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20 Strategies for Reducing Crime in Cities

John k. roman, october 10, 2023.

Complements, not substitutes, to policing

It is easy to despair of crime in cities. But there is much to be learned from recent history. Two decades of research on the almost everywhere, almost all-at-once, Great American Crime Decline of the 1990s —  when violence in America dropped by half in a single decade — finds dozens of evidence-based reasons why crime declined . And overwhelmingly, that research finds that the most effective crime-fighting tools were not explicitly about fighting crime. 

In the 1990s, crime declined, among other reasons , because more people had access to Medicaid , better medicines for behavioral health became available, less cash was in circulation and fewer people were poisoned by environmental toxins . And, more evidence-based programs and practices were used in schools , workforce development and public health . Yes, mass incarceration and new policing strategies played a role, but the strongest evidence suggests they explain perhaps one-quarter of the crime decline . 

What these explanations have in common is strong empirical evidence and a focus on classical prevention based on the idea that supporting people and strengthening communities is the surest path to widespread safety. There are hundreds of solutions — market-based solutions, medical solutions, structural solutions and behavioral nudges — that can meaningfully reduce the risk of crime and violence without expanding the criminal justice system. Instead of responding to problems, these solutions reduce risk factors and risk conditions and promote resiliency, stopping crime and violence before they happen.  

But prevention does not work a la carte and there is no silver bullet, only the hard work of gradual improvements and the challenge of waiting for the longer-term positive outcomes to emerge. Quantity has a quality all its own, and the more of these strategies that are employed, the better the outcomes.

In that spirit, here are 20 crime-reducing strategies that strengthen people and communities and are supported by solid social-science research to reduce crime. The list is here to draw you in.: There are more evidence-based approaches than even this, and even more promising programs being tested. We do not have to settle for 20th-century criminal justice. The vast breadth of available prevention policies and programs should vanquish any one-dimensional view of crime reduction. 

A call for non-criminal justice solutions is not a call to defund the police in disguise. These are complements to, not substitutes for, law-enforcement-led strategies. There are numerous evidence-based law enforcement-focused mechanisms that should be a critical part of any public safety proposal. But, if the arc from Michael Brown to George Floyd taught America anything, it is that we must move beyond law enforcement working in isolation to find justice and safety.

The 20 Strategies 1. Help Victims of Crime  There is far too little support for victims of crime, even though it is the most obvious place to start. Prior victimization — of a person or a place — is the top predictor of future victimization . Supporting people who have been victimized from being victimized again — through social supports and target - hardening — has enormous potential for positive change.   2. Reduce Demand for Law Enforcement A central reason why law enforcement does not prevent more crime or solve more crimes is that they are too busy doing things that accomplish neither objective. If the police were called less often for unproductive reasons, there would be less under-policing — and less over-policing as well. If cities and towns set the explicit goal of having people call the police less often, law enforcement would be more efficient at taking on the tasks that remain. 3. Fixing Distressed Spaces There is a wide body of evidence that shows that places poison people more routinely than people poison places. Crime does not result from “areas” of the “inner city” being high risk, but rather from a few very small, very bad places . Concentrated efforts to improve contagious places can build resiliency across neighborhoods.  4. Making Crime Attractors Less Appealing  Certain places attract and generate crime — schools , the built environment and bars being at the top of the list. More often than not, careful planning and implementation of best practices in situational crime prevention can reduce the harms they unintentionally generate and, in the case of schools and transit, unlock their potential for guardianship. 5. Scientific Supports for Law Enforcement  Police in the United States would benefit from increased reliance on civilians in two realms: translating scientific evidence into practice , and increasing their reliance on civilian analysts to study local policing practices . In particular, if law enforcement was aided by more civilian analysts who were better trained , crime would be reduced while the footprint of policing was reduced.   6. Improving the Job Market and Job Training The relationship between jobs and crime is far more complex than in the popular imagination — higher national-level unemployment rates, for example, do not seem to increase violence . But targeted programs can have large effects. Integrating social and emotional skills training into employment training for young people has solid evidence of effectiveness as does employment planning for people returning from prison and transitional jobs for high risk people .  7. Facilitate Neighborhood Non-Profits In his excellent book ”Uneasy Peace,” Professor Patrick Sharkey reports on a study that found that for each 10 additional nonprofits in a given city, the violent crime rate is reduced by 14% (in the study period between 1990 and 2013). It should come as no surprise that access to more and better services has positive effects. Local government can aid the development of these local assets by providing funding for hyper-local community projects.  8. Make Jails and Prison Less Criminogenic We have overwhelmingly designed our jails and prisons to prevent people from gaining the skills to work and maintain their sobriety when they go home , and cut them off from their most crime-reducing assets, their family and friends. Small investments in humanity yield large returns when jails and prisons are not designed to produce more crime. 9. Better Prepare People to Return Home from Prison People returning from prison need specific supports to facilitate a successful transition – 82% of people released from prison are rearrested within 10 years. And the solutions are simple — leaving facilities with an ID , prescriptions , a place to stay , a way to get started . A goal without a plan is a wish — people should leave prison with a plan and the supports to implement that plan. 10. Fund Community-Based Violence Interruption A growing body of evidence finds that credible messengers — individuals with lived experience — coupled with psychosocial services can prevent retaliatory violence and repeat victimization. But this is a new sector and will need time and space to learn and grow. 11. Use Technology to Reduce Violence Professor Graham Farrell argues convincingly that increases in security technology (such as engine immobilizers and cameras) in the 1990s were the only universal explanation for the universal decline in crime. There is much more that can be done using technology without imposing on civil liberties: text message reminders for court and probation appearances , databases to maintain records on police officers with histories of abuse and anti-crime features on ordinary consumer products are just the start.  12. Tackle the Causes and Consequences of Poverty  Poverty drives crime and violence in numerous ways beyond a simple lack of income, through weakened social bonds . A number of important policies have been successfully piloted but not fully implemented by state and local government. These are the big-ticket items — child poverty tax credits , whole-school anti-bullying programs , expanding Medicaid — that have the biggest crime reduction benefits. But the benefits outweigh the costs for dozens of policies and programs .  13. Fix Long-Standing Problems  Problems often persist because they have high costs, a lack of immediacy and declining political constituency — but these perpetual problems are often the key risk condition causing crime in a place to persist. Unhealthy homes , lead paint and pipes , and under-resourced foster care all promote crime. 14. Shorten the Reach of the Criminal Justice System Too many financial burdens are imposed on people with low risk to public safety, creating a cycle of debt and incarceration , the latter which increases violence through stigma , criminal capital accumulation and a disruption of social bonds . Removing those conditions by clearing old warrants and convictions , reducing toxic fines and fees and ending poverty traps would prevent crime. 15. Help Those with Substance-Use Disorders  In the 1990s and 2000s, with trepidation, the justice system began treating substance-use disorders as a disease rather than a crime. Expansion in the broadest of these interventions – problem-solving courts and in-prison substance use treatment — largely ended more than a decade ago. Many extremely useful ideas have been piloted — trauma-informed care , motivational interviewing , treating withdrawal in prison — but few were ever taken fully to scale. Those foundations are ready-made to build upon.  16. Support Programs for High-Risk Young People and Families A lot of criminology is concerned with bending the criminal trajectory curve — to keep adolescents from accelerating their delinquency or failing to desist as they age — and a huge body of scholarship has contributed to numerous model programs. From prenatal programs , to social and emotional learning , to programs for high-risk adolescents , there is a tremendous base of knowledge. 17. Education Improving education is its own crime-reducing category, but schools can facilitate crime reduction outside of schools. Reducing food insecurity , humanizing discipline and improving the safety of the school commute benefit everyone.  18. Housing Like education, housing is its own category beyond the scope of this essay. But there are housing solutions with specific crime-reducing benefits: permanent, supportive housing ; transitional housing for young people leaving homelessness; and housing programs specifically for people who cycle through emergency services .  19. Policy and Law There are any number of laws and regulations that could be tweaked to meaningfully reduce crime and victimization. For example, higher taxes that specifically target the overuse of criminogenic products like guns and alcohol have been shown to reduce excess demand.  20. Stop the Proliferation of Firearms  The link between firearms and violence is ironclad — the more guns, the more crime. More guns explain much of the difference in rates of violence between the U.S and peer nations. Fixing violence in the U.S. without addressing the gun problem, which is to say ensuring fewer potentially dangerous people have easy access to weapons, is embracing half-measures. Next steps   The next step in strengthening people and communities is for the evidence-making industry to think beyond one intervention at a time. What we need is classical policy analysis that considers the choices faced by lawmakers in the presence of budget constraints. That means embracing cost-effective evidence-based prevention over expensive remediation, and programs that lift as many people as possible and leave behind far fewer than we do today. We need to embrace science and evidence, to think holistically and comprehensively and to stop thinking of crime and violence as a problem that can only be addressed through police and prisons.  In medicine, we learn that our first line of defense is a catchall triage — some exercise, a better diet and more sleep are the cure for a vast array of simple problems before they become serious. In economics, we learn that simple nudges can motivate better choices. In public health, we can learn that a small early change in trend and trajectory today has enormous long-term benefits. All of these lessons await discovery in the public safety sector.  John K. Roman is a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago. He also serves as the co-Director of the National Prevention Science Coalition. Up next...

