Want to Make Your City Safe? The Data Points to Prioritizing Vision Zero to Cut Crime

Constituents consistently rank the safety of their streets as highest priority, not the risk of being violently attacked.

Police Departments across the United States want to lower crime rates; It is their primary mission. To accomplish this, when violent crime spikes, there are endless conversations about whether cities are “spending enough,” and leads to what appears to be an intuitive dialogue asking, “do we have enough officers on the streets?” When I worked in Washington D.C. and Chicago, I always questioned this mentality as I knew from my work running transportation departments that there was not necessarily a direct connection between “spend” and “output.” There is certainly not a correlation between raw spend and executing on key outcomes like pedestrian or cyclist safety for instance.

In my career, I have learned a lot about balancing data with intuition. Data without intuition can be inadequate to make decisions and the same goes for intuition without data. I also have learned that the best people to talk to about the causes and impacts being experienced in their neighborhoods… are often the people living in their neighborhoods, particularly when we integrate data to help everyone to figure out solutions to problems. So, how do we do this and balance empirical data with the experience of people in their neighborhoods?

The Data Correlation Between Violent Crime and Traffic Crashes

One of the most interesting joint programs put together at the federal level under the Obama Administration was DDACTS, or Data-Driven Approach to Crime and Traffic Statistics which is a national partnership co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and National Institutes of Justice (NIJ). NHTSA, its federal partners and many additional national organizations provide technical assistance and other resources to states and localities interested in adopting the DDACTS model.

Fundamentally, DDACTS is a program that utilizes geolocational data which combines highly correlated crash and crime data and then determines redeployment strategies for officers and other resources. This resource reallocation is linked with high profile traffic enforcement to deter the causational behavior going forward. One of the most important realizations that went into DDACTS, was that neighborhood crimes disproportionately involved motor vehicles. Also, when studying corrolaries to crimes (assaults, robberies and worse), they found the highest correlation between data sources was traffic crashes and violent crime.

Once this data is formatted for comparison and visualized with heat mapping, discussions can be had amongst electeds, police, and transportation leaders regarding how to redeploy resources towards activities that will actually change behavior at the root, and decrease the entropy that results in an environment that is ripe for what I would term “traditional crime.” This includes automated enforcement as we implemented in Chicago (saw 50% up to 99% drops in speeding), dedicated funding for infrastructure improvements and upgrades to signalization including leading pedestrian intervals. In other words, redeploying people, AND resources is key.

Geo-Targeted Polling Data From City Residents

I recently was introduced to a technology company called Elucd that currently operates in the public safety vertical, and has contracts with some of the largest cities in the U.S. to essentially give feedback to police departments on the sentiments of residents in very tight geographies. They use social media and web advertising, often on mobile phones to anonymously survey residents and ask them questions about neighborhood safety and trust in the police, such as “The police in my neighborhood treat local residents with respect (Level of agreement from 0-10)” and people rate their experiences. The data collection techniques are smart, and extremely accurate in tests vs. phone surveys or in-person intercepts and accounts for non-response bias etc.

I thought to myself, “ok, this is an interesting use of social media, mobile, and targeted ads,” and that was about it…until I saw the results from weekly surveys, and multi-year compilations of data below:

“Wow,” I thought, “street safety and traffic crime are consistently people’s top 1-3 concerns? Across cities of all sizes?” This is something even I had not even intuited and this is the space I live in every day, thinking about Vision Zero, safety, and health/active mobility amongst other issues. “Well,” I thought, “‘streets and traffic’ could mean different things to different people.” But then I read the comments from residents. See below:

Top Areas of Concern This Week vs this Month

Community Concerns from the Week of April 29, 2019 to May 5, 2019**

Streets and Traffic (21 comments)

• “Traffic” (Patrol Area 1, 4/29/2019)
• “Speeding on Catalina” (Patrol Area 1, 4/30/2019)
• “Traffic” (Patrol Area 1, 4/30/2019)
• “Crazy fast drivers” (Patrol Area 1, 5/2/2019)
• “Leaf blowers” (Patrol Area 1, 5/4/2019)
• “Drivers and bike riders running stop signs.” (Patrol Area 1, 5/5/2019)
• “Bicyclists need to obey the stop signs and traffic lights. Bicyclists on the street of Esplanade ride through stop signs all the time. They have their bike lanes but do not obey the rules of the road. Crack down on the bicyclists!” (Patrol Area 2, 4/29/2019)
• “SAME AS PREVIOUSLY … ALL THE FRIGGIN NOISE FROM SOME OF THE CARS AND MOST OF THE MOTORCYCLES …” (Patrol Area 2, 4/29/2019)
• “parking abuse” (Patrol Area 2, 5/1/2019)
• “Parking” (Patrol Area 2, 5/2/2019)
• “Sometimes a lot of traffic gets diverted down my street” (Patrol Area 2, 5/5/2019)
• “Failure to enforce Avenue F permit parking only violators.” (Patrol Area 2, 5/5/2019)
• “cars blocking driveways” (Patrol Area 3, 4/30/2019)
• “Neighbor riding go cart  its noisey and dangerous” (Patrol Area 3, 5/2/2019)
• “People driving the wrong way on my one way street cutting from Green to Aviation.” (Patrol Area 3, 5/5/2019)
• “Parking. Folks are allowed to park close to the corner obstructing turning.” (Patrol Area 3, 5/5/2019)
• “Speeding, not stopping at stop signs  and break ins.” (Patrol Area 4, 5/2/2019)
• “Cars speeding like our street is a race track.” (Patrol Area 4, 5/2/2019)
• “Cut through traffic” (Patrol Area 4, 5/4/2019)
• “Illegal parking such as blocking driveways.” (Patrol Area 5, 4/30/2019)
• “Dangerous drivers” (Location not reported, 5/5/2019)

It is clear that residents are concerned with everything from noise pollution from cars, to speeding, to parking abuse and of course the obligatory “bicyclists running stop signs” on their neighborhood streets. With delivery services and ridehailing skyrocketing, along with box trucks making (now) 1-day deliveries for Amazon and Walmart etc., + more walking, biking and scooting than ever, this should not be a surprise. The tension on the streets is palatable and the fatalities are rising to over 40k per year, particularly between delivery trucks and people walking, biking or in smaller cars.