“Being on guard is just being aware, ... and being aware is being alive.” – 23-year-old participant
In communities across the United States, mayors and other public leaders say public safety is a top priority. But those leaders face a pressing challenge: they do not have the tools they need to measure public safety in a way that accounts for what residents experience in their daily lives.
Without these insights, leaders report that they do not know if their decisions – the policies they set, the funding they allocate, and the agencies they oversee – meaningfully improve public safety for residents. Similarly, residents have limited ability to hold government institutions accountable for improving public safety.
Our latest report draws on research co-conducted with World Youth Connect, a youth-led organization, and insights shared by young people in Saint Paul to propose a novel approach to incorporating community insights to create actionable indicators of public safety that measure observable changes in behavior. The indicators were created for the city of Saint Paul as part of the GPL’s ongoing collaboration with Saint Paul’s Office of Neighborhood Safety.
After conducting interviews and focus groups with 50 young people from Saint Paul, the GPL identified four common themes that capture youth experiences with safety: the need to be consistently on guard, sense of lack of safety on Saint Paul’s public transit, interacting with the police, and social media use. Several of the most frequently cited causes for feeling unsafe, particularly the train, were not previously a focal point of public safety efforts, underscoring the importance of community members’ input in shaping public safety.
The GPL then used these themes to develop and prioritize 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, each of which is detailed in this report, reflect the types of actions youth would take if they felt safe, providing potential observable metrics that Saint Paul can use to test measuring the presence of safety in a neighborhood.
"I would love to just be able to go outside without worrying that something will happen to me, when someone else will just do something violent and yeah, having walks without worrying." – 17-year-old participant
Since 2020, the GPL has worked with the City of Saint Paul to reshape its public safety system, including supporting the creation of the Office of Neighborhood Safety.