Considering a community-first approach to public safety and crime prevention

Criminal justice leaders at the state and federal levels see benefits in changing the idea of public safety in the U.S. to promote community intervention and public health approaches to problems like gun violence as well as most nonviolent crimes.

At a South by Southwest panel last week that considered the role of community response in public safety efforts, speakers such as Greg Jackson, deputy director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, discussed how gaps in the social fabric tend to lead to incidents of violence and other criminal acts. With the federal government putting 14,000 new school-based mental health professionals in close proximity to young children in recent years, he said it’s no accident there was a 12.4 percent decrease in homicides nationally in 2023.

Steps such as trauma recovery and interventions in situations involving family conflict can often interrupt violence from taking place.

“​​Anything that can create time and space between someone in crisis and their firearm is valuable, whether that’s a red flag law that maybe removes the gun from the home, or we’ve seen some innovative strategies that just take the person away from the home,” he said. “One we’ve invested in is victim services and resources for those who have been traumatized, recognizing that the more we can pour into them, the healthier they can recover from that tragedy and hopefully cut off the spread of that trauma, whether it’s to their families or investment within themselves.”

Lisa Daniels, executive director of the Darren B. Easterling Center for Restorative Practices and a former member of the Illinois Prisoner Review Board, shared her experiences instituting restorative justice in her community. For incidents such as burglary involving a neglected teen, the victimized family would meet with the perpetrator to discuss the consequences of the act and what steps need to be taken by both sides to improve their situations.

Daniels said that approach is more beneficial than putting the perpetrator in prison or the juvenile system without examining what factors in their lives led them to commit a crime.

“We need to make the shift from criminal justice which isn’t working in our country. … None of us are safer for the (1.9 million) people that we have locked up in this country right now. None of us are safer with that level of incarceration. It’s not doing what the systems want us to believe that it is doing,” she said. “The criminal system takes that voice away from both the person who has been harmed and the person who has caused harm. We don’t get to hear the backstory. We don’t get to see that person as a human being.”

Jamila Hodge, a former assistant U.S. attorney and executive director of Equal Justice USA, said that in almost all cases, the criminal justice system across the country remains rooted in the laws created following the adoption of the 13th Amendment. Those laws, she said, were intended to exert control over former slaves who had become free citizens.

Hodge said a community-led public safety approach would reduce the role of misdemeanors in law enforcement, place more emphasis on solving and preventing violent crime, and direct more resources toward health and wellness. “Eighty percent of what comes from the system is misdemeanors, and it’s actually not against the violence. We spend so much money on it, and more than about half of homicides aren’t ever even closed or there’s no arrest that’s even made,” she said.

“When we redefine safety to think about ‘What does a community take or need to thrive?’ then that definition requires something different of us. When you think about safety as green spaces for a child, having somebody to play basketball with, being able to walk your neighborhood and be known and people call you by your name, then our responses are different than when we think of public safety as just this sort of punishment-focused policing.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license. This story has been changed since publication to correct the number of currently incarcerated people in the country.

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