![Black and white photo of people hanging out in front of a brick wall](/sites/g/files/omnuum10826/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/datasmart/files/nicolas-lobos-ktfaup8gtym-unsplash.jpg?itok=icTAtPsz) # If Our Neighborhoods Were Safer: Youth Visions for Saint Paul Using Youth-Led Insights to Redefine Community Safety June 04, 2024 [ Betsy Gardner ](/betsy-gardner) *“What activities would you do with your friends if you lived in a safer neighborhood?”* Close your eyes and picture what you would do, where you would go, or how you would act if you felt completely safe and secure in your community or neighborhood. For many youths, like those living in Saint Paul, MN, constant monitoring and rethinking their actions is their reality. While many elected officials and local leaders want their cities to be safe for everyone, many are unsure where to start — especially when they are working with incomplete data or without community. The Harvard Kennedy School’s Government Performance Lab (GPL) just released [New Measures of Public Safety: A Youth-Led Vision in Saint Paul](https://govlab.hks.harvard.edu/new-measures-public-safety), a crucial piece of research that advances the field of public safety by elevating youth perspectives on how they would behave in a safer neighborhood. The GPL then offered a set of metrics for jurisdictions to test measuring in an effort to create a fuller picture of safety that can be used to inform policy, policing, and public spaces. The goal is to help fill a major gap in public safety research: how can we measure the presence of safety, and not only the absence of crime? In February 2023 the GPL published “[Mayor to Mayor: Taking the Lead on Police Accountability](https://govlab.hks.harvard.edu/mayor-mayor-taking-lead-police-accountability%C2%A0?admin_panel=1),” a report that provides peer-to-peer advice and insights from mayors across the United States on the topic of police accountability. While conducting research for the report, the GPL team interviewed 26 local officials and asked them a variety of questions about public safety, including “how do you know if a community is safe?” Or “how do you measure safety?” Despite mayors and city councilors wanting to build trust and have their communities feel safe, most local leaders did not have clear answers to these questions. Gloria Gong, the GPL’s executive director, identified three barriers to answering these questions. The first is that, while information from police reports or CompStat-style data collection can provide some answers, it fails to capture the community’s feeling of safety — especially in communities that are historically overpoliced. Additionally, while many cities established neighborhood public safety offices in the wake of the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020, they were only just beginning to gather qualitative evidence and still had data gaps. Finally, many communities were experiencing “research fatigue” from being continually researched and felt taken advantage of without experiencing the benefits of that research. This was particularly an issue in communities of color. One neighborhood-based office, the [Saint Paul Office of Neighborhood Safety](https://www.stpaul.gov/departments/neighborhood-safety) (ONS), was interested in going further in this work. The GPL team had already been collaborating with the Saint Paul ONS since 2020, supporting the newly formed Community-First Public Safety agenda. Saint Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and other city leadership were interested in not only managing and using data to inform their public safety work, but also ensuring that communities had ownership of, and benefited from, that data. “The work that we'd put forward was aligned with the city and the mayor's interest in integrating resident voices into policy and government decision making,” said Andrea Barnes, government innovation fellow in Saint Paul. Barnes worked closely with GPL Project Leader Andrew Bentley, as well as another Fellow, Damonique Sonnier. In particular, the city team wanted to focus on integrating youth voices. Saint Paul’s Community First Public Safety Commission and ONS had [identified young people as a priority group](https://citizensleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/FULL-FINAL-REPORT-_-Community-First-Public-Safety-Commission-_-May-2021.pdf) at risk of being impacted by violence. That is why ONS chose to target their community engagement with young people in Saint Paul. ONS also identified the local group [World Youth Connect](https://worldyouthconnect.org/) (WYC), a youth-led community group based in Saint Paul that elevates the voices and concerns of young people. With a group of local stakeholders – a group that had rarely been listened to when sharing their insights on public safety – ready to collaborate, the GPL team of Barnes, Bentley, and Sonnier began to work with WYC on co-designing a plan to frame the work and engage local youth. “This study was based on design justice and Community-based Participatory Research principles,” Sonnier said. “With support from WYC, we formed a diverse Research Council of local youths aged 18-24; our goal was to not only amplify the voices of young people but to empower them as architects to co-design and co-facilitate a research process that is trauma-informed, intentional, and effective.” From