Topic 10: Neighborhood Public Safety and Community Policing

Safety, both from fear and crime, is essential to neighborhood quality: it is a condition for the wonderful things that can happen in neighborhoods.  But the absence of safety also is a significant contributor to neighborhood decline and a barrier to personal and community action to make life better and to establish partnerships beyond its boundaries.

Fear and crime are the products of people’s beliefs and actions.  As such they can be reversed through our understanding and efforts.

It pulls together many factors that issue from our history, prejudices, and the conditions in these neighborhoods.  Covered are the New Jim Crow and War on Drugs, police militarism and mass incarceration, homicides and clearance rates, police shootings, and the fear-charged explosion of gun ownership.  These factors are daunting but not insurmountable barriers to well-functioning neighborhoods where the challenges are greatest.  Facing these realities enables us to rectify them.

The Part 1 slide show addresses a set of causes and consequences, a downward spiraling system.  It is focused on segregated African American and Latino neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, which are a special concern of community development and planning. It is in the spirit of Benjamin Marsh, the author of one of the first modern urban planning text in 1909, who said: “no city is more beautiful [and successful] than its most unsightly tenement.”

Part 1 – Neighborhood Safety in Context

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Part 2 – Community Oriented Policing

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Part 3 – Crime and the Built Environment / Streets

“When people started protecting themselves as individuals rather than as a community, the battle was lost.” Community Oriented Policing (COP) is the public safety counterpart of Neighborhood Planning. In COP, the police and community work together to identify, prioritize, and solve public safety problems including crime, drugs, fear of crime, social and physical disorder, and neighborhood decay. The beat officer under COP almost becomes like a neighborhood planner and a government ombudsman. The neighborhood built environment and street design impacts crime and disorder. The underlying focus, again, is building social capital.

Readings:

Robert J. Sampson, “Crime and Public Safety: Insights from Community Level Perspectives on Social Capital”, in Susan Saegert, J. Phillip Thompson, and Mark R. Warren, Social Capital and Poor Communities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001).
Reading #2 (pdf)

Robert Trojanowicz and Bonnie Bucqueroux, Community Policing, How to Get Started (Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing Co, 1994), Section One: “What is Community Policing?”, Section Five, “What Community Policing Officers Do on the Job”
Reading #6 (pdf)

“Taking Back the Streets” in Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio, Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 151-173
Reading #8 (pdf)

U.S. Department of Justice, Executive Office for Weed and Seed, “Citizen Action for Neighborhood Safety: Community Strategies for Improving the Quality of Life”, August 1997. On web at: www.ojp.usdoj.gov/eows/pdftxt/qolmas.pdf
Reading #11

James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows, The Police and Neighborhood Safety”, The Atlantic Monthly, March 1982. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/crime/windows.htm
Reading #16

Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (New York: Collier Books, 1973), Chapter 1, “Defensible Space”; Chapter 3, “Territoriality”.
Reading #20 (pdf)

Donald Appleyard, Livable Streets, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981), Chapter 1, “Three Streets in San Francisco”, Chapter 2, “The Ecology of Streets”.
Reading #26 (pdf)

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