Working it out: A community re-creation approach to crime prevention

Journal of Community Psychology Volume 14. October 1986

Working It Out: A Community Re-creation Approach To Crime Prevention

Mark D. Levine University of Lowell

A case study of a neighborhood crimewatch illustrates the interactive re- creation of community from the fragmentation and alienation of contemporary urban life. Organizing an intensive walking watch program in response to a serious neighborhood crime-wave in Cambridge, Massachusetts emphasized a “working it out” strategy that attempted to reconcile and draw from the different approaches and talents of oldtimer working-class and newcomer middle-class residents. Empowerment ultimately expanded into municipal and ward politics, disarmament, and civilian review board programs. A participant-observation, intersubjective methodology, as part of the organizing, provided a validational context for observation, interview and drawing community and organizing histories. The results suggested that community re-creation increases empowerment, social control, and sense of community (McMilIan & Chavis, 1986) and develops a complementary mix of social problems and opportunity reduction approaches. Citizen participation and control and an active role for the community psychologist are recommended to facilitate democracy and empowerment in fragmented communities.

When a long stable urban community suddenly is threatened with dramatic evidence of a failure in social cohesiveness-a crime wave out of control-an identity crisis is underway. Some communities withdraw and then retrench as insular and exclusionary; they attempt to restore the order of the past. Others regenerate in a generally open, participatory manner; these attempt to re-create a sense of community from the fragmented elements at hand.

The purpose of this article is to develop a model for explaining and understanding the experience of one such community in crisis. Social theory (quest for community) traditions of re-creation and restoration of community are reviewed and applied to contemporary crime prevention approaches and theory. The case study method then is employed in a consideration of the experience and its implications for practice, policy, and theory. The community’s experience illustrates the generation of empowerment opportunities from the initial response to crime, a shared responsibility and decision making model, the combining of social science and traditional neighborhood wisdom, and the employment of community as a context for self-understanding and community psychology theory. My analytic strategy is interdisciplinary; the research approach, intersubjective. A sense of community is understood here as existing across community residents, participant observers, and intellectual disciplines.

The thread that connects the community re-creation organizing, research and analysis is the “working it out” model, Broadly speaking, working it out is a strategy for reconciliation and cooperation that permits social differences to be transcended.

This article is based on a doctoral dissertation for the Union Graduate School (Levine, 1986). I wish to acknowledge the editorial assistance of Colin Greer and David Chavis. The New World Foundation is thanked for its generous support of my organizing activities. Reprint requests should be addressed to the author, 154 Magazine St., Cambridge, MA 02139.

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Working it out is inspired by the “working through” strategy of traditional psychoanalysis, in which, in Fromm-Reichmann’s (1950) characterization, fresh insights and awareness are “reconquered and tested time and again in new connections” until mastered. Working it out expresses a social interactive concept in which consciously and unconsciously experienced differences that exist between subgroups within a community gradually are integrated into a strategy of action and understanding. Reflection, support, and occasional interpretation are common to both working it out and working through. Finally, working it out is a dynamic, dialectical method that can be initiated and modeled by a community psychologist and then replicated over and over again by community members. Thus, individual psychological and behavioral change strategies are translated into a community context.

In the present study, an example of “working it out” was the recurring reconciliation of the crime fighting and prevention analyses and strategies of the working-class and middle-class groups within the community. The strategy was employed early in the present process of organization.

An old- and new-timer dialectic quickly surfaced: The approaches of the college- educated young professional collided with those of the older, working-class, “neighborhood” person. The newcomer organizers proclaimed: Let’s go out and eliminate crime, get to know each other, and establish a presence. The old timers’ solution: Let’s make the system-the police and the city government-do what it’s paid to do.

Common ground soon was reached, and by September, a crimewatch schedule was being drawn up and citizen training was underway. At the suggestion of a conservative councilor, a special city council meeting was held in a neighborhood school. The police chief was present. The liberal Protestant minister and two crimewatchers presented the watch plan and principle (“observe, report, but do not engage crime”) and a list of 17 requests to police and city that ranged from increased police foot patrols, lighting, and tree clipping to the “clean-up” of presumably crime-ridden Central Square.

One of the related contributions to community re-creation theory of this study is the development of a genuinely participatory role for clinical psychology within a community. This represents an evolution from the pioneering, simple formulation of William James (1962), which was also of heuristic significance for the field of community study in sociology. James held thatin the communication of unique experience lay the heart of both human possibility and human tragedy. To Park (1925) and his many followers in community study, this provided a principle for both understanding and studying the modern community. Empathizing across individual and social differences meant address- ing what Park’s teacher Simmel(l973) considered to be the central dilemma of modern life: Seeking human identity in the face of urban fragmentation and isolation, questing for community without sacrificing individuality.

