Building “A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth” through problem‐oriented community organizing: A quasi‐experimental evaluation

• Published date: 01 May 2024
• Author: Charlotte Gill,David Weisburd,Denise Nazaire,Heather Prince,Claudia Gross Shader
• Date: 01 May 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12657

DOI: ./- .

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Building “A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth”

through problem-oriented community

organizing: A quasi-experimental evaluation

Charlotte Gill1David Weisburd1,2Denise Nazaire1

Heather Prince3Claudia Gross Shader4

Department of Criminology, Lawand

Society, George Mason University,

Fairfax, Virginia, USA

Institute of Criminology, Facultyof Law,

Hebrew University of Jerusalem,

Jerusalem, Israel

RTI International, Research Triangle

Park, North Carolina, USA

City of Seattle Office of City Auditor,

Seattle, Washington, USA

Correspondence

Charlotte Gill, Department of

Criminology, Lawand Society, George

Mason University,  University Dr.,

MS D, Fairfax, VA, USA.

Email: cgill@gmu.edu

Funding information

National Institute of Justice, Grant/Award

Number: -CK-BX-; Bureau of

Justice Assistance, Grant/AwardNumber:

-AJ-BX-; City of Seattle,

Grant/AwardNumber:

DC-–DC-

Abstract

Research Summary: This paper describes Rainier

Beach: A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth (ABSPY), a

community-led, place-based, data-driven initiative to

improve community safety and reduce crime involving

young people at hot spots in Seattle, Washington. The

ABSPY model puts crime prevention into the hands

of the community, compared to traditional problem-

solving approaches that may involve community stake-

holders but are led by the police. We evaluated the

initiative using a quasi-experimental research design

comparing the five hot spots in the Rainier Beach

neighborhood, where ABSPY was implemented, to five

similarly situated hot spots elsewhere in the city. We

used  years of police calls for service and offense reports,

from  to , to assess ABSPY’s effects on crime

and a five-wave community survey conductedpre- and 

years post-implementation to examine community per-

ceptions. Although there were no significant effects on

calls for service or crime, ABSPY significantly improved

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits

use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or

adaptations are made.

©  The Authors. Criminology & Public Policypublished by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society of Criminology.

Criminology & Public Policy. ;:–. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp 287

288 GILL  .

community members’ perceptions of serious crime and

the police in the short and medium term.

Policy Implications: Our results show positive

changes in community perceptions that offer a foun-

dation for relationship and capacity building in

problem-solving efforts. Although ABSPY is not asso-

ciated with reductions in crime, our results suggest

that even communities with entrenched crime prob-

lems can leverage this capacity to reduce crime in the

longer term. Community coalitions also offer some

benefits relative to police-led efforts, such as shared

culture and values; stability; and consistency. However,

community coalitions must build capacity for action as

well as community engagement, and consider if and

how the police should be involved, ensuring that the

specific expertise of each coalition member is leveraged.

Furthermore, our study highlights the importance of

identifying measures of crime that are not affected by

increased trust and collaboration between the police

and the community.

KEYWORDS

community organizing, crime & place, crime prevention, policing,

problem-solving, quasi-experiment, youth

The police are traditionally considered the “experts” in dealing with crime and are called upon

to lead crime prevention efforts in neighborhoods or at microgeographic “hot spots.” Trojanow-

icz and Bucqueroux () argue that no other profession provides obvious leadership for public

safety efforts, and the police have at their disposal a range of options that other non-law enforce-

ment organizations, social service providers, and local residents do not. However,although many

proactive place-based policing efforts are effective at reducing crime (Braga et al., ;Weis-

burd & Majmundar, ; Weisburd & Telep, ), they often fail to center the experiences and

expertise of those most affected by crime at place—local community members.

