Safety in Numbers

How Boston measures up in public safety & our work planning for peace

A few weeks ago, Gallup News shared the results of a nationwide poll about which cities are considered safest. At the top of the list: Boston, second only to Dallas.  

A screenshot from Gallup News on the recent poll

The poll was conducted in July 2023 and asked Americans to rate whether each of 16 major cities are safe to live in or visit. You can see the full ranking on Gallup’s website, with city ratings ranging from 26% to 74% (Boston at 72%). 

And while perceptions didn’t vary much by gender, age, income level, or education—party affiliation made a big difference. For some cities, the gulf between Democrats’ and Republicans’ ratings on safety was as big as 43%.

A chart from Gallup News showing gaps in cities’ perceived safety by political party affiliation; Boston is near the top of the list for both Democrats and Republicans

In certain spaces, the idea that cities are out-of-control hotbeds of violence and crime has been repeated so many times that the talking points overshadow the data. Instead of connecting overall context and trends, individual incidents become evidence for a skewed narrative that often dehumanizes victims, perpetrators, and entire communities. 

So how do we measure safety in an objective way? And what metrics can help us track public safety consistently across different cities? 

Digging into the data

There’s no perfect way to capture the complexity of what makes communities safe distinctly from health, housing stability, and economic prosperity. But generally, we can measure crime rates, arrests or illegal guns seized, clearance rates (the proportion of crimes that are solved or resolved with an arrest), response times to calls for service, or public satisfaction with police departments through polling or other mechanisms.

Every city and law enforcement agency in the country reports certain public safety statistics to the FBI through their Uniform Crime Reporting Program as one way to compare apples to apples, but compiling consistent statistics across so many jurisdictions means there’s more of a lag in reporting (currently, data is available through 2021). The largest cities in the country also share data more immediately through the Major City Chiefs Association (MCCA), which releases their Violent Crime Survey twice a year. 

Let’s take a look at this MCCA data for the last full year available, 2022. For the 16 cities in the Gallup poll, if we rank the total incidents of violent crime in 2022 scaled to each city’s population, we get a very different set of rankings: 

One way to measure public safety is total incidents of violent crime per 100,000 residents. Here I used 2022 violent crime data from the Major City Chiefs Association report and 2020 Census population numbers

The differences between actual public safety and perceived safety highlight the distinction that BPD Commissioner Michael Cox often makes: crime and the fear of crime are related—but fundamentally different—issues, and both matter. 

Our job at the City is to make sure people are safe and also feel safe. And we can only do that with strong community partnerships, built on effective communication and real investments in public safety, community health, and economic opportunity. 

Boston is the only city in the top three on both sets of safety rankings—by public perception and actual public safety statistics. Whether we’re counting total violent crime, total Part One crimes (defined by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program as both violent crimes and property crimes), homicides, or other measures of reported incidents—Boston consistently has the lowest numbers. But it’s not a happy distinction. We feel deeply the impact of every single incident, carrying the pain alongside impacted families and communities whose grief doesn’t reset when the reporting starts over next year. 

Boston’s public safety incidents have also generally been on the decline for the last few years, bucking the trend that many other cities experienced. My own perspective on what makes our approach special is the strong foundation of collaboration built over many decades—community policing intertwines police officers with street outreach workers, trauma support teams, faith leaders, neighborhood leaders, and bedrock community institutions like the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute and We Are Better Together, to form a tightly-woven ecosystem of accountability, support, and healing. And we’re hungry to do more. 

Our police officers are the most professional and well-trained department anywhere, and we continue to onboard large recruit classes to meet staffing needs with new officers who reflect the talent and diversity of our communities and who are more committed than ever to community policing. Our EMS, world-class healthcare infrastructure, and fire department save lives everyday who otherwise may not have survived. And nationally known community organizations based in Boston join City trauma responders to provide services to survivors and families for deep healing to disrupt cycles of violence.

But we won’t be satisfied as long as any community members are experiencing violence or living in fear of violence. 