To prevent crime, respect the role of self-control.

Alex R. Piquero

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How to Reduce Crime in Your Neighborhood

Last Updated: February 6, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Saul Jaeger, MS and by wikiHow staff writer, Eric McClure . Saul Jaeger is a Police Officer and Captain of the Mountain View, California Police Department (MVPD). Saul has over 17 years of experience as a patrol officer, field training officer, traffic officer, detective, hostage negotiator, and as the traffic unit’s sergeant and Public Information Officer for the MVPD. At the MVPD, in addition to commanding the Field Operations Division, Saul has also led the Communications Center (dispatch) and the Crisis Negotiation Team. He earned an MS in Emergency Services Management from the California State University, Long Beach in 2008 and a BS in Administration of Justice from the University of Phoenix in 2006. He also earned a Corporate Innovation LEAD Certificate from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 2018. There are 19 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 315,653 times.

There are plenty of easy steps that you can take to help make your community a better place. By building a relationship with your neighbors and your local police department, you’ll raise awareness and make it easier to enact change in your area. Just remember, you are not going to find success if you go out trying to fight crime yourself. The goal here is to build your community up to make it less welcoming for criminals, not to confront strangers or call the police every time you see something vaguely suspicious.

Get to know your neighbors.

• Criminals don’t like to be challenged. If a burglar is driving around looking for houses to break into, they’re going to be put-off if they see a bunch of folks in the neighborhood chatting it up.
• There’s a strategy you can use here known as positive loitering. The premise is that if you hang out outside with people in the neighborhood, you can keep your eyes peeled and show criminals that they aren’t welcome. [2] X Research source
• The occasional block party or garage sale are a great way to get to know your neighbors!

Start a neighborhood watch.

• The first goal of a neighborhood watch is to report crime and suspicious activity. Outside of that, you could institute citizen patrols, clean up vandalism, or organize youth events.
• Remind everyone to stay reasonably cautious and not to get paranoid about crime. Some watch groups have resulted in racism and hysteria, because people started feeling like they were the cops. Keep everyone cool to make sure things don’t get carried away. [4] X Trustworthy Source PubMed Central Journal archive from the U.S. National Institutes of Health Go to source

Get to know your local police department.

Report suspicious activity when you see it.

• Don’t call 911 if there isn’t a crime taking place or the suspicious activity isn't an emergency or a crime in progress.
• For issues that are not so black and white if they constitute an emergency, check resources in your relevant area to see what issues they expected to be reported to 911. For example, in New York City, illegal marijuana smoking is an issue that they officially instruct citizens to call 911. [7] X Research source

Push local politicians to do more.

• You could ask them to tear down vacant properties in your area. There’s a lot of evidence that abandoned buildings are linked to higher crime rates. [10] X Research source
• If you don’t have streetlights, ask for them! Street lighting can dramatically lower crime.
• If you’ve noticed an uptick in problematic loitering or public drinking around local businesses, you could let your local representative know [11] X Research source

Keep your neighborhood clean.

• Cleaning up and painting over the graffiti in your neighborhood is a great way to make it look nicer.
• This is a phenomenon known as broken window theory. The premise is that small signs of decay—like broken windows—send a psychological message that law and order are not being enforced. It’s a hotly-debated idea, but there’s evidence that it has merit. [13] X Research source

Increase the number of cameras around your home.

Put up signage as a warning to criminals.

• You can throw a security company sign in your yard, even if you don’t have a security system installed.
• Even if you never got an official neighborhood watch off of the ground, you can still ask about putting the signs up! Criminals won’t know the difference.
• Consult your local government before nailing signs to electrical poles and such. In most cases they’re going to honor small requests like these.

Start a community garden and cultivate green spaces.

• When it comes to your hedges and bushes, make sure you trim them low enough so that you can see out of the window. Keep them small enough that a potential burglar won’t be able to hide themselves near a door and hide while they try to break in.

Give your time or money to local youth groups.

• This is also just a great way to make the world a better place. The more positivity you can inject into your community, the better you’re going to feel about your neighborhood.

Expert Q&A

• Don’t confront the subject if you see them actively committing a crime. You could be putting yourself in harm’s way if you do this. Just call emergency services and let the professionals handle the problem. [21] X Research source Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0
• Be mindful and self-reflective before you call the cops on someone. When you call, report what you see and what they appear to be doing, not a speculation that can not be reasonably ascertained by observations. Racial profiling has been a huge problem when it comes to crime-prevention programs and neighborhood watch groups, so make sure you’re doing the right thing before you hit the send button to call the police. Somebody being a specific race is not a reason for you to be suspicious. [22] X Research source Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ Saul Jaeger, MS. Police Captain, Mountain View Police Department. Expert Interview. 21 February 2020.
• ↑ https://www2.gnb.ca/content/dam/gnb/Departments/ed/pdf/K12/policies-politiques/e/703A.pdf
• ↑ https://bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/Publications/NSA_NW_Manual.pdf
• ↑ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36214281/
• ↑ https://www.theiacp.org/news/blog-post/10-ways-community-members-can-engage-with-law-enforcement
• ↑ https://www.fitchburgwi.gov/906/Crime-Prevention-Tips-Resources
• ↑ https://oasas.ny.gov/cannabis
• ↑ https://www.justice.gov.nt.ca/en/going-to-court-as-a-witness-or-victim/
• ↑ https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/can-tearing-down-vacant-house-make-your-neighborhood-safer
• ↑ https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/186049.pdf
• ↑ https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/community-cleanup
• ↑ https://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/what-works-in-policing/research-evidence-review/broken-windows-policing/
• ↑ https://www.justice.gov/jmd/political-activities
• ↑ https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2011/04/28/lets-move-grow-more-community-gardens
• ↑ https://www.useful-community-development.org/cleaning-up-your-neighborhood-park.html
• ↑ https://youth.gov/youth-topics/involving-youth-positive-youth-development
• ↑ https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug03/youth
• ↑ https://www.police.vic.gov.au/preventing-motor-vehicle-theft
• ↑ https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/race-discrimination/publications/know-your-rights-racial-discrimination-and-vilification

About This Article

To reduce crime in your neighborhood, get to know the usual happenings so you’re more likely to notice if something’s wrong. Remember to stay up-to-date on criminal activity in your area, and form a neighborhood watch so you and your neighbors can keep each other informed about any suspicious activity in the area. Finally, occupy high-crime areas en masse with your neighbors when you can to help push criminal activity out! Keep reading for tips on how celebrating together as a community can make for a stronger neighborhood! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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8.6 Reducing Crime

Learning objective.

• Describe five strategies that criminologists have proposed to reduce crime.

