Crime Prevention, and Otherwise Keeping Yourselves Safe

Fear of crime grips Americans and many other cultures. We need to approach crime prevention in smart and effective ways. Fear is anti-social and anti-neighborhood because it makes us distrustful of one another.

Just like the 10:00 news, we’ll have to lead this page with crime prevention and neighborhood watch. But flood prevention, clean-up of toxic waste, and traffic calming may be even more relevant to your particular community.

There are six basic approaches to neighborhood-level crime prevention, all of which your community, and perhaps your local government on your behalf, should be using to some extent:

• "Eyes on the street," meaning both there is human activity on the street and alertly watching the street. This is implemented in particular by instituting a neighborhood watch program. Also take to heart all the useful-community-development.org recommendations in general for building a vibrant community, because when people want to be out and about in your neighborhood, it’s tougher to get by with mischief.

• "Hardening the target," meaning making it harder to break into a door, basement window, or sliding glass door, for instance. Your group might be able to partner with local businesses for installation of bars over windows or some other crime prevention feature.

• Making it harder to escape notice and surveillance. Street lighting and neighborhood video camera approaches are avenues that community associations often pursue. Such measures simply solidify the "eyes on the street" notion.

• Assertive community mental health, which refers to providing help for those who suffer from schizophrenia and bipolar disorders, paying attention to domestic violence that may spill over into the street, and caring and intervening when someone exhibits unbalance or long-standing malice against someone or something. Neighborhood groups spend so much time on the physical realm, but building positive mental health, beginning with the school kids, pays rich dividends.

• What I call community pro-social values. It's astounding to me that people could care more about making an anti-authority statement than they care about putting criminals behind bars by serving as witnesses. I know, I know, it's dangerous and all that, but it just doesn't seem worthwhile to build a society that doesn’t value human life.

• Drug programs, ideally emphasizing prevention and treatment programs. If you have a big problem in this area, you might be a candidate for the federal Weed and Seed program. Neighborhoods frequently must deal with the “drug house” problem or with dealers loitering on street corners. Mind-altering substances of every type, certainly including alcohol, have to be addressed in a meaningful crime prevention program. Knowing and being known, feeling part of the community, are drug prevention techniques that also benefit everything else you're trying to accomplish.

Petty crime often attaches itself to the public realm, particularly on streets and in parks. Safe parks is a subject unto itself, and making your local neighborhood scrap of green feel and be safe is key to its becoming a major amenity for you.

Traffic Safety

Not all of the auto accidents are on the highway, and to the extent that speeding is dangerous to pedestrians of any age or to other vehicles, your neighborhood usually can achieve an easy win through requesting that a speed limit be lowered. This is true only on your local streets, unfortunately, as traffic engineers seem to think that they made those major roads to handle a lot of traffic fast, and they are going to defend that idea till it kills them. Or someone else.

Some neighborhoods have embraced what is now called traffic calming. This term just means slowing the traffic, through measures such as speed bumps, narrowing streets, making it necessary to bob and weave to get through the street, and closing off through streets to make frequent stops necessary. You either love it or you hate it, but some of you became involved in a community organization just because of traffic calming proposals.

In some urban neighborhoods, the original purpose of traffic calming measures was crime prevention, and that may still be valid. Certainly the practice of making streets more narrow contributes to neighborliness and pro-social behavior. Less street also may mean less stormwater runoff, and therefore less flooding, as discussed further down in the page. So there are many good reasons for complete streets, "road diets," "skinny streets," or "green streets."

Toxic Waste and Brownfields

Toxic waste could be in your air, on your roads, or even in the park where the kids play. Learn a little about the terminology of polluted soils, and the areas called brownfields where dirt is, well, dirty. Jumping up and down to draw attention to a polluted site in your community is an art in itself, and one we hope you will practice.

Flood Prevention

Flooding is an obvious danger to property and sometimes to life as well. People seem to underestimate the capacity of a fast-moving high volume of water. Preventing flooding may be beyond your local capability, but a surprising amount can be done locally to decrease future damage, even if the people upstream of you refuse to cooperate. Or more likely, they just refuse to recognize that you exist.

In many urban neighborhoods, the amount of paving just seems to keep increasing, so learning about the dynamics of urban runoff is important.

There's even a tie-in to crime prevention, you know. Flood-prone areas create just enough disorder that only chaotic people usually want to live there. And when the flooding has come and gone, other looters and people of less than pro-social motivation come in and add to the difficulty.

To motivate you to get more interested, that creek that plays havoc for a few residents periodically could begin to become an amenity for the many residents if you start working at it now.

The Necessity of a Building Code

A few small towns and cities, and especially rural places and those suspicious of government, think they can survive just fine without a building code. Maybe so, but then it would only take one tragedy to disprove the theory. We think adopting a building code is absolutely necessary.

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