GUEST COLUMN.

 “How do we make municipalities safe?” is a far-reaching question in public administration today.  At its heart is the perception that crime is rampant, with most Americans believing it to be rising year over year despite national decreases. John Gramlich and Kirsten Eddy note in a Pew Research Center Brief that this inflated perception of crime is not new, appearing in public opinion research since 1993. Efforts to address crime have reached a fever pitch, with federal law enforcement officers and National Guard troops deployed to Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and Memphis.

But the reality is somewhat different. Metrics like arrests, charges, and convictions show crime has decreased significantly in the United States. Arrests for murder are down 16.3 percent; robbery 14 percent and motor vehicle theft 25.4 percent, according to the FBI Crime Data Explorer. In Washington D.C. 

Violent Crime is down 28 percent compared to 2024, which itself saw a 35 percent decrease in violent crime compared to 2023. In Minneapolis, the place I am lucky to call home, Homicides (13.1 percent), Burglary (13.1 percent), Robbery (32.2 percent) and reports of shots fired (20.1 percent) are all down year over year, though assaults are up 2.3 percent. With all of that in mind, why do people still feel unsafe?

Not only do traditional news services and social media report heinous crimes repeatedly, causing residents to overestimate crime, but the most commonly used metrics for crime also tend to be inadequate measures of community safety.

A Path Towards Performance Management

Crime rates shouldn’t be discarded as a measure of public safety, but they should be one indicator in a broader approach to measurement. Relying on crime statistics alone to judge safety is like judging a car’s performance only by engine failures. Instead, public safety agencies should consider a public-facing performance management scorecard that includes metrics focused on the safety tactics that work broadly as well as tactics that are known to work in the context of their community.

In psychology, researchers have long attempted to categorize violence into two categories: “Expressive Violence,” in which an individual strikes out to express personal anger and “Instrumental Violence,” which is committed to advance a goal, like robbing a liquor store or in territory disputes among gangs.

In Rethinking Homicide, Terance Miethe and associates suggest that 77 percent of 20^th century Los Angeles gun homicides were expressive, with the remaining 23 percent being instrumental.  In 2019, Maria del Mar Pecino-Latorre of the University of Almeria, and her associates in Spain found that approximately 95 percent of homicides were expressive.  

While the methodology for defining expressive vs. instrumental violence isn’t entirely cut and dried, it does indicate that, in the United States, efforts to remove illegal firearms from the streets should reduce expressive homicides, which are often crimes that might not have taken place if a weapon wasn’t readily available.

Public safety agencies already do significant work around removing illegal firearms, and adding efforts to secure legally owned firearms to reduce theft would also benefit safety. Performance measures that could capture this phenomenon could be:

1.     The number of illegally owned or acquired firearms seized each month.

2.     The number of firearm owners who are provided with gun securement devices per month (e.g. trigger locks, safes).

Timeliness Metrics

When we think about timeliness in public safety, we often think of response times as the most critical measure. And for individuals awaiting help, that’s certainly true. But for reducing crime overall, potentially more important is timely evidence processing and timely release of information on high-profile events. Delays in evidence processing reduce the likelihood of referral, prosecution, and conviction.  Performance measures for timeliness could be:

1.     The percentage of evidence processed by a crime lab within a set number of days.

2.     The percentage of cases referred to investigators within a prescribed number of hours.

3.     The number of high-profile events in which a press briefing or press release was issued within a reasonable amount of time.

Public Perception Metrics

Much of what we know about public perceptions of crime comes from Gallup’s Global Safety Research Center or the Pew Research Center. Perceptions of safety in Minneapolis / St. Paul likely don’t apply to rural Minnesota and vice versa. It would be beneficial for agencies to obtain their own public perception metrics through direct survey, focus groups, or post-contact survey via a QR code or similar interaction point. Performance metrics for public perception could be: 

1.     The percentage of individuals who feel their own municipality is safe or secure

2.     The percentage of individuals who interacted with the department who felt their interaction was resolved or made the municipality safer as a result.

Conclusion

Public Safety agencies make up a significant portion of municipal spending. The idea that communities are unsafe boils down to perception. Municipalities and other public safety organizations should consider a public-facing dashboard for measures of community safety as well as targeted resident feedback as we navigate new local and federal directives for keeping our communities safe.

The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc. 

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