The interactive mode of knowing and researching is found in the social roots of contemporary psychology. Mead (1 932) and Dewey (1 932) understood the incompleteness of James’ individualistic psychology. Dewey credited Mead with considering

how states of mind peculiar to an individual . . . instead of being merely ‘subjec- tive’ might belong to the common and objective universe (p. xxxvii).

For Mead, the social context provided a mechanism for both understanding and ameliorating alienation and, thus, laid the groundwork for the intersubjective psychology of phenomenologists, social activists, clinical practitioners in psychology and educa-

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tion, and community psychologists. Each of the sequence of community studies that followed upon the work of Park (Gans, 1962; Liebow, 1967; Whyte, 1952) examined the specific forces that contribute to fragmentation, and by implication and example, advocated a participatory approach to re-creating a sense of community. Whyte, Gans, and Liebow each used a participant-observation research strategy, in which the research- ers took responsibility for their interactions with the community studied. In related posi- tions, the social psychoanalyst Sullivan (1953) and the existentialist-Marxist Sartre (1963) suggested further that the social scientist might make an active commitment to the ends of those individuals or communities studied. The social philosopher Schutz (1970) defined meaning as distinctly social and intersubjective; that is, the shared domain of participant and observer.

The foregoing interactionist tradition shaped a participatory strategy for the re- creation of community and placed the social scientist in an engaged role. Citizen participation is in theory a process that opens up social and human possibilities, as in Boyte’s (1981) “backyard revolution” concept. Boyte found evidence for a contemporary citizen movement that began at the grassroots and has revived traditional humanistic values:

The spirit of liberty and the democratic aspiration have been spreading out, finding instruments, and teaching skills, self confidence, and mutual regard. In their course, they begin to build hope for the future (p. 208). The second contrasting strand of social thought and planning calls for a restora-

tion of community, a quest for a lost social order, This ongoing social critique dates from the period that followed the French and the Industrial Revolutions; it holds that the modern condition of fragmentation and alienation is a devastating result of the continuing decline in the influence of the ecclesiastical and social order of the past. In its modern form (e.g., Nisbet, 1966; Wilson, 1983), the study, the planning, and the control of the restoration of community are held to be the responsibility of an academic and professional elite. Citizen participation functions within a restorative process, ultimately in the service of order-imposing institutions (e.g., in religious fundamentalist organizing).

Crime prevention theory reflects the division between community re-creation and community restoration and suggests some of the difficulties that surround citizen participation in both traditions. Podolefsky (1983a) has divided neighborhood crime prevention strategies into two categories. The first category includes the social problems or root causes approach (which falls within the community re-creation tradition), in which crime is seen as the result of social and economic conditions. This approach includes youth services and attempts to improve the physical, economic, or social environments. Citizen-initiated efforts are less central in their reports than government-sponsored and implemented programs. Yet, the significant problems that emerge when planners fail to consider citizen needs or community strategies already in place have been documented by Podolefsky (1983b). The second category includes the opportunity reduction or vic- timization prevention approach (based upon a community-restoration analysis), which defines crime as an event that happens to a victim rather than as the activity of an offender. Strategies that implicitly invoke a preexisting standard of public order and civility include personal and household security and neighborhood surveillance measures. Here, the citizen’s role clearly is limited to supporting the authorities (Wilson, 1983).

Yet, citizen participation and control indeed may prove to be the keys to a successful neighborhood crime prevention program. Reports have been increasing of crimewatch groups that exist nationwide and that are not even indirectly the product

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of government programs, but, rather, are formed spontaneously by local residents or are piggybacked on existing community programs formed for other purposes.

Kelling (1985) has studied 97 Boston metropolitan-area crimewatch organizations, including the subject of this case study. He found these to be almost exclusively local “grassroots” efforts, unfunded and maintained by a core of neighborhood volunteers, who jealously guard their autonomy. Kelling suggested that the typical reports of cen- tralized, funded, professionalized, charismatically led, police-sponsored and affiliated groups are misleading and perhaps inaccurate. Kelling noted the existence of grassroots participatory groups in New York City and Baltimore. He recommended that such grassroots organizations be respected and encouraged by police departments. Finally, he noted the political quality of the groups, which often develop power capable of moving municipalities at a local level in the area of crime prevention.

