Did community greening reduce crime? Evidence from New Haven, CT, 1996–2007 (original) (raw)
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Trees and crime in urban areas: recommendations
2018
The benefits of trees, especially in urban settings, are often limited to discussions centered on energy savings, the removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide, muting noise pollution, and storm water control.2–5 Yet, the benefits of trees extend well beyond the environmental benefits just mentioned. In this paper, the relationship neighborhood trees have to crime and as well as recommendations from these findings will be discussed. This is pertinent given that many communities are often defined by the level of safety, be it realized or not, in that community.6,7 As a result of this, those neighborhoods deemed less safe have been shown to have lower home values when compared to similar localities.6,8,9
Chapter 4 Do green areas affect crime and safety
In: Crime and fear in public places, 2020
The aim of this chapter is to identify and assess the nature of published, peer-reviewed literature in English on the relationship between green areas (parks, forests, neighborhood parks, green vacant land, interstitial spaces) and crime and perceived safety. This goal is achieved by performing a systematic literature overview from 1968 to 2018 from the major databases and respond to the following questions: (1) Which are the most common types of the green areas associated with crime and/or poor perceived safety in the international literature? (2) Do green areas affect the occurrence of crime and disorder, and if so, how? (3) Do green areas impact on perceived safety and, if so, what are the mechanisms? The chapters concludes with a discussion of policy and research recommendations.
Neighborhood street activity and greenspace usage uniquely contribute to predicting crime
Crime is costly economically, socially, and psychologically for all societies, especially in urban areas. While there are many well-studied environmental and social influences on crime such as poverty and marginalization, one less studied, but important factor is the effect of neighborhood greenspace. Prior research has shown that greenspace is negatively associated with crime, but the mechanism of this effect is debated. One suggested mechanism is that greenspaces increase local street activity, which in turn reduces crime, but past work has failed to examine effects of greenspace and street activity together, making it difficult to decouple these factors. Additionally, past research has typically used the static physical presence of greenspace as opposed to determining residents’ engagement with and use of greenspace, which may be critical to understanding the potential causal role of greenspace on crime. Here, we examine the association of crime with street activity, physical gre...
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 2016
Objectives: There is a growing interest in the relationship between greenspace and crime, yet how particular greenspace types encourage or inhibit the timing and types of greenspace crime remains largely unexplored. Drawing upon recent advances in environmental criminology, we introduce an integrated suite of methods to examine the spatial, temporal, and neighborhood dynamics of greenspace crime. Methods: We collate administrative, census, and crime incident data and employ cluster analysis, circular statistics, and negative binomial regression to examine violent, public nuisance, property, and drug crimes within 4,265 greenspaces across Brisbane, Australia. Results: We find that greenspace amenities, neighborhood social composition, and the presence of proximate crime generators influence the frequency and timing of greenspace crime. Conclusions: Our analyses reveal that particular types of greenspaces are more crime prone than others. We argue that this is largely due to the prese...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018
Vacant and blighted urban land is a widespread and potentially risky environmental condition encountered by millions of people on a daily basis. About 15% of the land in US cities is deemed vacant or abandoned, an area roughly the size of Switzerland. In a citywide cluster randomized controlled trial, we investigated the effects of standardized, reproducible interventions that restore vacant land on the commission of violence, crime, and the perceptions of fear and safety. Quantitative and ethnographic analyses were included in a mixed-methods approach to more fully test and explicate our findings. A total of 541 randomly sampled vacant lots were randomly assigned into treatment and control study arms; outcomes from police and 445 randomly sampled participants were analyzed over a 38-month study period. Participants living near treated vacant lots reported significantly reduced perceptions of crime (-36.8%, < 0.05), vandalism (-39.3%, < 0.05), and safety concerns when going ou...
Trees and Crime in Bogota, Colombia: Is the link an ecosystem disservice or service
2018
There is a perception that increased forest cover and density in urban contexts is associated with increased criminality. But, this complex relationship between urban vegetation, crime, ecosystem services (ES) and dis-services (ED), has been little studied in low and middle income countries. This study's aim was to statistically determine if specific structural and socioeconomic characteristics of urban treescapes were related to crime occurrence, considered an ED, in a major Latin American city. We used spatial and statistical analyses of a public tree inventory, homicide occurrence, and available geospatial data to analyze if urban treescape, demographic, and socioeconomic variables were related to the incidence of homicides in Neotropical Bogota, Colombia. First, a generalized linear model indicated that fewer homicides occurred in public treescapes with taller trees and higher tree density. In contrast, the amount of overall green space and average tree basal area were not significant predictors of homicide occurrence. Second, a geographically weighted regression model indicated that the inclusion of tree basal area rendered tree height insignificant, and that higher basal areas were associated with fewer homicides. Thus, both models indicated that increased tree density and size were actually associated with lower homicide occurrences. The amount of public green areas was however, not significantly related to homicide occurrence. Results indicate that in general, Bogota´s treescapes provided overall net ES as opposed to ED in terms of crime. Findings could be used to develop land use policies and management practices that increase the overall provision and demand for ES from urban forests.