During the last few decades, the United States has used a get-tough approach to fight crime. This approach has involved longer prison terms and the building of many more prisons and jails. As noted earlier, scholars doubt that this surge in imprisonment has achieved significant crime reduction at an affordable cost, and they worry that it may be leading to greater problems in the future as hundreds of thousands of prison inmates are released back into their communities every year.

Many of these scholars favor an approach to crime borrowed from the field of public health. In the areas of health and medicine, a public health approach tries to treat people who are already ill, but it especially focuses on preventing disease and illness before they begin. While physicians try to help people who already have cancer, medical researchers constantly search for the causes of cancer so that they can try to prevent it before it affects anyone. This model is increasingly being applied to criminal behavior, and criminologists have advanced several ideas that, if implemented with sufficient funds and serious purpose, hold great potential for achieving significant, cost-effective reductions in crime (Barlow & Decker, 2010; Frost, Freilich, & Clear, 2010; Lab, 2010). Many of their strategies rest on the huge body of theory and research on the factors underlying crime in the United States, which we had space only to touch on earlier, while other proposals call for criminal justice reforms. We highlight some of these many strategies here.

Applying Social Research

“Three Strikes” Laws Strike Out

The get-tough approach highlighted in the text has involved, among other things, mandatory minimum sentencing, in which judges are required to give convicted offenders a minimum prison term, often several years long, rather than a shorter sentence or probation.

Beginning in the 1990s, one of the most publicized types of mandatory sentencing has been the “three strikes and you’re out” policy that mandates an extremely long sentence—at least twenty-five years—and sometimes life imprisonment for offenders convicted of a third (or, in some states, a second) felony. The intent of these laws, enacted by about half the states and the federal government, is to reduce crime by keeping dangerous offenders behind bars for many years and by deterring potential offenders from committing crime ( general deterrence ). Sufficient time since the first three strikes laws were passed has elapsed to enable criminologists to assess whether they have, in fact, reduced crime.

Studies of this issue find that three strikes laws do not reduce serious crime and, in fact, may even increase the number of homicides. Several studies have focused on California, where tens of thousands of offenders have been sentenced under the state’s three strikes law passed in 1994. Almost all these studies conclude that California’s law did not reduce subsequent crime or did so by only a negligible amount. A few studies also have examined nationwide samples of city and state crime rates in the states that adopted three strikes laws and in the states that did not do so. These studies also fail to find that three strikes laws have reduced crime. As one of these studies, by three criminologists from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, concludes, “Consistent with other studies, ours finds no credible statistical evidence that passage of three strikes laws reduces crime by deterring potential criminals or incapacitating repeat offenders.” The national studies even find that three strikes laws have increased the number of homicides. This latter finding is certainly an unintended consequence of these laws and may stem from decisions by felons facing a third strike to kill witnesses so as to avoid life imprisonment.

In retrospect, it is not very surprising that three strikes laws do not work as intended. Many criminals simply do not think they will get caught and thus are not likely to be deterred by increased penalties. Many are also under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol at the time of their offense, making it even less likely they will worry about being caught. In addition, many three strikes offenders tend to be older (because they are being sentenced for their third felony, not just their first) and thus are already “aging out” beyond the high-crime age group, 15–25. Thus three strikes laws target offenders whose criminality is already declining because they are getting older.

In addition to the increase in homicides, research has identified other problems produced by three strikes laws. Because three strikes defendants do not want a life term, some choose a jury trial instead of pleading guilty. Jury trials are expensive and slow compared to guilty pleas and thus cost the prosecution both money and time. In another problem, the additional years that three strikes offenders spend in prison are costing the states millions of dollars in yearly imprisonment costs and in health-care costs as these offenders reach their elderly years.

As should be clear, the body of three strikes research has important policy implications, as noted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham scholars: “(P)olicy makers should reconsider the costs and benefits associated with three strikes laws” (p. 235). Three strikes laws do not lower crime and in fact increase homicides, and they have forced the states to spend large sums of money on courts and prisons. The three strikes research strongly suggests that three strikes laws should be eliminated.

Sources: Kovandzic, Sloan, & Vieraitis, 2004; Walker, 2011

A first strategy involves serious national efforts to reduce poverty and to improve neighborhood living conditions. It is true that most poor people do not commit crime, but it is also true that most street crime is committed by the poor or near poor for reasons discussed earlier. Efforts that create decent-paying jobs for the poor, enhance their vocational and educational opportunities, and improve their neighborhood living conditions should all help reduce poverty and its attendant problems and thus to reduce crime (Currie, 2011).

A second strategy involves changes in how American parents raise their boys. To the extent that the large gender difference in serious crime stems from male socialization patterns, changes in male socialization should help reduce crime (Collier, 2004). This will certainly not happen any time soon, but if American parents can begin to raise their boys to be less aggressive and less dominating, they will help reduce the nation’s crime rate. As two feminist criminologists have noted, “A large price is paid for structures of male domination and for the very qualities that drive men to be successful, to control others, and to wield uncompromising power.…Gender differences in crime suggest that crime may not be so normal after all. Such differences challenge us to see that in the lives of women, men have a great deal more to learn” (Daly & Chesney-Lind, 1988, p. 527).

Lessons from Other Societies

Preventing Crime and Treating Prisoners in Western Europe

The text suggests the get-tough approach that the United States has been using to reduce crime has not worked in a cost-effective manner and has led to other problems, including a flood of inmates returning to their communities every year. In fighting crime, the United States has much to learn from Western Europe. In contrast to the US get-tough approach, Western European nations tend to use a public health model that comprises two components. The first is a focus on crime prevention that uses early childhood intervention programs and other preventive measures to address the roots of crime and other childhood and family problems. The second is a criminal justice policy that involves sentencing defendants and treating prisoners in a manner more likely to rehabilitate offenders and reduce their repeat offending than the more punitive approach in the United States.

The overall Western European approach to offenders is guided by the belief that imprisonment should be reserved for the most dangerous violent offenders, and that probation, community service, and other forms of community corrections should be used for other offenders. Because violent offenders comprise only a small proportion of all offenders, the Western European approach saves a great deal of money while still protecting public safety.

The experience of Denmark and the Netherlands is illustrative. Like the United States, Denmark had to deal with rapidly growing crime rates during the 1960s. Whereas the United States responded with the get-tough approach involving longer and more certain prison terms and the construction of more and more prisons, Denmark took the opposite approach: It adopted shorter prison terms for violent offenders and used the funds saved from the reduced prison costs to expand community corrections for property offenders. Finland and the Netherlands have also adopted a similar approach that favors community corrections and relatively short prison terms for violent offenders over the get-tough approach the United States adopted.

All these nations save great sums of money in prison costs and other criminal justice expenses because they chose not to adopt the US get-tough approach, yet their rates of serious violent crime lag behind the US rates. Although these nations obviously differ from the United States, the advantages of their approach should be kept in mind as the United States evaluates its get-tough policies. There may be much to learn from their less punitive approach to crime: While the United States got tough, perhaps they got sensible.

Sources: Dammer & Albanese, 2011; Waller & Welsh, 2007

A third and very important strategy involves expansion of early childhood intervention (ECI) programs and nutrition services for poor mothers and their children, as the Note 8.28 “Children and Our Future” box discussed earlier. ECI programs generally involve visits by social workers, nurses, or other professionals to young, poor mothers shortly after they give birth, as these mother’s children are often at high risk for later behavioral problems (Welsh & Farrington, 2007). These visits may be daily or weekly and last for several months, and they involve parenting instruction and training in other life skills. These programs have been shown to be very successful in reducing childhood and adolescent misbehavior in a cost-effective manner (Greenwood, 2006). In the same vein, nutrition services would also reduce the risk of neurological impairment among newborns and young children and thus their likelihood of developing later behavioral problems.

A fourth strategy calls for a national effort to improve the nation’s schools and schooling. This effort would involve replacing large, older, and dilapidated schoolhouses with smaller, nicer, and better equipped ones. For many reasons, this effort should help improve student academic achievement and school commitment and thus lower delinquent and later criminal behavior.

