The Value of Safety: Unwrapping Crime and the Urban Space

ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

Akua Schatz

ARCU 4400

Prof. Bruce Firestone

February 6, 2006

American social critic H. L. Menken once said that “The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.” While brashly patronizing the underpinning values of American society, Menken was suggesting that without a secure public space, personal and private freedom cannot exist. Maslow’s model for the “hierarchy of needs” further supports Menkel’s statement when it suggests that beyond our physiological needs of food, water and air, the need for security is of utmost importance. In fact, he stipulated that only in a safe environment was one able to realize any other desire.

If this is true, our freedom hinges on the security of our human spaces. Whether consciously or unconsciously, safety considerations drive many of the decisions of urban dwellers. Children are taught to look both ways before they cross the street. Pedestrians avoid dark alleyways and empty streets at night and home owners seek to purchase a house in a neighborhood that is free from crime and delinquency. The value that citizens place on security in turn affects the market value of properties. Crime is one of the major factors that depress property values in urban areas. Neighborhoods that experience large increases in either violent or property crime generally have declining property values. Housing prices also tend to fall in communities where markets for illegal goods flourish. Neighborhoods with depressed housing prices and abandoned buildings also frequently become havens for criminals and centers for the illegal drug trade.[1] On the flip side, the opposite is true as well. People are willing to pay for safe homes and neighbourhoods. They do this by choosing to live in suburban areas and by paying high property taxes for good police forces. They also increasingly do this by living in privately guarded compounds or “gated communities”

One of the characteristics of a properly functioning society is that it provides a degree of security to its members. Over the years, city planners, politicians and policy makers have developed a number of interventions to promote safety in urban spaces. This essay will explore four strategies that have been used in a variety of contexts to create secure city dwellings.

Safety in Numbers

In the 1960s Jane Jacobs wrote a book entitled “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” - perhaps the most influential American text about the inner workings and failings of cities. In this book she suggests that the more densely populated an urban space, the more likely it is to be safe. She reasons that the more people in public places, the better the surveillance and therefore, the less crime. She went on to argue that isolated communities were “ideally suited to rape, muggings, beatings, hold-ups, and the like” because deserted streets and sidewalks [were] more likely to attract crime.[2]

If one is strictly considering density, Hong Kong is perhaps a good example of Jane Jacob’s theory. Hong Kong has one of the highest density relationships on earth. The average density is 280,350 people per square mile.[3] The crime rate in Hong Kong is very low considering the size of the city. However, this is not a perfect example of Jacob’s theory as physical density is not the only proponent that she emphasized. She advocated for “livable streets”. She was referring to neighbourhoods with walking access the grocery stores, coffee shops, boutiques and community centres. New urbanites uphold this form or city planning with mixed commercial and residential use neighbourhoods. Communities flourish socially and economically in such contexts and are often less likely to see high levels of crime and delinquency.

Cleaning up the streets

In 1982, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling first proposed the “broken windows” theory in an article they wrote for the Atlantic Monthly. The “broken windows” theory of urban decay holds that if a single window is left damaged in a building, very soon the remaining windows in the building will be broken. If windows are fixed as soon as they are broken, a message is sent that vandalism is not tolerated. The opposite is also true. Not fixing windows sends the message that vandalism is acceptable. The theory suggests that once vandalism starts, if left unchecked, there is a high probability that the urban space will see an increase in crime.[4]

In the mid 1990s, Mayor Rudolf Guillianni and police commissioner William Bratton invoked this theory to combat high levels of crime in New York City. They mounted a campaign against “quality of life offenses”.[5] These included drinking in public, urinating on the street and general rowdiness. They also increased the prevalence of security cameras, ensured a heavier police presence and created stiffer punishments for offenders. The late 1990s saw a steep decrease in the crime rates in New York City and Guillianni and Bratton’s interventions are often credited for the more secure environment.[6]

Teach a man to fish and give him a place to fish.

In a paper entitled, “Identifying the Effect of Employment on Crime” Steven Raphael and Rudolf Winter-Ember explore the impact that unemployment has on crime. The study confirmed first that the vast majority of offenders were young unemployed males from inner cities. They found that policies designed to increase jobs in inner cities areas had a direct, positive effect on crime rates and they found that crime rates rose and fell with unemployment levels in the over thirty states studied.[7]

There are a variety of approaches that are commonly used to increase the employment opportunities available for at-risk youth. These include education and training programs, increased access to recreation and social facilities, intensive programs directed at families and increased economic opportunities youth and their families.[8] In terms of city planning, these interventions often appear as an increase of commercial activity in the form of small businesses; programming links between community centres and the private sector; and locally available job training and educational opportunities.

