On behalf of Big Cities Health Coalition and Prevention Institute, we’re excited to introduce
Community Safety Realized: Public Health Pathways to Preventing Violence. This new tool is designed to support health departments and other organizations as they work to prevent and address violence in their communities right now. During the pandemic, risk factors for violence, such as economic instability and social isolation, soared, and unfortunately, violent incidents did as well. Advocates from coast to coast, and big city health commissioners in particular, are calling for different and better violence prevention strategies—ones that reimagine community safety, taking structural racism into account.
Community Safety Realized is intended to help move the conversation about reimagining community safety from aspiration to concrete strategies and action steps. It is based on interviews with dozens of health directors, government leaders, epidemiologists, and violence prevention advocates and practitioners. The framework includes their best thinking about the portfolio of strategies and partnerships that when put into place—to address violence upfront, in the thick, and in the aftermath—can effectively create community safety using a public health methodology.
What’s different about this framework is that it makes the case that to create healing and change, we need to put racial justice at the center of the public health approach to preventing violence. Its four defining features are:
- Truth, racial healing, and transformation: Racial injustice embedded in policies at all levels of government has resulted in inequities in rates of violence. A shared understanding that violence is rooted in structural racism can build public will for public health strategies for community safety.
- Community leadership and power: The people who are most impacted by violence and injustice have a democratic right to drive public policy agendas, influence institutional decision-making, and set budget priorities that will improve their lives and the neighborhoods in which they live.
- Data and evidence driven: Community safety strategies should be informed by a careful and thorough assessment of violence in a community, including who is most affected, and factors and circumstances that are either contributing to violence or helping to create safety, using a variety of data sources.
- Collaborative action: A public health approach to community safety depends on collaborative action, because the policies and conditions that lead to either safety or violence are shaped by multiple sectors and systems.
We hope you’ll join us for a webinar on June 8th to learn more about the Community Safety Realized framework and hear from health department leaders who contributed to its development. As public health departments begin to recover and rebuild from the impact of COVID-19 and decades of underinvestment, the framework provides a roadmap to re-build safer, more resilient communities. That means making meaningful investments in public health strategies within communities most impacted by violence, working across sectors to shift away from an overreliance on the criminal legal system, and promoting justice and equity in policies, systems, and institutions. It also means working with and through BCHC member health departments as they have a unique, diverse, and crucial role to play to help cities realize community safety.
We look forward to sharing more in the coming months about this and other work coming from BCHC and PI that amplifies racial justice and strong public health leadership in building safer, more resilient communities.
