Redefining Community Safety in Three Local Counties
The following is an excerpt from a blog originally posted on the Safety and Justice Challenge site. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Safety and Justice Challenge helps jurisdictions across the U.S. implement data-informed strategies that reduce the misuse and overuse of jails and racial and ethnic disparities present across the criminal legal system. The CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance provides data and analytic oversight for the project, as well as manages its Research Consortium.
Everyone wants to feel safe in their community. Yet, we know little about how people make sense of what community safety looks and feels like to them. Discussions among policy makers and the media often center on a very specific and limited conception of safety. It emphasizes crime rates as a key measure, and the criminal legal system as the primary means of achieving this goal.
But aspects of safety captured by criminal legal system data may not align with community priorities or values. Allowing communities to define what safety means to them enables them to tailor this definition to their needs and values. It allows them to identify their own priorities for action, helping to advance the goal of safety for all.
A new report explores the meaning of community safety for people who live and work in three US counties. Each county faces some challenges that impact views of safety. Missoula County, Montana; St. Louis County, Missouri; and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina are all currently working on interventions around crime and community safety funded, in part, through the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation‘s Safety and Justice Challenge initiative.
In Missoula, there is general agreement that the physical and social environment is rapidly changing. Housing-related concerns and the visibility of the unhoused population dominate conversations around safety. Part of these changes are due to an influx of new residents and associated increases in home prices, making basic needs less affordable even for people with stable employment. At the same time, many perceived that the unhoused population was growing in visibility because of a higher prevalence of drugs, a limited supply of low-income housing, and difficulty accessing mental health and substance use treatment services.
In St. Louis, violence is a significant concern for area residents. Like in many places, aggravated assaults and homicide rose at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Concerns about violence are exacerbated by the county’s proximity to St. Louis City, which has high rates of these crimes. St. Louis County’s high level of fragmentation creates many challenges for community safety as it hinders the ability to address crime and safety-related concerns in a coordinated fashion. Black county residents, particularly those residing in North County, are disproportionately impacted by crime and the criminal legal system.