A final set of strategies involves changes in the criminal justice system that should help reduce repeat offending and save much money that could be used to fund the ECI programs and other efforts just outlined. Placing nonviolent property and drug offenders in community corrections (e.g., probation, daytime supervision) would reduce the number of prison and jail inmates by hundreds of thousands annually without endangering Americans’ safety and save billions of dollars in prison costs (Jacobson, 2006). These funds could also be used to improve prison and jail vocational and educational programming and drug and alcohol services, all of which are seriously underfunded. If properly funded, such programs and services hold great promise for rehabilitating many inmates (Cullen, 2007). Elimination of the death penalty would also save much money while also eliminating the possibility of wrongful executions.

This is not a complete list of strategies, but it does suggest the kinds of efforts that would help address the roots of crime and, in the long run, help to reduce it. Although the United States may not be interested in pursuing this crime-prevention approach, strategies like the ones just mentioned would in the long run be more likely than our current get-tough approach to create a safer society and at the same time save us billions of dollars annually.

Note that none of these proposals addresses white-collar crime, which should not be neglected in a discussion of reducing the nation’s crime problem. One reason white-collar crime is so common is that the laws against it are weakly enforced; more consistent enforcement of these laws should help reduce white-collar crime, as would the greater use of imprisonment for convicted white-collar criminals (Rosoff et al., 2010).

Key Takeaways

• The get-tough approach has not been shown to reduce crime in an effective and cost-efficient manner. A sociological explanation of crime thus suggests the need to focus more resources on the social roots of crime in order to prevent crime from happening in the first place.
• Strategies suggested by criminologists to reduce crime include (a) reducing poverty and improving neighborhood living conditions, (b) changing male socialization patterns, (c) expanding early childhood intervention programs, (d) improving schools and schooling, and (e) reducing the use of incarceration for drug and property offenders.

For Your Review

• The text notes that social science research has not shown the get-tough approach to be effective or cost-efficient. If this is true, why do you think this approach has been so popular in the United States since the 1970s?
• Of the five strategies outlined in the text to reduce crime, which one strategy do you think would be most effective if it were implemented with adequate funding? Explain your answer.

Barlow, H. D., & Decker, S. H. (Eds.). (2010). Criminology and public policy: Putting theory to work . Philadelphia, PA: Temple Univeristy Press.

Collier, R. (2004). Masculinities and crime: Rethinking the “man question”? In C. Sumner (Ed.), The Blackwell companion to criminology (pp. 285–308). Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell.

Cullen, F. T. (2007). Make rehabilitation corrections’ guiding paradigm. Criminology & Public Policy, 6 (4), 717–727.

Currie, E. (2011). On the pitfalls of spurious prudence. Criminology & Public Policy, 10 , 109–114.

Daly, K., & Chesney-Lind, M. (1988). Feminism and criminology. Justice Quarterly, 5 , 497–538.

Dammer, H. R., & Albanese, J. S. (2011). Comparative criminal justice systems (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth

Frost, N. A., Freilich, J. D., & Clear, T. R. (Eds.). (2010). Contemporary issues in criminal justice policy: Policy proposals from the American society of criminology conference . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Greenwood, P. W. (2006). Changing lives: Delinquency prevention as crime-control policy . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Jacobson, M. (2006). Reversing the punitive turn: The Limits and promise of current research. Criminology & Public Policy, 5 , 277–284.

Kovandzic, T. V., Sloan, J. J., III, & Vieraitis, L. M. (2004). “Striking out” as crime reduction policy: The impact of “three strikes” laws on crime rates in US cities. Justice Quarterly, 21 , 207–239.

Lab, S. P. (2010). Crime prevention: Approaches, practices and evaluations (7th ed.). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson.

Rosoff, S. M., Pontell, H. N., & Tillman, R. (2010). Profit without honor: White collar crime and the looting of America (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Walker, S. (2011). Sense and nonsense about crime, drugs, and communities: A policy guide (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Waller, I., & Welsh, B. C. (2007). Reducing crime by harnessing international best practices. In D. S. Eitzen (Ed.), Solutions to social problems: Lessons from other societies (pp. 208–216). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Welsh, B. C., & Farrington, D. P. (2007). Save children from a life of crime. Criminology & Public Policy, 6 (4), 871–879.

Social Problems Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Essay on Crime Prevention

Crime is a global problem affecting each and every country. Every country suffers from increased crime rates which result to insecurities and a negative impact on the economy. This increased crime rate is fueled by poverty, parental negligence, low self-esteem, alcohol, and drug abuse, resulting from the lack of proper moral values (Topalli & Wright, 2014). Moral values are responsible for determining what is right and wrong and also establish what is socially acceptable. They are ideas considered by society as important and contribute to one’s general personality, and thus, without them, an individual is lost. It is significant to prevent crimes to raise the quality of life of all citizens. Preventing crimes also results to long-term benefits as it reduces social cost resulting from crimes and the costs involved with the formal criminal justice system. In order to prevent these crimes, there is the need to develop evidence-based and comprehensive approaches addressing several factors impacting crimes, including moral values on growing children.

Crimes result from negative moral values, and thus there is a need to promote positive youth development and wellbeing. Horace Mann believes that this prevalence of crime in society could be reduced by moral instruction in schools (Spring, 2019). He argues that for the crime rate to reduce, the moral value of the general public needs to be shaped accordingly. According to him, the most accurate method of doing this is by incorporating moral instruction in the education system. He referred to this method as putting a police officer in every child’s heart. This would enable the child to be conscious of the evil in society and be aware of good and bad. This would guide them as they grow up and prevent them from engaging or committing any crime.

The American Education book portrays crime as a global nuisance, and the more accurate and effective method to prevent it is through education. Mann suggests in this book that the number of police required by society would significantly be reduced by schooling. Thus, education is portrayed as a source of knowledge and a significant tool that would help reduce crime rates remarkably. It is supposed to do this by allowing students to acquire more educational attainment that leads to high paying jobs and thus higher earnings, which increases the opportunity cost of crime and consequently reducing crime. Mann also believes that education would reduce the crime rate by affecting individuals’ personality traits associated with crime. This is done by making students become patient, disciplined and moral. Despite this being a more suitable method of preventing crimes in society, it is not as effective as Mann and other researchers rate it.

Mann theory of preventing crime through schooling is a considerate method, but it is not enough to do so. There is no causal relationship between crime rates and school attendance (Lochner, 2020). It is assumed that schooling and crime rates are related, and thus if school attendance is increased, a consequent crime reduction would be noticed. However, this is wrong, and Mann theory has not proved a reality. According to Joel et al. (2021), the percentage of 5-to 17-years-old students increased from 82.2 in 1959-1960 to 91.9 percent in 2004-2005. The average days of attendance also increased from 160.2 in 1959-1960 to 169.2 in 1999-2000. There was also a rapid increase in violent crimes in 1960-2000 from 160.9 to 506.5 per 100,000 residence (Spring, 2019). As the number of students attending school and the attendance days increased from 1960 to 2004, so did the crime rate. This is proof that the crime rate is irrespective of the number of students going to school and the average days of attendance, and thus Mann theory is ineffective.

Moral value instruction is a vital tool to prevent crimes but implementing it only through schooling, such as Mann suggested, is not only a failing strategy but a waste of time and resources. Moral values in children need to be implemented in many different ways to ensure that they stick as they develop into adults (Damon, 2008). Implementing these moral values would ensure that they grow into morally upright adults, thus reducing crime rates. Implementing moral value through schooling is advised, but it would work with a combination of many other methods including through religion and good parenting. Religion helps in the spiritual growth of a person and emphasizes moral codes aimed to develop values such as social competence and self-control, which are major virtues in crime hating people. According to the study done by Brown and Taylor (2007) on how religion impacts child development, it was found that social competence and the psychological adjustment of third-graders were positive influenced with several religious factors. This shows that religion helps in developing children to become adults with a positive and better judgement that would keep them from engaging in any crime and thus would contribute to crime rate reduction.

