Report Details How Different Sectors Can Promote Community Safety
Every day, people make decisions about land use that impact whether or not communities will be safe. These decisions include where schools are sited, how streets and parks are designed, and the kinds of businesses that are allowed to operate. To the extent that safety has been taken into account in these decisions, it has mostly been through the lens of crime prevention. PI’s new paper, Community Safety by Design: Preventing Violence through Land Use, explains how a violence prevention lens and a crime prevention lens are similar, and how they are different.
One difference is that a violence prevention lens necessarily engages the end-user – community residents—in shaping land-use decisions that work for the community and support community safety. This engagement is a critical component to achieving equitable health and safety outcomes, and applies across many sectors. Our paper drew on extensive research and interviews with 23 key informants from planning, public health, the justice system, and other sectors, and outlines concrete steps to better integrate effective violence prevention strategies into land-use decisions. The report includes:
- A summary of the roles of multiple sectors in driving land-use decisions;
- A discussion of the ways that land-use decisions impact risk and resilience factors for violence;
- An overview of current land-use practices and implications for preventing violence within communities;
- An analysis of the current conflation of crime and violence within planning and design research and practice, and why this matters for community safety; and
- Recommendations that promote cross-sector collaboration and community engagement, and build capacity among practitioners to make land-use decisions that prevent violence.
Download Community Safety by Design: Preventing Violence through Land Use, and share the report with your networks with these suggested tweets:
- Explore how #landuse decisions impact risks and resilience at community level URL @preventioninst
- Learn how local govt can prevent #violence through land-use decisions URL @preventioninst
- Crime prevention and #violence #prevention are different. Learn how! URL @preventioninst
- Many sectors are involved in preventing #violence via land use. Read about them here. URL
Community Safety by Design was developed with funding from The California Endowment.