the very start WYC helped drive the project, weighing in on everything from research design to engagement practices. While the GPL oversaw the research design and findings analysis, interviews and engagement were a close collaboration with WYC. The GPL conducted the research independently of ONS, keeping a separation that allowed the youth subjects to participate in interviews and focus groups authentically. WYC handled the recruitment; in total, 50 youths between the ages of 13 and 24 participated in the project. Based on self-reported data, 56 percent identified as male, 40 percent female, and 4 percent non-binary, and 58 percent identified as Black or African American, 22 percent Asian, and 20 percent Other. They were recruited from several different neighborhoods across Saint Paul. According to Barnes, youths were happy to take part in this work and appreciated having their voices heard. In particular, the part of the report that asked what they would do if they were “mayor to make their neighborhood safer” was a favorite. Both the project itself and the opportunity to provide their insights to possibly influence decision making gave participating youths hope. “By positioning youths with power and authority, even if it was imagined just for a moment, it was clear the youths have ideas and solutions,” Sonnier said. “And if given the opportunity, resources and little time would welcome being a catalyst for change in their neighborhoods.” The GPL analyzed the interviews and focus groups, from which they identified four themes. ## Themes and Indicators The GPL identified four common themes related to public safety that were elevated by Saint Paul youths: being on guard, the train, the police, and social media. These were areas where youths reported having serious concerns about safety, or where they modulated their behavior in order to avoid possible dangers. For example, while the city’s light rail Green Line train provides an affordable transportation option for youths, one-third of [participants stated that they avoid](https://govlab.hks.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/govlabs/files/new_measures_of_public_safety_1_pager_vaccessible.pdf?m=1712875976) it due to their concerns about “exposure to drug use and physical violence.” This is an important finding for two reasons; one, the train was not initially identified as a research focus area. And second, the youth identified measurable actions taken to either avoid the Green Line completely (i.e. walking or using rideshares) or to avoid potential threats once on the train (i.e. moving from the middle of the three cars to avoid open drug use or sitting in the front car near conductors). “Being on guard” meant that youths were constantly on alert in their neighborhoods, scanning their surroundings for potential dangers like gun violence and taking avoidant actions like staying indoors between 2-5pm or not taking the trash out at night. While the traditional metrics for public safety could capture the incidents of gun violence, burglaries, or other crimes, those measurements don’t capture the impacts on residents and their self-policing behaviors, which gets to the heart of this research: “There's really something missing from the community perspective if you're only measuring traditional measures of crime and public safety,” stated Gong, “For a lot of people, they don't feel safe in their communities in a way that really affects their lives.” The GPL used these themes to develop and prioritize observable indicators of public safety, such as playing outside or riding the train, which Saint Paul officials can test measuring. These metrics wouldn’t rely on constant questions or surveys of the community either. “We were asking about something that was operational, which is ‘what do you do when you feel safe’ or ‘what do you do when you don't feel safe,’” said Gong, “We were trying to talk to find an observable change in behavior that we could then gather and turn into a metric without having to come back to them over and over and over.” This last point was especially salient for the GPL research team, which recognized that too often, community members were subjected to research intensive surveys and interviews, without seeing actionable follow-up. “Our real goal in developing these indicators was to reach a point where we could collect data in a consistent manner over time, that didn't involve going back and forth to communities, that actually focused on observable changes that could be tracked at the agency level,” Barnes said. Conversations with local leaders in Saint Paul confirmed the priority safety themes identified by young people. For example, concerns about metro rider safety have motivated city actors to explore ways to add metro ambassadors as a presence on the train. ## Recommendations and Future Work Ultimately, the research resulted in the GPL offering a set of recommendations to two groups: leaders like mayors and public safety officials (with specific recommendations for Saint Paul ONS and collaborating agencies), as well as public safety researchers. For the first group, the GPL recommendations included gathering resident input to develop and test community-based indicators that provide real-time feedback on which public safety interventions make residents feel safer. For the latter group, one recommendation was to use public safety priorities elevated