Parents are responsible for their children, and they are required to guard and guide them as they contribute to their personality. According to Penn (2015), how a child turns out as an adult depends on how their parents brought them up. As a result of this, it is crucial for parents to be careful of how they handle their children. It is the responsibility of every citizen of a county to help fight and prevent crimes, and thus it is the responsibility of parents to reduce the crime rate by training their children to be better people in future. They should be consistent with rules and monitor their children behaviour to ensure that they instil good moral value in them, equipping them with the knowledge of good and evil. If a child is raised in a way that makes them hate crime, then they would not engage in any, and this would contribute to the general reduction of crime in the society.

In conclusion, the main way of preventing crime is by instilling positive moral values on growing children to ensure that they develop into morally upright adults who would not engage in criminal activities. It is assumed that to instil this moral values in children and prevent crimes in future, the best way is through schooling. But this is not the case as there is no causal relationship between crime rates and schooling, and thus schooling will not necessarily result to a reduced crime rate. In order to ensure that moral values are successfully instilled in children, schooling would have to be combined with other methods, some of which include religion and good parenting, resulting in adults who are conscious of good and evil. Increased crime rate is a problem experienced by all countries globally, and the only way to fight it is by shaping the personality of the future generation by instilling positive moral values as their driving force.

Topalli, V., & Wright, R. (2014).  Affect and the dynamic foreground of predatory street crime  (1st ed.).

Spring, J. (2019). American Education.  https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429274138

Lochner, L. (2020). Education and crime.  The Economics Of Education , 109-117.  https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-815391-8.00009-4

Joel, M., Bill, H., Jijun, Z., Xiaolei, W., Ke, W., & Sarah, H. et al. (2021).  National Center for Education Statistics: The Condition of Education 2019. NCES 2019-144 . ERIC. Retrieved 5 July 2021, from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED594978.

Damon, W. (2008).  Moral child: Nurturing children’s natural moral growth  (3rd ed.). FREE Press.

Brown, S., & Taylor, K. (2007). Religion and education: Evidence from the National Child Development Study.  Journal Of Economic Behavior & Organization ,  63 (3), 439-460.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2005.08.003

Penn, H. (2015).  Understanding early childhood  (3rd ed.). Open University Press.

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I wanted to make my community safer and more neighborly. The advice I got surprised me.

When I moved into a densely populated urban neighborhood south of Louisville, Kentucky with my husband a few years ago we noticed two things right away. We experienced more crime than in the neighborhood we'd moved from. And in no time we knew a large swathe of our neighbors, versus the sole couple we knew on our old block.

In conversation with neighbors one night, a friend from the next block made a passing comment. “You have a responsibility to the neighborhood when you live somewhere like this,” she said. Unlike in the suburbs where you can come home, close your garage door, and be done with the world outside, here we all look out for each other — and we care, passionately, about what happens in our neighborhood.

And that's key to reducing crime, according to University of Michigan professor Marc A. Zimmerman, Ph.D., who wrote “ Want to fight crime? Plant some flowers with your neighbor ” based on his work with the University of Michigan School of Public Health Youth Violence Prevention Center.

Eager to learn how people like my neighbors and I could battle a recent spate of crime in our community, I reached out to Zimmerman for insights into his research that anyone looking to prevent crime in their neighborhood could learn from. And I spoke with Major Joshua Judah, Commander of my neighborhood's police division .

Hit the streets After a big move, running helped me learn to love where I live

Zimmerman says busy streets = safer streets.

While there's no easy answer of course, a lot of what Zimmerman had to share boiled down to one concept: creating busy streets. Why busy?

“I grew up going to New York City,” Zimmerman said. “I always want to walk on the busy street — I might get pickpocketed, but probably not beaten up or stabbed.”

He was looking for a counterpart to what the broken windows theory had become, he said, by asking: “What builds a neighborhood back up?”

Busy streets flips the logic of the broken windows theory — a controversial criminological approach to public safety — on its head, Zimmerman wrote. Broken windows defenders see urban disorder in U.S. cities — graffiti, litter, actual broken windows and the like — as a catalyst of antisocial behavior. So they direct police to crack down on minor offenses like vandalism, turnstile jumping and public drinking.

With an emphasis on looking at positive approaches like empowerment and engaging youth rather than 'fixing them,' we looked at busy streets, which is 'if we build it they will come,'” he said.

The best of These are the 10 best places to live in the U.S. in 2019

Green spaces can make a difference.

“What happens if we start creating nice green spaces?” he went on. “Does greening make a difference?”

In a word? Yes. “I feel more confident in this than almost anything else I've done in my research,” he said.

Zimmerman took that research to Flint, Michigan, a city known for crime and blight long before the water crisis (and hometown for my husband's family), where he documented the process of neighborhood engagement and its results on crime.

The project involved a group of residents along with businesses and colleges called the University Avenue Corridor Coalition who tackled a three-mile stretch of central Flint with regular neighborhood cleanup days.

The coalition grew from a group of residents and stakeholders who attended a workshop on Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, reported the local online magazine Flintside , aided by some large grants.

“What they did is say 'we're going to take control of this area,'” said Zimmerman. "[That included] gems of Flint in its heyday that had gone into disrepair and were run down. They cleaned up the median, they put lighting up, made a bike path, they extended beyond this street. Taking over an empty park , they put sidewalks in and made it more inviting.”

One big success for the group and neighborhood was replacing a corner liquor store with a sandwich shop, Zimmerman said. For anyone who lives in a place where you can walk to get groceries or food anytime, putting in a Jimmy John's may not seem like much. But this liquor store had been called a “Stab 'n’ Grab” because of the frequent fights breaking out, he said, and this was a part of town with almost nowhere to go eat. Once there was a place to go, “people started coming during the day, and at night wasn't as much of a hangout. Businesses across the street were inspired to fix up their places.”

The result of these efforts? “According to the coalition’s latest report , assaults decreased 54 percent, robberies 83 percent and burglaries 76 percent between 2013 and 2018,” Zimmerman wrote.

“It’s also meant seeing the neighborhood come alive with food trucks, bike patrols and neighborhood cleanup days — all of which have increased quality of life and safety along the avenue,” Flintside reported.

It can be as simple as the length of the grass

So can something as simple as making an unkempt neighborhood prettier reduce crime? Zimmerman has been studying just that.

He's working on a paper now that looks at three conditions: a vacant lot that's not mowed, one that's mowed by a professional, and one where a neighborhood group takes care of it with mowing or a pocket park.

“What we found was with the professional mowers over time the crime went down,” he said. But it went down even more when community members were taking care of it. (Meanwhile when the lot wasn't tended to, crime actually increased a little.)

Why does that matter? “It isn't that the grass is lower,” he said. “It's that people are paying attention and people care about the place.”

Major Joshua Judah of Louisville's police department echoed that sentiment. He spoke with me following a recent safety meeting my neighborhood called following a daylight rolling gun battle that left historic homes riddled with bullet holes.

“[In] communities that have a high level of social organization ... you have low levels of crime,” Major Judah said. And not just when it comes to group clean-up days like those our neighborhood association holds a few times a year. “Where people are hanging out on the front porch and walking to say hi to a neighbor … A predatory criminal notices when they're being watched. They go after the easiest target and don't want to be apprehended.”

“If you start taking back parts of a city,” Zimmerman said, “showing people in the neighborhood and in the city that there's somebody here paying attention and they care about the place, that is sending a message to all sorts of people.”

Showing people in the neighborhood and in the city that there's somebody here paying attention and they care about the place, that is sending a message to all sorts of people.

Marc A. Zimmerman, Ph.D.

But, wait, isn't this just gentrification?

When we're talking about neighborhood change and beautifying, “a criticism that often comes up is gentrifying,” Zimmerman said.

“There's a big debate about this and I get it,” he said. “A lot of times there are neighborhoods, typically lower income, often people of color, and it's often displacement. What we're talking about is nothing close to that.”

Working toward busy streets through clean up and beautification, “it's very community engaged,” Zimmerman said. “To me [gentrification] is when developers come in and displace people and people don't have a voice. This greening work is much more localized. It's a [vacant] lot here, an abandoned home here. It's not development per se, it's community owned and community defined and community engaged.”

