DOG POOP IMPORTANT?
First, there aren’t supports in these neighbourhoods for pet ownership. Supports include green space, especially dog parks, locations with extra bags in case residents need them, and ample waste baskets. These might seem like minor changes, but they impact how residents clean up after their pets.
Second, people don’t care about their neighbourhood because they don’t feel a part of their neighbourhood. They aren’t connected to other people (what we term in 2nd Generation CPTED - socially cohesive) and so they are less likely to be concerned about leaving animal waste. When people are disconnected from their neighbours, informal controls are weaker, for example, worrying what your neighbours might think and behaving better.
Third, there is no ownership and maintenance of the spaces. People are more likely to dispose of their dog’s droppings appropriately when it is clear that a place is cared for and maintained. This is even more effective if residents know the owner of the space.
Simple message for dog owners - show respect!
PET OWNERSHIP
Pet ownership increased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic as many people had the additional time and space to care for a new friend. However, places for these furry friends are being reduced as green spaces are being fenced off or removed.
Creating connected communities, with the support necessary for pet ownership will make our neighbourhoods healthier and more liveable.
But to do that, we need to recognize that neighbourhoods aren’t just for people. And if we want to support a pet-friendly city, we need to ensure that our neighbourhoods are built for everyone – including our furry friends.
California wildfire researchers work with NASA's scientific data
by Gregory Saville
Yesterday I watched NASA’s meteorologists mapping California’s wildfires with LiDAR and climate sensors to help reduce risks of damage and death in the future. It is remarkable what scientists can do when they use obvious, decent data. As a university undergrad, I studied physical geography and meteorology. That's why the NASA documentary resonated. In university, and in the video, I learned that it is high-quality data that makes the difference.
Geographers study things like weather patterns, how epidemics spread, and how water controls our lives. Geography was the first science in the early environmental movement with climate studies on global warming long before it was rejected by extremist Climate Deniers.
Like the NASA video, it is all amazing stuff. At the core of it is real-life, measurable data with observable patterns.
Imagine my shock when I transferred to a degree program in urban studies, city development, and urban planning. Social geography data was so very different than science data! Social data is not always obvious, well-known, or observable. It uses surveys, tax, census, land use, and economic and demographic data. Social data can be difficult to collect and much of it is incomplete. Useful theories exist only after decades of research.
The very best applied and theoretical science at NASA's Johnson Space Center's Mission Control Center - author NASA
CRIME PATTERNS
In criminology, the situation is worse. Crime studies usually emerge from police data - in other words, citizen reports to the police. Sometimes this shows basic patterns and sometimes not. If citizens don't trust the police, they may not call the police for anything. How can we know if unreported incidents distort the real story?
Criminologists conduct self-report surveys and victim surveys to close the gap. However, the dirty secret of crime patterns is that crime data is horrid. Since data is the basis on which scientific theory proceeds, unreliable data cannot produce good science. If you thought weather prediction was a fuzzy science, at least it uses decent data.
Crime pattern studies, sadly, almost exclusively rely on police reports to analyze crime. In SafeGrowth we use a method called the risk assessment matrix to collect different forms of physical, social, and cultural data along with police stats. It's not perfect, but it is not dependent on police stats.
Now imagine crime prediction! Researchers serve us terminologies like time decay factors, graph signal processing, and the deep generative adversarial network. They slice and dice data into sophisticated algorithms and impressive 3-D graphs. All of this emerges, of course, from the worst imaginable data (at least in scientific terms). My geography classes seldom mentioned crime data. Now I know why.
Fortune-telling attempts prediction without data. This Japanese fortune-telling service had no luck predicting the demise of its own advertising tower - Author hanonimas, Creative Commons
Homicide research is the type I trust most (it's difficult to ignore a murder victim and most get reported). The homicide prediction study concludes:
“Our results are important because, from a policy perspective, optimal deployment of scarce police resources should be guided by high resolution spatial strategies”
Hm…
Well, first, police resources should be guided by evidence-based policy driven by reliable data! That is a long way off.
Second, predictions from mathematical algorithms and graph signal processing should be based on real-life context. For example, will deploying police resources to the right places cut homicides? If alleyway bar fights or outdoor robberies cause the majority of homicides, then police patrols and arrests might work. Policing gang behavior to cut outdoor gang shootings will definitely help.
Unfortunately, studies reveal that, in the US and most other Western countries, most murder victims know their attackers, many offenses occur inside the domestic household, or the victim and attacker live in the same neighborhood. It’s hard to imagine how police deployment will make much difference.
