We spoke directly with the communities most affected by violent crime and police violence
The Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS) asked the National Innovation Service (NIS), to speak directly with the communities most directly affected by violent crime, police violence, and neighborhood disinvestment. ONS, which encompasses the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety (MAP) and the Office to Prevent Gun Violence (OPGV), explicitly engages community-level understandings of safety to co-design solutions with residents and deliver a variety of programs and physical space improvements that aim to build safe and resilient communities. ONS’s model is grounded in the assertion that community safety is not merely about the absence of crime, but the presence of opportunities that enable community thriving.
NIS’s research builds on ONS’s work, as well as previous research that NIS conducted, to identify how communities understand safety and thriving, how the conditions of and mechanisms for safety and thriving could be measured over time, and how MAP’s work to increase community ownership over government investments could be best evaluated in that context.
This project employed a community-based participatory approach to research, which engaged community partners in the definition and execution of qualitative research. NIS sought participation through partnership from a variety of community stakeholders and neighborhood institutions across NYC’s five boroughs to co-develop a research approach.
This partnership seeks to enable communities who experience and are impacted by government systems to play a more active role in their shape and direction.
NIS built on the connections we made to community-based organizations in our prior exploratory research on Safety and Thriving and through the existing community relationships held by ONS to develop research partnerships for this project. Those partners have a variety of different issue area focuses (ranging from maternal health, to emergency food distribution, and advocacy for gun violence survivors), but all are engaged directly at the neighborhood level with work related to community safety. We developed research questions with a number of those partners, in order to help tailor our conversations to particular communities.
Our ONS and community partners also helped us recruit participants for focus groups and interviews. We focused on Black and Brown residents in neighborhoods with high rates of violent crime, including residents in neighborhoods with MAP and/or OPGV programs and residents in neighborhoods that were not directly engaged with MAP or OPGV. Through our work, we engaged residents across 8 sites where MAP and/or OPGV operate. The Center for Court Innovation's Neighborhood Safety Initiative, MAP's partner in facilitating the NStat Resident Stakeholder teams, was instrumental in supporting resident team engagement.
Community-Based Organizations
In total, NIS engaged 108 residents and 16 staff across NYC. While most sessions were all ages, we held a number of specific sessions for teenagers and seniors to get their unique perspectives.
In focus groups and interviews, residents were asked to talk about how they understand the concepts of safety and thriving, and what factors might increase safety and thriving in their communities. Additionally, we worked with our research partners to tailor sessions to their contexts, often adding questions specific to a neighborhood and/or an organization’s focus.
All focus groups and interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded in order to develop key themes drawn directly from residents’ descriptions of safety and thriving. We paid special attention to the factors that residents identified as important to increase safety and thriving for their communities.
For those interested, take a look at the codebook used to analyze our data: Here.
What follows is the synthesis of our conversations with residents:
Findings that describe the ways in which residents understand safety and thriving
New indicators for measuring Community Safety
And a framework to evaluate MAP by measuring Community Power
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Our Findings
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