by youth to engage in research assessing public safety investments that are more responsive to youth experience, including those that promote the presence of public safety beyond the absence of crime. According to Gong, the next step for jurisdictions on this work is testing and validating these metrics to eventually be able to create a real-time measure of public safety. If these measurements hold up to testing, then they can be presented to city leaders and incorporated into existing dashboards, both for city employees and for the community themselves. This then opens an avenue for accountability that is radically different from traditional measurements, as a complement to standard metrics of crime and safety. It would also influence resource allocation and funding. Another very important area for future research is social media. Prior to beginning the focus groups with WYC, many adults assumed that youths were engaging on social media in a way that led to fights spilling over into real life alterations. However, the youths revealed that they were deeply impacted by being exposed to violence on social media, a more nuanced and complicated finding than policymakers had anticipated. Barnes emphasized that the traumatic content youths viewed online caused them to adapt online behaviors just as they adapted real life behaviors to traumatic events or violence in real life. “Conversations about public safety are usually only about the physical environment,” she said, “but the online environment is a place to consider as well.” Another potential area for future work, according to Gong, is finding innovative and novel ways to incorporate data and technology. For example, existing data on youth ridership and mechanisms like door counters and camera footage could be used to help measure where and when people are accessing recreational spaces or using the trains. Systems for collecting that type of data already exist, so tapping into them — with requisite safety and privacy controls — is one way to interpret community actions into metrics. Finally, one area of consideration in future iterations is the different ways that race and gender impact safety behaviors. Many Black male youths expressed fear of police and concerns about being mistaken for another individual or wrongfully detained, while other focus group members stated that they preferred to sit near police while on the train as a way of ensuring safety. And youths that identified as female and/or non-binary had significantly more concerns around harassment from men, which changed their behaviors (i.e. wearing full-coverage clothing or avoiding certain areas because of catcalls). According to Sonnier “one youth told us she lost her “innocence” early because she had to grow up quickly. It was difficult for me to hear, but it was the reality for some youths in Saint Paul.” ## “When’s the next one?” There is a significant appetite for continuing this work in Saint Paul, both among local leaders and the youth who participated in the focus groups. “After our conversations we've heard from young people asking us ‘when's the next one?’” reported Barnes. There is also interest from other cities, hoping to involve impacted residents into the decision-making process. Gong even sees this work as bettering democracy on the local level. “It is hard to get high levels of civic participation in local government sometimes,” she said, “and given the very low level of turnout in many local elections, it can mean that a local government leader might have been elected from a very small subset of the population — yet as an elected leader you have to figure out how to lead for your entire community.” Ultimately, by being able to observe and measure the actions that communities themselves have identified as the things they would do if they felt safe, local leaders can adjust policy based on those observations. Barnes and Gong suggested that this could contribute to another level of accountability for public safety agencies, who could then monitor for not just the absence of crime, but the presence of something like an increase in folks enjoying public spaces in their neighborhoods. “The research is a rich tapestry of thoughts, worries, hopes and dreams for a safer Saint Paul,” Sonnier said. “But through this process we learned more about the impact the lack of safety has on youth lived experiences.” Interested agencies and/or cities should reach out to the GPL at ## About the Author ### Betsy Gardner ![Headshot of Betsy Gardner](/sites/g/files/omnuum10826/files/styles/hwp_1_1__100x100_scale/public/2025-05/Betsy%20Headshot%20resize.jpg?itok=k2OsSp1g) Betsy Gardner is the editor of Data-Smart City Solutions and the producer of the Data-Smart City Pod. Prior to this, Betsy worked in a variety of roles in higher education, focusing on deconstructing racial and gender inequality through research, writing, and facilitation. She also researched government spending and transparency at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Betsy holds a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Policy from Northeastern University, a bachelor’s degree in Art History from Boston University, and a graduate certificate in Digital Storytelling from the Harvard Extension School. See also:- [ Equity ](/topics/equity) - [ Public Safety ](/topics/public-safety) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)