Is Fighting Crime as Easy as Going Green?

Philadelphia study reveals a surprising side effect to environmental renewal.

Beginning in 1999, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society began a campaign to refurbish abandoned, vacant lots in and around downtown Philadelphia. The Society’s goals were modest – remove trash and raze dilapidated structures, plant grass and trees, and surround each refurbished lot with a quaint picket fence in the hopes it would deter illegal dumping.. Several times a year, Society members would return to the lots to flex their green thumbs by tending to the shrubbery and mending the fences.

Early in the campaign, researchers got wind of the urban renewal project and decided to conduct a series of experiments. Vacant “control” lots were chosen and specifically left untouched by the Horticultural Society, with the control lots evenly distributed among different areas of Philadelphia to aid in the integrity of the experiments. Researchers then spent the next ten years measuring a variety of health and safety statistics in communities where lots were greened over and compared those measurements to identical studies in areas where no renewal occurred.

By 2008, more than 4,500 vacant lots were refurbished, representing 7.8 million square feet of Philadelphia that was now green and vibrant as opposed to the gray dilapidation of the still-crumbling control lots. As expected, exercise increased significantly among residents in areas where refurbished lots now provided a pleasant place to spend time outdoors. Likewise, citizens in the re-greened sections of the city often reported less stress and a greater sense of community pride.

Researchers were surprised, however, to hear reports from the Philadelphia Police Department that both violent and non-violent crime were down significantly in the areas where the Horticultural Society had done its work, versus steady or rising crime rates in the communities around the control lots.

Gun assaults, specifically, were down in all four of the studied sections of Philadelphia, as was other types of assault crimes. The greening was also associated with a sharp reduction of vandalism throughout the city. Researchers believe the perception that someone cared enough to refurbish the community was all it took to motivate criminals to take their activity elsewhere. If someone cared about the land, the researchers hypothesized, criminals might think the same property was also being watched for troublemakers.

The only crime-related downside to the greening project was a rise in reports of disorderly conduct immediately after the lots were renewed. Criminologists believe this was the result of the community’s newfound use of the green space, where parties or other community gatherings occasionally resulted in various nuisances and complaints to police.

The study is far from definitive, but the public safety advantages of greening and urban renewal could complement more traditional methods of crime fighting in cities ripe for renovation.


Source: “More Green, Less Crime: Rehabilitating Vacant Lots Improves Urban Health and Safety, Penn Study Finds”
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/more-green-less-crime--rehabilit...