Safety That Actually Makes Blocks Safer

Nobody in this district needs a briefing on what unsafe feels like. What they need is a Council office that treats safety as something you build, not something you announce.

Prevention at the scale of the problem

Group violence intervention, community-based violence interruption, and intensive case management for the small number of people at highest risk work when they are funded consistently and staffed by people from the neighborhood. Philadelphia has funded these in fits and starts. Stop-start funding is how you lose the credible messengers you spent three years building trust with.

Fix the physical conditions

The research on this is not subtle: cleaning and greening vacant lots, sealing abandoned buildings, and fixing the streetlights measurably reduces shootings on those blocks. These are unglamorous line items. They also work.

• A streetlight outage should be fixed in days, not quarters. Publish the backlog.
• Clean and seal vacant properties, and put the cost on the owner where the owner is an LLC that has been sitting on it.
• Traffic safety is public safety. This district loses people to crashes on the same corridors every year.

Open doors for young people

A rec center with a padlock at 6 p.m. and a library closed three days a week is a policy decision. Staffing and opening those buildings — evenings, weekends, summer — is one of the cheapest violence-prevention tools the city has.

Accountability in both directions

Neighbors deserve to know how long it actually takes for a car to arrive, by district, published quarterly. And they deserve a police department whose misconduct process does not quietly reinstate officers the city already fired.