Now, “if the local efforts start to change a community to make it more desirable, that could attract developers and that could create a negative situation of gentrification,” he said. “What I say to that is to make sure community voices are heard. Make sure development is respectful of the history and who lives there. There are all sorts of things you can do to bring back a community that aren't gentrification. Who wants to live in a place where families [live in fear] — I hear this in Flint, 'when I hear gunshots I send my kids into the bathroom to lay down in the tub,'” he said. “We have to do better than this.”

Start with your own front door

Making a safer place to live can start at your own front (or back) door, literally. In addition to joining forces with neighbors, residents can take steps at home, too, Major Judah said. We're talking basics, but it takes everyone doing it.

“If at night every porch light is lit up you've got a well-lit street, whether you have street lights or not,” he said. “I have a floodlight out my back door and I have a pretty bright porch light and every single night I leave them on all night (I use LED). If everybody on the block does that particularly in a true urban neighborhood, that street's lit up. It makes less shadows for people to hang out.”

Have (and use!) quality locks, Major Judah said, and camera systems are also helpful, especially “the ones where you can actually see there's a camera, and even putting a sign out that says this house has an alarm and you're being videoed.” (We ponied up for Nest cameras after I spoke with the commander.)

The idea is that the opportunity for crime isn't at your house, nor at your neighbors', he said. “Sometimes that offender becomes less motivated to commit that crime and may not [even do it at all].”

When there is a concerted crime prevention in one neighborhood you have a diffusion of benefits into other areas.

While people are often concerned about pushing crime on down to the next neighborhood, “research doesn't support that,” he said. “It supports when there is a concerted crime prevention in one neighborhood you have a diffusion of benefits into other areas.”

“Criminals operate in areas they feel comfortable and know well,” he explained. “Think of a teenage kid breaking into cars — they know the escape route, they know where police will come from. If they can't operate there they have to be really motivated to go to another neighborhood where they don't have that information. Oftentimes they will do something else — or nothing.”

Doing nothing may be an option for them. But like my neighbor said, living in an urban community comes with responsibilities. Doing nothing isn't an option for us.

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Reducing Violent Crime in American Cities: An Opportunity to Lead – Full Report

Publication Date

January 2017

National Policing Institute

This report, presented to the White House and Congress in January 2017, provides an examination of the federal role in responding to violent crime in major cities. The report reviews detailed data, interview and survey information, and literature regarding violent crime and its drivers. In Chapter 1, the Full Report outlines the increase in localized violent crime in recent years, and provides an overview of the contrast between this increase and the overall decrease of crime nationwide. The Full Report then discusses federal priorities and budgets in Chapter 2; and in Chapter 3, it outlines federal tools brought to bear to assist in the fight against violent crime. Chapter 4 provides a detailed look at the unique position of the U.S. Attorney to convene resources to assist local law enforcement in fighting violent crime. Finally, Chapter 5 reviews ways to address access to firearms by those committing violent crime. Most importantly, each chapter concludes with recommendations to the new Administration and the United States Congress on ways the federal government can best address violent crime in local jurisdictions. The recommendations, extensively driven by the input of the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) members, include prioritization of violent crime and non-traditional approaches, openness and sharing of data, expansion of available technologies, and calls for immediate action in the new Administration and new Congress. An executive brief version of the report in lesser detail is available here .

Recommended Citation

National Policing Institute. (2017). Reducing violent crime in American cities: An opportunity to lead – Full report. https://www.policinginstitute.org/publication/reducing-violent-crime-in-american-cities-an-opportunity-to-lead-full-report/

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Violent Crime Rates Are Surging. What Can Be Done To Reverse The Trend?

NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Ronald Wright, a criminal justice expert and law professor at Wake Forest University, about why so many cities across the U.S. are experiencing a surge in violent crime.

Copyright © 2021 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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6 proven policies for reducing crime and violence without gun control

by German Lopez

On a night of the Republican convention focused on "making America safe again," one question, strangely, went unanswered: How exactly could policymakers make America safer? Although Americans are in fact safer than they were decades ago , this seems like a pretty crucial question to answer given the first day of the convention's theme.

I previously reached out to criminologists and researchers across the country about this issue. My question: What nonpartisan policies can America use to reduce crime and gun violence without going after the guns themselves? I started with the assumption that gun control laws would not happen, since that issue is too politically fraught — and it's certainly not something Republicans seem likely to support.

After all, although there's strong evidence that America's uniquely high levels of gun ownership cause the US to have more violence than other developed countries, guns aren't the only cause of violence and crime — there are other factors, from cultural issues to socioeconomic variables to even smaller issues like alcohol consumption , that drive these problems.

What follows are six of the promising ideas I heard to reduce crime and gun violence in particular. This is by no means a comprehensive list — there are great websites solely dedicated to that kind of catalog. But these policy ideas give some perspective on how many options are left to local, state, and federal lawmakers as long as they don't want to do anything about guns — or maybe even if they do.

1) Stricter alcohol policies

Alcohol has been linked to violence. According to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence , alcohol is a factor in 40 percent of violent crimes. And a 2010 study found a strong relationship between alcohol stores and gun assaults. These statistics and research are one of the big reasons that possessing a gun while drunk is largely illegal .

"It's a disinhibition theory," Charles Branas, one of the 2010 study's authors, said. "So it's not so much aggressiveness, but that decisions and judgment that would normally be held in check are suddenly disinhibited under consumption of alcohol."

This doesn't mean America should ban alcohol — prohibition in the 1920s was a disaster. But there are other policies that America could take up to limit alcohol-related problems:

• A higher alcohol tax : A 2010 review of the research in the American Journal of Public Health came out with strong findings: "Our results suggest that doubling the alcohol tax would reduce alcohol-related mortality by an average of 35%, traffic crash deaths by 11%, sexually transmitted disease by 6%, violence by 2%, and crime by 1.4%."
• Reducing the number of alcohol outlets : A 2009 review published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine also found that limiting the number of alcohol outlets — through, for example, stricter licensing — in an area can limit problematic drinking and its dangers. But it also found that going too far can have negative results — by, for example, causing more car crashes as people take long drives to outlets and possibly drink before returning home.
• Revoking alcohol offenders' right to drink : South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety program effectively revokes people's right to drink if a court deems it necessary after an alcohol-related offense. The program, specifically, monitors offenders through twice-a-day breathalyzer tests or a bracelet that can track blood alcohol level, and jails them for one or two days for each failed test. Studies from the RAND Corporation have linked the program to drops in mortality, DUI arrests, and domestic violence arrests.

Notably, the NRA, the biggest gun rights group, already agrees alcohol and guns don't mix. Its website says , "Never use alcohol or over-the-counter, prescription or other drugs before or while shooting." The question, Branas said, is how to make that "operational" — and some of these policies could move in that direction.

2) Hot-spot policing

Yes, police practices have run into increasing criticism over the past couple years — with the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement and its protests against racial disparities in the criminal justice system and police use of force.

But police can, obviously, play a huge role in reducing crime, especially by adopting evidence-based tactics like hot-spot policing.

The idea, explained to me by famed criminologist David Kennedy: In many cities, a very small subset of places, down to the street and block level, drive most of the crime. So deploying police, intelligently, in these specific areas can have a big impact on fighting crime and violence.

In many cities, a very small subset of places, down to the street and block level, drive most of the crime

"It can be as simple as making sure your police presence is increased there, or it can be much more complicated," Kennedy said. "You can get partnerships of police, residents, families, parents, shop owners, building managers, and school officials." He added, "The more those interventions involve partnerships, the more effective those interventions can be."

The research strongly backs up the practice: Not only does it reduce crime , but it does so without displacing it to other areas and generally to positive reactions from locals. And as Kennedy said, the research suggests that bringing in community partners and focusing on the community's needs can boost the crime-fighting effects further.

3) Focused deterrence policing

One of the hot new phrases in criminal justice today is "community policing." But quite honestly, nobody seems to have any idea what it means. Experts and law enforcement officials will give all sorts of definitions and strategies for the practice.

