Developing Participatory Public Safety Metrics in Oakland, CA

• In Event: Participation and Urban Policy: Case Studies from around the World

Abstract

This paper presents a new way of measuring public safety with a focus on the City of Oakland, CA. It draws on the Firsthand Framework for Policy Innovation, a new research initiative that seeks to democratize the measurement of pressing social problems, like public safety. Historically, city leaders have assessed the efficacy of their local criminal justice system and tracked trends in public safety primarily through crime statistics. In recent years, however, urban communities—especially those that have been both under-resourced and over-policed—are working to reimagine the goals, scope, and operations of their public safety infrastructure. This new conceptualization of safety demands new methodologies for policy design and evaluation, which move beyond solely crime to account for the broader network of interrelated factors that determine how residents experience public safety in their everyday lives. At the same time, policy makers require indicators and evaluation tools that are concise and measurable. This presents a dilemma for the evaluation of public safety policy: how do we capture the nuance and complexity of community experience in such a way that we can connect it to policy and decision-making processes? To answer this question, we employ the Firsthand Framework to develop metrics that are informed by lived expertise.

In the first step of this community-based participatory research project, we partnered with a diverse array of community organizations to collect nearly 600 “firsthand indicators” of safety, sourced from 33 focus groups and town halls, involving hundreds of Oakland residents spanning nine diverse local communities representing a cross-section of those most directly impacted by both violence and policing. In the second step, we sought to balance the indicators’ rich community-specific context with city-wide scalability as we worked to build a measurement tool to longitudinally assess public safety in Oakland. To do so, we culled and validated the indicators through a combination of cognitive interviewing, public forums, and community outreach to iteratively test and adapt survey questions and formats. Finally, we pilot tested the resulting tool across Oakland. In the paper, we detail these processes and present our initial results. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this work for the design of policies seeking to promote public safety.

Authors

• Amy E. Lerman, UC Berkeley

• Naomi Levy, Santa Clara University

• Kathryn McAlindon, University of California, Berkeley