URP 534, Section 1

Public safety is a crucial but often neglected aspect of community development. This course explores a wide range of strategies that community development institutions can use to tackle concerns about public safety, with a special focus on strategies that do not rely heavily on the criminal justice system. We will begin by developing a conceptual framework for thinking about the role of community development institutions in making neighborhoods safer, drawing lessons from situational crime prevention, abolitionist theory, and other intellectual traditions to do so. We will then explore a wide range of specific public safety strategies and problems, such as violence interrupters, crime prevention through environmental design, mobile crisis teams, private security, restorative justice, place management, supportive housing, services for crime victims, and transit safety. Throughout the course, we will consider the scope and limits of community-based public safety strategies as alternatives to criminal justice-based strategies, and we will examine the obstacles that have limited their use as well as the unintended consequences they have had.