Safe Communities Are Healthy Communities
People, before they can participate in civic life, must first feel safe. In high-crime municipalities, citizens often do not have the leisure of becoming more engaged in their communities. Rather, they focus on survival. Robert Steuteville, in an article for Public Square , writes that "people don’t linger in places where their hair stands on the back of their necks." One's environment must be conducive to civil society. For the article, he interviewed urban planner Ray Gindroz who remarked that "...if people feel lost or trapped within a public space, unable to see or find a quick way out, they will avoid it." I recently read Evicted by Matthew Desmond, a powerful book that follows the lives of poverty-stricken tenants in Milwaukee. The families that Desmond follows are simply in no position to think about joining book clubs or political campaigns; they are bogged down by, what my old NYU professor used to call, "the burden of necessity." That is...