Planning for peace

This year we challenged all city departments and partners to build a rigorous, coordinated approach to eliminate violence in our communities. Each month Boston Police command staff, captains, and specialized units hold internal COMPSTAT sessions to review citywide public safety data, identify trends, and align on strategies. One of Commissioner Cox’s first initiatives was opening this collaboration up to the public through new Community COMPSTAT sessions in each district with anonymized and redacted information. Not only have these public conversations informed residents with the real statistics on public safety in their neighborhoods, but the community feedback has been invaluable in helping BPD solve crimes and form entirely new strategies based on these partnerships. We’ve also partnered with local leaders on a community-led Healing Tour and roundtable discussions on trauma and mental health.

In April, we convened key providers, community leaders, and public officials for a Violence Reduction Workshop to learn from national best practices, examine Boston’s specific data, and bring those on the frontlines of this work together to tackle gun violence most effectively. 

Community members from all sectors involved in frontline community safety efforts gathered for our Violence Reduction Workshop in April (City of Boston Mayor’s Office Flickr)

As in many cities, violence in Boston is concentrated in a small set of geographic areas. At the workshop, we learned that 5% of the street segments in Boston are where more than 75% of the shootings occur. It’s a startling data point that both underscores how specific communities and residents are repeatedly retraumatized, and shows exactly where we need to focus our efforts for the greatest impact. Coordinated by our Community Safety team out of the Mayor’s office, headed by Dr. Isaac Yablo, we’ve begun planning for all city departments and partners to be involved in violence intervention, recovery, prevention, and reinvestment. 

Our efforts focus on accountability for offenders to deter crime and bring justice to survivors and their families, as well as coordinated services to stem the cycles of trauma and violence in impacted communities, including: reimagining and reinvesting in community outreach; working to engage 100% of high-risk individuals with high-quality services and supports; better coordinating violence intervention efforts with weekly incident review meetings; and boosting positive presence and environmental investments in these micro-places where violence concentrates. 

And every city department has a role to play—coordinating police, street outreach, public health, and schools staff; improving street lighting and trimming overgrown trees and shrubbery; hosting activities at community centers; auditing partnerships funding for outcomes and impact; ensuring problem properties are addressed—and we’ll continue to expand these efforts. This summer our Community Safety team allocated microgrants for block parties and events in our opportunity areas and partnered with community organizations to keep key areas programmed. 

One key area of focus remains our young people. In Boston as in other cities across the country, we’ve seen an alarming trend of younger and younger individuals involved in every category of public safety incidents, from robbery to shootings. 

At various points during the summer and especially the last two weekends, we’ve seen teenagers and young adults involved in large-scale fights, injuries, and arrests at several locations in Boston. Some of these young people are not Boston residents, and we need to be clear that not only is this type of behavior unacceptable in our city, but there are consequences for engaging in violence. Some are Boston residents and part of our Boston Public Schools community, where there’s urgency for accountability and services as we head into a new school year starting next week. Over the last year, we’ve built up an infrastructure to support youth safety with more than a dozen agencies and organizations meeting weekly to make an individualized plan for outreach and intervention with every young person and family identified through the court system or partners. 

Nationwide, we still see the ongoing impact of several years of disruption weighing on our young people, as similar situations are taking place in cities across the country. It’s all hands on deck as we continue working to support and invest in youth development and opportunity here in Boston. This summer we set new records for participation in BPS summer learning and City of Boston youth summer jobs, and we’re already planning to do even more this school year and next summer.

For young people and adults, our goal for Boston’s ecosystem is to connect each individual person to the supports and structures they need, with focused attention on the whole person and coordinated efforts across every organization to ensure no one falls through gaps.

A note of gratitude for first responders and providers

An important final note: the work on the front lines of community safety is grueling, unrelenting, and often thankless. I’ve had the privilege to ride along with Boston Police and EMS, sit with street outreach workers, walk alongside our Neighborhood Trauma Team members, and learn from BPHC’s Division of Violence Prevention team and community partners who have been saving lives in our neighborhoods (some for many decades). Just as important as building systems to serve impacted families is doing more to care for those who are caring for our communities.

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There’s a lot more to talk through around community safety (e.g. trauma response, what we know about homicides in Boston, alternative response to crisis calls & much more). I’ll follow up in later posts, so let me know what topics you’re hoping we’ll discuss. What organizations or approaches should be highlighted? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below! Thanks for reading.