But Kennedy did explain a strategy — "focused deterrence policing" — that sounds a lot like what I would expect real community policing to look like, and it works.

Focused deterrence hones in on specific problems in a community, such as drug dealing, generally violent behavior, gangs, or gun violence. It then focuses on the individuals and groups who drive most of that activity, particularly those with criminal records and those involved in gang activity.

"The national annual homicide rate now is between 4 and 5 per 100,000," Kennedy said. "If you're in one of these street networks, your homicide rate can easily be 3,000 per 100,000." He added, "Add in the nonfatal woundings, which can be multiples of the homicide rate, and suddenly you're in unimaginable risk."

"The community itself needs to convey extremely strong and clear standards against the violence"

The strategy brings together law enforcement and community groups to clearly signal the major legal and community consequences of violence, especially in relation to an individual's previous criminal record. And to provide alternatives to violent or criminal lifestyles, the community should also offer social services and other forms of help.

So if someone has a long history of drug or even violent crimes, police could let him know about the legal consequences of violence — decades or life in prison — and the community could voice, through personal interactions, how it would directly damage his family, friends, church, school, and so on. And the groups should also offer help through, for example, accessible job and education programs.

"The community itself needs to convey extremely strong and clear standards against the violence," Kennedy said, describing it as a form of informal policing that comes from within someone's community.

The idea is that a would-be shooter, now knowing the full consequences of his actions, will be deterred from acting out in the future. And he'll have alternative options if he wants to pursue a different kind of life.

The research shows this works. Focused deterrence is one of the changes in policing strategy credited with what's known as the "Boston miracle," in which the city saw violent crime drop by 79 percent in the 1990s. And other research has found that it can work in many other places.

This policing strategy can involve retraining cops, getting them more involved in the community, hiring more officers to carry it out effectively, and boosting spending on social services. That can be very expensive — as such services and police departments already make up a sizable chunk of many municipal and state budgets. But if local lawmakers and officials want to reduce crime, these changes can go a long way.

4) Raise the age or grade for dropping out of school

Another way to reduce crime and violence could be to keep kids in school longer.

The research is quite clear that kids who don't drop out and complete school are less likely to commit crime.

But this can get into tricky questions over correlation versus causation: Does keeping kids in school longer stop them from committing crime later on by keeping them off the streets and giving them the education they need to find a legal job? Or are the kids who decide to stay in school longer simply better behaved, and therefore less likely to commit crimes?

A recent study published in the American Economic Journal took an ingenious approach to cut through this question — by tapping into data for students in North Carolina, their birthdays, when they enroll in kindergarten, their dropout rates, and their crime rates. It found that keeping kids in school longer likely reduces crime.

The study looked at data based on when children begin their education and whether the older children in a class — those who were enrolled into kindergarten at an older age — were more likely to drop out and commit crime. The idea: These kids are generally enrolled at a later age due to a technicality in North Carolina rules about birthdays and cutoff dates, so there's no inherent reason to think their behavior should be different — unless their time in school influences it.

The study strongly suggests keeping kids in school will reduce their crime rates

The study found that these older kids were more likely to drop out — and they were more likely to commit a felony offense by age 19.

Phil Cook, one of the study's authors, told me his findings strongly suggest keeping kids in school will reduce their crime rates.

So what could policymakers do with these findings? Well, many states, including North Carolina, set the dropout age at 16. They could raise the dropout age to 18 or older.

"If North Carolina raised its age to 18, there would be some seniors in particular who'd cross that threshold and would be legally entitled to drop out," Cook said. "But that prospect would look different than it does at age 16 — they would be closer to the finish line, so presumably it would not be as enticing."

Another option: Lawmakers could adopt Denmark's model, which requires students to complete a certain number of grades. (Presumably there would be exceptions, such as for children with extreme disabilities.) This would be less arbitrary than an age cutoff, but it could run into some politically tricky territory if it forces adults 18 and older to stay in high school.

Whatever method policymakers use, keeping kids in school longer appears to reduce crime rates. And it doesn't involve guns at all.

5) Behavioral intervention programs

The University of Chicago Crime Lab has done a lot of great work into many different policy proposals to fight crime. One of those ideas, Youth Guidance 's Becoming A Man , is emblematic of how specific these policies can get — it targets youth who are at risk of getting into violent encounters, perhaps because of the neighborhood they live in or what school they go to.

The program then uses once-a-week interventions, based on cognitive behavioral principles, to teach youth how to react in encounters that can turn violent.

"It helps kids understand and slow down the scripts that they use to get by," Harold Pollack, co-director of the Crime Lab, said. "They have exercises that the kids do where they get to practice self-regulation, skills, and slowing down and negotiating with other people — the kinds of things that young boys growing up particularly in a tough environment haven't had enough of a chance to practice."

It works: Randomized control trials by the Crime Lab found it reduced violent crime arrests by 30 to 50 percent during the time of the intervention.

"It helps kids understand and slow down the scripts that they use to get by"

One example of the exercises the program uses: One kid is told to get a golf ball from another kid. Typically, they get in a physical fight within seconds, because they simply don't know any better. But when they're walked through the situation, they learn to resolve it much more peacefully.

"So many of the confrontations that kids get into are almost over nothing in one sense," Pollack said. "But in another sense, kids are in a situation where they've learned over a period of time a set of reactions that are pretty important for them so that everybody knows not to mess with them."

The problem, Pollack said, is that many of these kids simply haven't learned the right behaviors over time — and they've actually learned to resort to violence quite quickly. Pollack gave an example:

For example, I'm walking down the hallway and somebody steps on my foot in school. If Harold Pollack is doing that, walking around the University of Chicago, I figure that it's just another colleague that was playing with his iPhone and stepped on my foot — and I ignore it and move on. If I'm a 17-year-old kid in Fenger High School, I can't afford to have people punk me. I got to get home. And I got a nice jacket, and my mom has told me that if somebody comes and takes my jacket, she can't get me another one. So when somebody does something like that, I might respond in a way that to the middle-aged white professor seems really excessive, but in the life of that kid is really human — there's an incentive to reacting really harshly.

Pollack emphasized that these kids are not in any way bad or evil. They have rational incentives for behaving in the way they do: In the tough environments they grow up in, sometimes it is important to fight.

But, Pollack explained, "What we want to tell them is, 'You may have to fight as a last resort. But you got to have other things in the toolkit that you go to first. And many of the situations where you might jump to escalate, you have more options, and the long-term consequences for you if you can avoid that confrontation are much better than if you react instinctively.'"

6) Eliminate blighted housing

One of the more unexpected ideas I heard from policy experts: Clean up and repair blighted buildings.

But it seems to work: A 2015 study from Branas, who's part of the Urban Health Lab , and other researchers found fixing up abandoned and vacant buildings in Philadelphia led to significant drops in overall crimes, total assaults, gun assaults, and nuisance crimes. There was no evidence that crime shifted to other areas, although there were signs that drug dealing, drug possession, and property crimes went up around remediated buildings. Still, net gains overall.

Branas characterized the findings as proof of a big gain for a pretty small investment.

"It makes the space appear cared for, and suddenly criminal activity doesn't want to happen there"

So what explains this? "It makes the space appear cared for, and suddenly criminal activity doesn't want to happen there," Branas said. "Also, the neighbors get more invested in the space and look after it — more of an informal policing mechanism."

Another potential explanation, according to Branas: Some would-be shooters may stash guns in vacant or abandoned spaces, since they want to avoid getting caught with illegal firearms. So when those vacant or abandoned spaces go away, they may decide to forego at least some guns — and may not be able to carry out some violence.

It's certainly one of the more exotic ideas I heard from researchers. But combined with the other proposals I heard from experts, it helps show that there are many varied policies lawmakers could embrace to combat crime and gun violence in the US — yet perhaps haven't to the extent that the evidence suggests they should.

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Improving Street Lighting to Reduce Crime in Residential Areas

Response guide no. 8 (2008).

by Ronald V. Clarke

PDF Guide   Order Bound Copy

Introduction

Improved street lighting is widely thought to be an effective means of preventing crime, second in importance only to increased police presence. Indeed, residents in crime-ridden neighborhoods often demand that the lighting be improved, and recent research generally bears out their expectation that improved lighting does reduce crime.

