Many government leaders do not have the tools they need to adequately measure community safety, instead relying on traditional crime metrics to measure progress toward their goals. Crime statistics, such as arrest rates, can reflect law enforcement priorities by measuring whether a crime is observed and reported, yet often fail to meaningfully capture whether or not residents actually feel safe.
In Saint Paul, leaders wanted to move beyond solely capturing the absence of crime and instead measure the presence of safety. To advance a vision of public safety that was informed by community members, leaders implemented several initiatives to solicit input, including:
A Community-First Public Safety Commission, a 48-member group of St. Paul residents, to provide recommendations to the mayor and city council on re-envisioning emergency response.
An Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS), which includes a permanent Neighborhood Safety Community Council that engages with community members to inform strategy development.
Building on these efforts, city leaders sought to generate new, observable measures of public safety rooted in community perspectives. In particular, they were eager to engage Saint Paul youth, as they experience high levels of violence and policing, yet their perspectives are often not accounted for in policymaking processes.
How the GPL Supported:
Co-designed the Community-Based Indicator (CBI) pilot in 2022 with ONS and World Youth Connect, a local, youth-led nonprofit. The GPL and World Youth Connect conducted interviews with 50 local young people, who self-identified as being highly impacted by violence, to learn what made them feel unsafe and how their behavior would change if they felt safe.
Uncovered that youth feel unsafe in their daily lives and that they significantly alter their behavior as a result. The GPL identified four common themes that impact youth experiences with safety:
The need to be consistently on guard
Exposure to drug use on the METRO Green Line
Interacting with the police
Social media use
Developed and prioritized a novel set of actionable indicators of public safety, such as playing outside and riding the train, and corresponding metrics that Saint Paul can use to measure each indicator, such as the number of young people utilizing public spaces. These indicators reflect the types of actions youth would take if they felt safe, providing potentially observable metrics that Saint Paul could use to test measuring the presence of safety in a neighborhood.
The results of the CBI pilot have created a blueprint for Saint Paul and communities across the country to elevate the voices of those who are often excluded from the policymaking process and yet are most likely to feel its effects. This data helps us build on the efficacy of our public safety system and move closer to a model where measuring the presence and perception of safety is just as vital as the absence of crime.Melvin Carter
Mayor of Saint Paul
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It was nice actually having somebody to listen to something that most people really don’t seem to care about, and actually know that there are people who are trying to make it better and make it a safer place.18-year-old participant
Interviewed in "New Measures of Public Safety: A Youth-Led Vision in Saint Paul"
The results of the CBI pilot have created a blueprint for Saint Paul and communities across the country to elevate the voices of those who are often excluded from the policymaking process and yet are most likely to feel its effects. This data helps us build on the efficacy of our public safety system and move closer to a model where measuring the presence and perception of safety is just as vital as the absence of crime.Melvin Carter