Crime and other urban safety concerns are usually dealt where the damage is done - put some police agents in the bank, be careful of that dangerous area, take care at night - but efforts to attack its root causes are limited. Many new preventive options can be explored by focusing in the roots of safety, such as education programs, decrease inequality, increase employment, but while reading a report on urban safety in Asia I had a quick thought about an approach that is closer to the one that micro-finance schemes use.
The key to this approach is social pressure. How can you recognize those people that you can trust will pay you back a loan, when they have no physical proof of their paying capacity: you ask the people that know them. By making small loan groups where everyone knows each other in which one failing to pay affects the rest of the group, the groups self-organize among people that trust each other to pay.
If we can assume that criminals have a common set of values/moral that allow them to damage other people (yes there might be exceptions), it is probably expected that these values are shared with their close social groups. This idea is reinforced by gangs being common support groups for people that can't mingle in other social settings. Furthermore, the context around your home is presumably a big influence when developing your own moral, so it is to be expected that potential criminals can be found in the neighborhoods where actual criminals live or grow up.
Now, this doesn't mean that everyone in a neighborhood is or will be a criminal; but perhaps in these area there is more tolerance to people pursuing criminal activities and/or environmental factors that push people to a criminal life.
While this probably won't show us anything new, as this areas might be expected to have the already common factors that cause criminals (poverty, lack of social services, deficient education, etc), this might be a useful way to target integrated intervention that aim to change a neighborhood into a place that promote safety, instead of one that promotes criminals. The ability to target specific areas instead of people or sectors, might be better accepted in these communities and have proven good results in Medellin for urban interventions.
Can we come up with original measures to promote urban safety from these insights?