NASA Sunspot predictions for Solar Cycle 23 and 24 from solar observation data - Creative Commons
“Responses [to homicide] must place more responsibility on communities for identifying disputes at an early stage in their development, before they turn fatal.”
Since most homicides happen in the same troubled neighborhoods over and over, strategies like SafeGrowth build capacity in troubled neighborhoods to help residents, with their local police, to transform violence-breeding neighborhoods into livable, crime-resistant places.
Not much prediction is needed there…just municipal services, competent training, and resources to get started. I believe strongly in research and evidence to create viable prevention programs. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves with delusions of scientific prediction when the data is so poor and well-known solutions are already at hand.
Let's admit the truth of crime data and the limit to what it says.
Designing outdoor "rooms" - a building at the end of the street frames the space
GUEST BLOG – Carl Bray is a member of the SafeGrowth Network and an urban designer teaching at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He runs Bray Heritage Consulting and is co-author of a forthcoming book on SafeGrowth and neighborhood safety. In this article, Carl offers some architectural observations on the concept of community-created and safe outdoor places.
Municipalities can go far beyond basic security measures such as improved lighting and sight lines, the first steps in CPTED, to improve public safety. And it can also be a community initiative to create such spaces, something that is the essence of SafeGrowth. Whoever does it, making “outdoor rooms” is a creative and practical way to strengthen neighbourhoods and improve stewardship of place.
Why is it that some places outdoors feel inherently comfortable, and others don’t? Maybe it is because the most comfortable share most of the features that a room has – a floor, walls, and a ceiling – all at a human scale. We decorate rooms to suit our personal tastes, and we spend a lot of time in them. They are where we often feel safest.
Walkways can contribute, or detract, from the outdoor room effect
DESIGNING OUTDOOR ROOMS
A skill known and practised for centuries but only now being rediscovered is designing outdoor spaces that are room-like. In some cultures, people can literally create a room outdoors by moving their rugs, chairs, and tables onto the street or square to enjoy a special event or even to relax in cooler night air.
Some large cities went further and converted streets into outdoor plazas: Times Square in New York City is one example. And during the pandemic, many places moved seating into on-street parking spaces to expand sidewalks and add to adjacent restaurants (some of these adjustments have been made permanent).
But mostly it is everyday activities such as walking down a main street or through a neighbourhood when we feel as though we had entered what feels like a room.
Redesigned public access bleacher in New York Times Square - photo Jim Henderson, Creative Commons
Take a main street, for example. It often feels most comfortable when the street (floor) is about one and a half to twice the height of the flanking buildings (walls). In that case, the “walls” remain in our peripheral vision but we don’t feel confined. Walls are “decorated” with the details of individual buildings and the “ceiling” is defined by rooftops, towers as well as tree canopies, lighting, and signs (as well as, of course, the sky).
Framing a street with murals and a building at the end
In a neighbourhood, it is the street trees and front yard plantings that add to the details found in building facades. If the street is narrow enough – say, around equal to the height of the buildings – the street tree canopies arch over the street and partially define the “ceiling”. There is even recent research suggesting tree canopies over sidewalks has a crime-deterrent effect.
While most of us live in places that have a pattern of straight streets along the edges of square or rectangular blocks, some places slant the grid and create what is known as deflected vistas, where the view along the street angles off to one side so that what is in the distance isn’t visible until you come around the corner. Even more, room-like is what’s known as a terminated vista.
For example, a building sits at the end of the view, usually on the far side of a cross street, and defines the end wall of the outdoor room. Extrapolate that to the scale of a public square in Europe, for example, where all four sides of the square are framed by buildings, and you have a complete outdoor room.
Street furniture and roads as walkways - a more common practice after Covid
FEELING COMFORTABLE MATTERS
What all of these spaces have in common is an ability to make us feel comfortable and secure, even if it is at a subconscious level. An outdoor room attracts people to use it, with the result that it becomes safer. By creating and furnishing outdoor rooms, and making them work well, municipalities can go far beyond basic security measures and elementary CPTED steps, such as improved lighting and sight lines. It can also be a community initiative to create such spaces, something that is the essence of SafeGrowth. Whoever does it, making outdoor rooms is a creative and practical way to strengthen neighbourhoods and improve stewardship of place.
While much of this relies on empirical observation, not scientific research, more methodical approaches, and precise data may soon be available to support these notions. Historical precedent certainly suggests that such places succeed. In the meantime, I encourage you to go outdoors and test these ideas for yourself.
.jpeg)
.jpg){kind=link}
