WWJJD?

By John Bennett

July 15, 2008

I’ve been thinking a lot about crime in the last couple weeks and violent crime in particular. There’s a definite relationship between sustainability and crime, with the former often being offered as a way to reduce the latter. Walking and bicycling, for example, are both sustainable modes of transportation that can have a positive effect on public safety.

But what happens when fear of crime makes people feel uncomfortable using public spaces?

Well, it ruins everything.

People will be less likely to walk, ride bikes or participate in other beneficial activities such as community gardening. And thus a positive feedback loop is created. As more people withdraw from the public realm, conditions deteriorate for those who continue to use sidewalks, streets, parks and other public spaces. This cumulative causality extends to those who seek protection in the perceived safety of their automobiles. As one of my neighbors likes to say, the most dangerous seconds in your life may be between your car door and your front door.

When we retreat into our cars and houses, we become isolated from the public realm and the safety of the public realm suffers from our absence. The idea of “eyes on the street” as a deterrent to crime is not a new idea. In fact, Jane Jacobs coined the phrase in the early 1960s. Here are a couple quotes from “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” which remains important and instructive decades after its publication in 1961.

“The first thing to understand is that the public peace — the sidewalk and street peace — of cities is not kept primarily by the police, as necessary as police are. It is kept by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.”

and

“… there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their back or blank sides on it and leave it blind.”

and

“…the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street.”

What Would Jane Jacobs Do if she was worried about crime in her neighborhood?

I have to think she’d be turning her eyes toward the street and that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve resolved to spend more time on my front porch, watching what happens on my block. Jacobs is correct in her assessment of viewing an empty street: It’s boring. The highlight of four hours spent on my front porch this Sunday was a brief conversation with a strolling family, who couldn’t remember the seventh dwarf’s name (Brainy? Nope. He was a Smurf). I’ll be ready with the correct answer next time they walk by and I hope to have more conversations in the future, with both “residents and strangers.”

Posted in Advocacy, Crime, Neighborhoods, Transportation