CityLab recently posted an interesting article entitled “There’s No Such Thing as a Dangerous Neighborhood”. The piece makes a lot of points that are consistent with the findings of our independent crime studies of East Liberty and our “hot spot” crime reduction strategy. Our strategy focused on cleaning up the 3% of addresses in the neighborhood that generated a majority of calls to the police. This resulted in an astounding 49% reduction in residential crime in the neighborhood between 2008 and 2012. The key to this strategy was using property management as a tool to reduce crime, rather than relying on the police.
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See these excerpts from the article:
“More than 30 years later, the evidence demonstrates that the broken windows paradigm does little to nothing to reduce serious crime but does tend to make people feel more unsafe, reduce trust in and cooperation with police, and could contribute to, in fact, producing and facilitating more violence.
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The knowledge that we’ve gained since 1982 unequivocally tells us something else: Serious violence is extremely concentrated in very particular places and, most importantly, among very particular people. Dispelling the notion of ‘dangerous neighborhoods,’ extensive research on geographic concentration has consistently found that around half of all crime complaints or incidents of gun violence concentrated at about 5 percent of street segments or blocks in a given city.”
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