This guide is written to help community policing officers decide whether improved lighting is an appropriate response to a crime or disorder problem that might be confronting a particular neighborhood or community. It assumes that a detailed problem analysis has been conducted and that police, community and business leaders, and other stakeholders are exploring ameliorative responses, particularly improved street lighting. It explains why better street lighting can help reduce fear, crime, and disorder, and summarizes the literature on the effectiveness of better lighting. It discusses the considerations that should be weighed in pursuing this approach, suggests questions that should be asked, and lists the steps that should be followed in improving lighting. Finally, it suggests measures that can be used to assess the effectiveness of the lighting solutions that have been implemented.

Improved street lighting is much less controversial than some other responses to street crime discussed in this series of problem-oriented policing guides, including street closures§ and video surveillance.§§ Even so, it does have some potential costs (apart from monetary costs) and, as will be discussed elsewhere in the guide, its relationship to crime is not as straightforward as is usually assumed.

§ Problem-Oriented Guides for Police, Response Guides Series No. 2, Closing Streets and Alleys to Reduce Crime

§§ Problem-Oriented Guides for Police, Response Guides Series No. 4, Video Surveillance of Public Places

Scope of the Guide

This guide deals with lighting improvements intended to reduce crime in public streets and alleys in residential neighborhoods. It does not discuss:

• the lighting of new residential neighborhoods, subdivisions, or gated communities;
• improved lighting of parking lots, shopping malls, campuses, hospitals, or other public and private facilities;
• security lighting for private residences; or
• lighting and road safety.

As explained below, problem-oriented policing projects to reduce crime in residential neighborhoods have usually made other environmental changes in conjunction with improvements in street lighting. In some of these projects extensive use has been made of the principles of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED). These principles have been explained in another guide in this series§ and will not be repeated here. This guide focuses solely on street lighting improvements, whether or not made in the context of broader environmental changes.

§ Problem-Oriented Guides for Police, Tools Guides Series No. 8 Using Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design in Problem Solving

Although led by police, all successful problem-oriented policing projects in crime-ridden neighborhoods depend upon a partnership among police, local residents, community leaders, elected officials, and municipal officers. Police leading the project must invest a considerable amount of time in making these partnerships work. This guide does not attempt to discuss the nuances of managing these partnerships, but it does discuss ways of dealing with concerns that might be expressed about proposed street lighting improvements.

Because of the lack of relevant research, this guide says little about the effects of improved lighting on fear. Although there is little doubt that improved lighting reduces fear, in most cases this is merely an added benefit from the reduction in crime. Reducing unwarranted fear is a legitimate objective of lighting improvements in settings such as college campuses or municipal parking lots. However, it would be difficult to persuade public officials to spend taxpayer money to improve lighting without the expectation that both the fear and incidence of crime would be reduced. In fact, according to research quoted in the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority How-to Guide to Effective Energy-Efficient Street Lighting for Municipal Elected/Appointed Officials , 1  simply increasing light levels beyond a certain point will neither make an area seem safer nor increase perceptions of safety. That is, glare and high light levels that make it harder for people to see can increase fear, whereas uniform lighting that eliminates both glare and dark shadows can lead to increased feelings of security.

Again because of the lack of relevant research, this guide says little about the cost-benefits of improved lighting. It is relatively easy to estimate the costs of relighting schemes, but calculating the benefits is much more difficult. This involves estimating the numbers of different types of crime prevented by the improved lighting and putting a cost to these crimes—not just cost to the victim but also to the police, the municipality, and the criminal justice system. It also involves calculating the benefits of reduced fear, increased freedom of movement, and related factors. Unsurprisingly, no existing research has undertaken these calculations.

Finally, this guide provides only a brief introduction to the practicalities of selecting and installing improved lighting. Street lighting improvements entail many considerations, both in terms of the level and quality of lighting desired and how these are to be achieved. You can expect the local utility company or municipal officials to make many of these decisions, but if you have a basic logistical understanding of the issues you will be able to provide useful input regarding the needs of your particular neighborhood. And although experts will commission and supervise the work, you can help by acting as a liaison between the municipality, the local community, and contractors. You might also find it necessary to "progress-chase" the work to ensure that installation does not lag.

Free Bound Copies of the Problem Guides

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Land use changes in the environs of Moscow

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Time in Elektrostal , Moscow Oblast, Russia now

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Sunrise, sunset, day length and solar time for elektrostal.

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• Location: Moscow Oblast, Russia
• Latitude: 55.79. Longitude: 38.46
• Population: 144,000

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Out of the Centre

Savvino-storozhevsky monastery and museum.

Zvenigorod's most famous sight is the Savvino-Storozhevsky Monastery, which was founded in 1398 by the monk Savva from the Troitse-Sergieva Lavra, at the invitation and with the support of Prince Yury Dmitrievich of Zvenigorod. Savva was later canonised as St Sabbas (Savva) of Storozhev. The monastery late flourished under the reign of Tsar Alexis, who chose the monastery as his family church and often went on pilgrimage there and made lots of donations to it. Most of the monastery’s buildings date from this time. The monastery is heavily fortified with thick walls and six towers, the most impressive of which is the Krasny Tower which also serves as the eastern entrance. The monastery was closed in 1918 and only reopened in 1995. In 1998 Patriarch Alexius II took part in a service to return the relics of St Sabbas to the monastery. Today the monastery has the status of a stauropegic monastery, which is second in status to a lavra. In addition to being a working monastery, it also holds the Zvenigorod Historical, Architectural and Art Museum.

Belfry and Neighbouring Churches

Located near the main entrance is the monastery's belfry which is perhaps the calling card of the monastery due to its uniqueness. It was built in the 1650s and the St Sergius of Radonezh’s Church was opened on the middle tier in the mid-17th century, although it was originally dedicated to the Trinity. The belfry's 35-tonne Great Bladgovestny Bell fell in 1941 and was only restored and returned in 2003. Attached to the belfry is a large refectory and the Transfiguration Church, both of which were built on the orders of Tsar Alexis in the 1650s.  

To the left of the belfry is another, smaller, refectory which is attached to the Trinity Gate-Church, which was also constructed in the 1650s on the orders of Tsar Alexis who made it his own family church. The church is elaborately decorated with colourful trims and underneath the archway is a beautiful 19th century fresco.

Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral

The Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral is the oldest building in the monastery and among the oldest buildings in the Moscow Region. It was built between 1404 and 1405 during the lifetime of St Sabbas and using the funds of Prince Yury of Zvenigorod. The white-stone cathedral is a standard four-pillar design with a single golden dome. After the death of St Sabbas he was interred in the cathedral and a new altar dedicated to him was added.

Under the reign of Tsar Alexis the cathedral was decorated with frescoes by Stepan Ryazanets, some of which remain today. Tsar Alexis also presented the cathedral with a five-tier iconostasis, the top row of icons have been preserved.

Tsaritsa's Chambers

The Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral is located between the Tsaritsa's Chambers of the left and the Palace of Tsar Alexis on the right. The Tsaritsa's Chambers were built in the mid-17th century for the wife of Tsar Alexey - Tsaritsa Maria Ilinichna Miloskavskaya. The design of the building is influenced by the ancient Russian architectural style. Is prettier than the Tsar's chambers opposite, being red in colour with elaborately decorated window frames and entrance.

At present the Tsaritsa's Chambers houses the Zvenigorod Historical, Architectural and Art Museum. Among its displays is an accurate recreation of the interior of a noble lady's chambers including furniture, decorations and a decorated tiled oven, and an exhibition on the history of Zvenigorod and the monastery.

Palace of Tsar Alexis

The Palace of Tsar Alexis was built in the 1650s and is now one of the best surviving examples of non-religious architecture of that era. It was built especially for Tsar Alexis who often visited the monastery on religious pilgrimages. Its most striking feature is its pretty row of nine chimney spouts which resemble towers.

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