Scaling Safety: A Roadmap to Close America’s Safety Gaps | Alliance for Safety and Justice

From the Alliance for Safety and Justice:

Across the United States, everyday Americans largely agree on what needs to be prioritized to improve public safety. However, current government priorities do not match the public’s expectations.

After a generation of record-low crime, many cities across the United States are experiencing increases in violence. Americans from all walks of life—89 percent of us—are concerned about crime and safety.1 Importantly, we also share broad consensus about which investments would more effectively prevent the cycle of crime: local programs such as violence prevention programs, mental health treatment, trauma recovery programs, and reentry programs.

These types of programs have demonstrated positive impacts on safety. Yet, they are infrequently available at a scale that matches community needs. They remain under-supported.

Instead of preventing the knowable drivers of crime and violence, most public safety resources respond to it after it occurs. For four decades, drastic increases in public safety expenditures have focused on responding to crime and violence through growing the criminal justice system, rather than preventing them by growing the building blocks for community safety.

When communities are not equipped with the building blocks to prevent and address the cycle of crime, we are left with a gap in safety—a gap between what people and communities need to prevent crime at scale and what is currently available in cities across the country. Put simply, communities have not been equipped to prevent crime. At a time when the nation is seeing new increases in violence, it has never been more important or urgent to understand this gap in safety and close it.

Scaling Safety: A Roadmap to Close America’s Safety Gaps is a first-of-its-kind attempt to estimate what it would take to bring to scale the very safety solutions that both impacted communities and most voters want.