Problem-oriented policing (POP) involves a proactive, systematic approach to identifying, pri-

oritizing, and responding to crime problems at places (Eck & Spelman, ; Goldstein, )and

is effective at preventing crime (Eck & Spelman, ; Goldstein, ; Hinkle et al., ;Weis-

burd et al., ). In his original conceptualization of POP,Goldstein () explicitly called for the

police to draw on the expertise of community members in problem solving. However, in practice,

these programs are often entirely police led and do not involve community partnerships (Hin-

kle et al., ). Even when the police do try to establish partnerships, studies have found that

community stakeholders were resistant to working with the police, and lack of trust in the police

among neighborhood residents was a significant barrier to collaboration (Hinkle et al., ;see

GILL  . 289

also Gill, Weisburd, et al., a, b; Gimenez-Santana et al., ; Kochel & Weisburd, ;

Tuffin et al., ).

Third-party policing (TPP) involves the police leveraging external processes, such as local

government agencies and civil remedies, to persuade or coerce community members to alter

behaviors that are conducive to crime (Buerger,; Mazerolle & Ransley, ). An example of

a successful TPP program is Oakland, California’s Beat Health, in which the police collaborated

with code enforcement agents and inspectors to persuade landlords to clean up their properties or

face fines for violating local regulations (Mazerolle & Roehl, ). TPP is also effective at control-

ling crime (Mazerolle & Ransley,), but it typically emphasizes the role of formal enforcement

strategies as a failsafe when informal social controls are insufficient, rather than collaboration

with community members on an equal footing. In some cases, these strategies may have harmful

collateral consequences for marginalized and vulnerable community members, such as landlords

evicting domestic violence victims after receiving citations related to repeat calls for service to

their properties (Desmond & Valdez, ).

Community-oriented policing (COP) comes closest to centering community voices. A core

component of COP is the idea that public safety should be a “co-production” between police

departments and the communities they serve. This is achieved through collaborative problem

solving and transforming the organizational structure to increase responsiveness to community

needs (Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, ). COP improves community mem-

bers’ satisfaction with the police and, to a lesser extent, their perceptions of police legitimacy (Gill

et al., ) but has weaker crime prevention benefits than POP or TPP. One possible reason for

this is that COP is theorized to prevent crime indirectly, via improvedcollective efficacy and c ol-

laboration, rather than directly, and therefore takes much longer to realize crime control gains

(Gill et al., ; Weisburd & Majmundar, ). It is also possible that increasing community

collaboration and, subsequently, satisfaction with and trust in the police may cause community

members to call the police more, limiting the utility of official crime data as a measure of suc-

cess (Weisburd, Gill, et al., ). Weisburd and colleagues () term this phenomenon “crime

reporting sensitivity.”

However, like POP and TPP, COP has been criticized for not fully taking advantage of the con-

cept of co-production in practice (Cordner, ;Gilletal.,; Gimenez-Santana et al., ;

Kerley & Benson, ; Thacher,). There is little guidance on what the police should actually

do to engage the community,and the approach rests on the assumption that community members

are ready, willing, and able to engage with the police (Gill et al., ). This assumption may not

hold up in communities where crime rates are high, social cohesion and collective efficacy are

low, and/or relationships with law enforcementare strained (Skogan, ).

The limitations of police–community collaborations raise the question: what if we stopped

assuming that the police need to take the lead in crime prevention and situate community mem-

bers themselves as the “experts?” Scholars have long recognized the central role of communities

as the foundation on which all social institutions operate (Sherman, ), and that the risk fac-

tors underlying crime problems at place require a much more diverse set of responses than the

police have in their toolbox. As Goldstein () recognized, “[a] community must police itself.

The police can, at best, only assist in that task” (p. ). Similarly, Eck ()argued that the police

do not have the capacity or knowledge to address all of the issues that createcrime problems at hot

spots, and highlighted the importance of drawing on the expertise of other stakeholders. Overall,

research supports the involvement of a wide variety of stakeholders including residents,commu-

nity leaders, social services, and governmental institutions in collaborative efforts to identify and

address crime-related problems (Abt, ; see also Beckett, ; Cordner, ; Gill, Weisburd,

et al., a; Trojanowicz & Bucqueroux, ). Furthermore, centering community expertise is