Tearing down walls and building bridges

In 1997, Enrique Penalosa became mayor of Bogotá city, Columbia. Bogotá, a city of 8 million people, had the reputation as a city at war - the centre of the drug-trade, corrupt politics, paralyzing traffic jams and choking smog. On top of all of this, it had one of the highest murder and kidnapping rates in the world. Peñalosa was not to be discouraged. He theorized that when communities divided themselves relative to income, race and status, the fallout was an urban space wrought with divisions and plagued by fear of the other. He saw such spaces as the necessary building blocks for discontent, prejudice and ultimately crime. On the flipside, Penalosa suggested that public spaces were one of the only environments where all citizens, regardless of income, race or status could meet as equals. He explained that "high-quality public pedestrian space… [was] evidence of a true democracy at work." One of the most essential roles of public spaces was therefore to give all people a sense of belonging and create a more socially integrated community.

During his term as mayor, Penalosa realigned the focus of city planning and policies to a new priority: equal access of all people to public spaces, services, and facilities.[9] He built or reconstructed hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks; more than 300 kilometres of bicycle paths, pedestrian streets, and greenways; a city-wide bus transit system and more than 1,200 parks. Today Bogotá has the most extensive dedicated bike path network in the world. Since the 1990s, there has been a 900% increase in cycling as a form of commuting. In 2000, Penalosa finished his term by creating Bogotá’s first car-free day, the largest and most successful event of its kind in the world.

According to the New York Times, Bogotá is now statistically safer than Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, Washington D.C., and Baltimore. In 1994, there were 4,457 homicides in Bogotá, representing a rate of 80 deaths in each group of 100,000 inhabitants. In 2003, after Penalosa’s interventions, the city recorded 1,607 homicides, or approximately 23.4 / 100,000 — a 48 percent decrease in ten years.[10]

Conclusion

The positive aspect to all of the above mentioned theories is that they are able to reduce crime while also leading to several other positive outcomes. These include the mixing of commercial and residential land; the beautification of public space; an increase in economic opportunity; and the social integration of income, race and class. Collectively, they ensure the availability of a large sampling of tools to politicians, policy makers and city planners as security continues to emerge as one of the priorities for our urban spaces.

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[1] Ann Dryden Witte, “Urban Crime: Issues and Policies,” Housing Policy Debate 7, no. 4, (1996): 735

[2] Jane Jacobs, The death and life of great American cites (New York: Random House, 1961), 33

[3] US Department of the State, “Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs”, available from http://www.state.gov/r/bgn/2747.htm Internet; accessed February 4, 2006.

[4] James Wilson and George Kelling “Broken Windows” Atlantic Monthly 3, no, 3 (1982): 29-38

[5] David Anderson “The Mystery of the Falling Crime Rate” The San Diego Union-Tribune 4, no. 6 (1997)

[6] James Levitt in his book Freakonomics proposes a correlation between abortion and crime rates in the 1990s. To test the theory he looked at the decline in crime rates in US states where abortion was legalized first – including New York – and found that crime started falling there first. He posited that many of the women having abortions were precisely the kind who might raise children likely to be criminals – that is poor, single women – so that legalization essentially reduced the pool of potential wrongdoers. He concluded that abortion accounted for more than half of the decline in crime in the 1990s.

[7] Steven Raphael and Rudolf Winter-Ember “Identifying the Effect of Employment on Crime” Journal of Law and Economics 44, no. 1 (2001): 259-283

[8] Graham Towers, Building Democracy: Community Architecture in the Inner City (University College London Press: 1995) 235

[9] Project for Public Spaces “Enrique Penalosa” available from http://www.pps.org/info/placemakingtools/placemakers/epenalosa Internet; accessed February 5, 2006.

[10] Vinicus Souza and Maria Eugenia Sa, “Crime Rate Decreases in Sao Paulo and Bogota”, NoMinimo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2005, available from http://www.worldpress.org/Americas/2119.cfm#down Internet; accessed February 6, 2006.