[From Our Partners] Redefining Community Safety in Three US Counties
Community safety has traditionally been defined in a very limited manner with a hyperfocus on levels of reported crime and violence. These traditional measures align closely with law enforcement priorities, system responses, and perspectives of crime as reinforced by the media. While these measures are important, they do not offer a full view of safety. In addition, using limited metrics to understand this complex concept rarely allows definitions of safety to consider the community at large, crimes that go unreported, and how the groups of people who live and work in communities most affected by crime and violence would define what safety means to them. Research has uncovered that community safety cannot be treated in a one-size-fits-all manner, and conversations about safety should be locally oriented, bearing in mind the unique local contexts and nuances. Stakeholders, policymakers, and locals must come together to collectively identify their own safety priorities.
To develop a framework that can be used to create nuanced local meanings of community safety, CUNY ISLG funded the University of Missouri- St. Louis (UMSL) through the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) Research Consortium to conduct a mixed-methods research study in three SJC sites: Missoula County, Montana; St. Louis County, Missouri; and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. First, the research team performed a descriptive analysis of trusted news outlets in each location to establish an understanding of how the media shapes views of crime, what the main safety concerns are, and who the claimsmakers are vocalizing those concerns. Next, surveys were disseminated to a diverse group of community members, including criminal legal system actors, system-impacted individuals, and people who work with system-impacted persons. The surveys were designed to understand perspectives of safety and top safety concerns and the team also conducted interviews and focus groups to better understand survey responses. Finally, the team developed a Community Safety Concept Map which depicts a community-informed holistic definition of safety, ultimately leading to the development of a toolkit to guide communities in their endeavors to define safety.
Key findings for this project include:
Each site faces unique physical and social concerns and challenges that directly impact how they perceive crime and safety.
Media analyses reveal that though main crime concerns varied, legal system actors and government workers were the most frequent claimsmakers cited in stories about local crime—meaning that they are the main influencers in shaping the crime and justice narrative.
Across study sites, the most important components to define safety were personal safety and security. While these aspects were more universal, the types of harm and daily concerns that participants reported varied greatly and were based on life experiences.
The wide breadth of differences reported in harms experienced and daily concerns that form perspectives of safety highlight the need for conversations about safety to include as many diverse and representative community groups as possible.
Project participants unanimously agreed that community safety should be a collective endeavor, but when it came to how it should be measured, viewpoints conflicted.
ABOUT THE SAFETY & JUSTICE CHALLENGE
In 2015, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a multi-year initiative to reduce populations and racial disparities in American jails. To advance knowledge development grounded in a research agenda that explores, evaluates, and documents site-specific strategies to safely and effectively reduce jail populations and address racial and ethnic disparities, the Foundation engaged the Institute for State & Local Governance (ISLG) at the City University of New York (CUNY) to establish and oversee an SJC Research Consortium. Consortium members are nationally renowned research, policy, and academic organizations collaborating with SJC sites to build an evidence base focused on pretrial reform efforts.