MasterPlanning!: Live Safe and Solve a Crime
by Tony Chavira
I was perusing the LAPD website a while back and found something I didn’t expect: a link entitled “Solve a Crime.” A natural step beyond the Amber Alert, Solve a Crime is an LAPD initiative to place criminal activity information on the Internet (alongside descriptions, images, and even YouTube videos), so that the public can get involved in the crimefighting process. My first reaction was, “Is the LAPD so desperate that it would enlist the help of an army of conspiracy-minded Internet whack-jobs?” But when I mentioned Solve a Crime to my parents, their initial reaction was, “That’s smart of them.”
“Smart?” I thought. The Internet is full of predators and vindictive cyber-bullies! I can see it in my mind’s eye: police brutally kicking in the doors on a wimpy 13-year-old under the assumption that it’s the hideout for a team of bank robbers. Funny, but definitely unjust.
It had completely slipped my mind that my mother had been Neighborhood Watch captain for something like 20 years. In fact, they hold meetings as if it were still the 1950s, and she is still close with several of the high-ranking officers in the small enclave of Monterey Park where I grew up. “When you look out for your neighbors, they look out for you” was her modus operandi, and I remember walking home through the park, waving to friendly members of the community, unaware that they were keeping a sharp eye on me on my mother’s behalf. Her Neighborhood Watch position was particularly important back at the end of the 1980s when Night Stalker Richard Ramirez murdered a woman only five houses down the block from us. A neighbor heard something, called the police, and the neighborhood watch was up in arms. Not that the Monterey Park Neighborhood Watch had anything to do with it, but he was caught only a week later.
Every neighborhood has its own community feel, and only the locals notice if something feels off. For example, I had a friend visiting from out of town many years ago, and my parents let him stay at our place. Our elderly neighbor saw him pacing in front of our home one evening while speaking to his family on a cell phone and she called the police. Clearly it was a case of muddled good intentions, but generally speaking I felt safe knowing that our neighbors had our back. They had watched us grow up in that home. We wave and speak to each other in passing. We’ve been to their birthday parties and they’ve been to ours. We exchanged (and still exchange) Christmas gifts, and know each other’s families fairly well. And we’ll be damned if we let some stranger ruin our perfectly good community.
In our old neighborhood, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Four years ago a friendly, elderly Jewish couple moved out from next door after 30 years to be closer to their family in Las Vegas, and a middle-aged Chinese couple moved in with their 20-year old son. Immediately the families descended on the home, my parents and brothers, the young family across the street, the elderly couple next to them, the large extended family down the street, the friendly family across from them. A few weeks later, the new neighbors were waving, shaking hands and participating in casual conversation as if they had lived there forever. My parents would look out for them and their son just as the elderly couple looked out for us when we were kids. Or the way that teenagers down the block (now in their late 30s) hung out with me when I was five.
But scars on a community like the ones left by Richard Ramirez don’t go away, and there are two directions a close neighborhood can go in as reactions to an event like that. First, the way that our neighborhood went: everyone becomes closer and coordinates more often. There is more interaction, there are more conversations, and there is more dependability. The neighbors know things about you that you would never have expected them to know, and are practically extended family. This is what I know and how I’ve experienced potentially dangerous situations in the neighborhood: with preparation and cooperation. We may not have much money or city assistance, but we definitely have trust. Lots of it.
The second, less integrative direction: the neighborhood could deliberately ignore the issue and do nothing at all. In these cases, community members become shut-ins, no one knows their neighbors, there tends to be higher occupancy turnover and an increase in criminal activity.
But what causes one community to become more coordinated while another flails and potentially becomes overtaken by crime? In 2004, the UK’s Office of the Deputy Prime Minister released a report entitled “Safer Places: The Planning System and Crime Prevention,” in which the problem is detailed pretty clearly: communities that don’t have safe sustainable attributes tend to become less sustainable and less safe as time goes on. In fact, nothing stays the same ... if you live in a well-designed community, it will only get better over time, where badly-designed communities will only get worse.
What are the attributes of a safe, sustainable community, where neighbors look out for each other? There are seven:
- Access and Movement—places with well-defined routes, spaces and entrances that provide for convenient movement without compromising security
- Structure—places that are structured so that different uses do not cause conflict (so that children’s parks aren’t next to freeways, for example)
- Surveillance—places where all publicly accessible spaces are overlooked
- Ownership—places that promote a sense of ownership, respect, territorial responsibility, and community
- Physical protection—places that include necessary, well-designed security features
- Activity—places where the level of human activity is appropriate to the location and creates a reduced risk of crime and a sense of safety at all times
- Management and Maintenance—places that are designed with management and maintenance in mind, to discourage crime in the present and the future
I can recognize many of these attributes in the place I grew up, though I can only assume that communities that do not have them are planned and designed in a way that does not promote participation in Neighborhood Watch or Solve a Crime. Regardless of whether the city, a planner, a developer or an architect takes the neighborhood into consideration when they’re designing their developments, the neighborhood will still be affected. Worse yet, studies have been released that state that fear of crime can actually counteract the aims of sustainable urbanism, the very thing that would inherently tie a community together against crime.
Take a moment to read the rest of the Deputy Prime Minister’s report and evaluate for yourself just how safe new developments will be based on their criteria. You may be pleasantly surprised or bitterly disappointed, but either way try not to let community design (or disrepair) dictate your involvement with your neighbors. Go out and introduce yourself, have conversations, and get to know all of them. And if you ever get the opportunity, join the Neighborhood Watch or try to Solve a Crime. Who knows? It might be exhilarating.
www.racaia.com | tony@fourstory.org
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