Similarly, Lavrakas (1985) has reinterpreted the social problems/opportunity reduction dichotomy to account for community participation and control. He has divided citizen participation strategies into self-household and neighborhood protection categories. The first two emphasize opportunity reduction. The third focuses upon the improvement of the quality of life of the community by citizens acting in concert:

this form of citizen self-help appears directly linked to citizens’ concerns about the general quality of life in their neighborhoods and to the willingness to voluntarily give some time to ‘make this a nicer place to live’ (p. 90). A further shift to community strengthening by residents has been the subject of

a growing body of research on social control. This concept attempts to explain the ability of residents to regulate neighborhood events and conditions. An increase in crime is seen as one of a set of factors in neighborhood decline. These can be countered by increasing control over the behavior of persons and the physical development of the locality, which results in an increase of confidence in a neighborhood’s future. Podolefsky and DuBow (1981) have shown how citizens can employ this model to analyze their crime problem and to create citizen participatory strategies. Crime is treated as simply part of a web of threats to a community. Within this framework, voluntary neighborhood associations can form block and house watches as one aspect of their crime prevention program and can add any of a variety of physical and economic ameliorative strategies. Yet, organizing a neighborhood made fearful and distrusting by the onset of crime is especially difficult. Chavis, Rich, and Wandersman (1986) have noted that:

We are therefore very much in need of research on how communities can be organ- ized, who will participate in such organizations, how many residents must join before the organizations are effective in deterring crime, [and] how to maintain organizations once they form (p. 5 ) . Further, the social control approach has highlighted problems in defining

neighborhood boundaries and in working across the social and economic differences among a neighborhood’s residents.

A recent theoretical presentation has formalized the concept of “sense of community.” McMillan and Chavis (1986) identified four component elements of sense of community: (a) membership; (b) influence; (c) sharing of values with an integration and fulfillment of needs; and (d) shared emotional connection. Membership defines who is a member of the group and who is not. Influence indicates the relationship within communities between increases in individual power and closeness, on one hand, and social conformity and uniformity, on the other. Integration and fulfillment of needs emphasize the fitting together of people with shared values to meet community and individual needs.

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A shared emotional connection refers to the common history of members as they in- teract with each other and experience the unfolding life of the community. This sharing is a product of “working it out” and developing the pattern of relationships characteristic of the organization.

The Case Study

The crimewatch organization considered here developed a community re-creation strategy whose effects were evident beyond the original crime prevention effort. The neighborhood organization remained in place well after the original crimewave was reversed and participated in several spin-off activities at ward and municipal levels. TO understand the nature of the continuing campaign within which I played an active role, I employed an intersubjective participant-observation methodology continuous with the community organizing process. The outcomes of the research, which existed within a domain of understanding shared by researcher, participant, and community observer, were evaluated for evidence of social control, empowerment, and sense of community. The social problems/opportunity reduction dichotomy was reconsidered in the light of the present experience. Finally, some implications of a community re-creation approach, citizen participation, and an actively engaged community psychologist were drawn..

Background The Cambridgeport section of Cambridge originally was the designation of a much

larger working-class enclave, settled mainly by immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its social cohesiveness was noted by Woods and Kennedy (1962), who accorded it a “clean bill of moral health” in their classic study of Boston’s industrial suburbs (“zones of emergence”) during the early twentieth century. After the Second World War, the population mix gradually changed to one of aging working-class and middle class, with an infusion of community activists attracted by the low rents and house prices. The Cambridgeport of the present study lay between Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; its population was less than 9,000.

In the 1960s, the neighborhood was at the center of successful resistance to a pro- posed Inner Belt highway that would have displaced thousands of Boston metropolitan- area residents. During the 1970s, several experiments in cross-class organizing took place, which focused upon neighborhood preservation, enhancement of municipal services, and improvement of police-community relations. In the early 1980s, as the economy dipped and a legislatively induced reduction of the tax base adversely affected municipal services, a major crime wave occurred in the community. A group of recent residents, who somewhat unconsciously were building upon the neighborhood‘s social and organizing history, created a crime prevention program whose central thrust was again community development and community recreation.

The Crimewatch Campaign

Begun as a response to a crime wave in the Cambridgeport section, the neighborhood crime watch program made its way across the city. Beyond the inner city Cambridgeport section, crime watching assumed several significant variations of the original model in more affluent sections of the city. Yet the empowerment effect proved most marked in its initial setting. (See Levine, 1986.) The present case study reviews the community re- creation approach of the organization that initiated the campaign, the Cambridgeport Residents Against Crime (CRAC).


In June 1981, a 61-year-old woman was mugged in front of her Cambridgeport apartment house two blocks from the Charles River. (Two days earlier, a young woman had been assaulted similarly nearby.) The significance of the event quickly made itself felt in the small apartment complex in which she had resided for more than 30 years. The building’s residents, a fairly cohesive group as a result of tenant organizing, had considered themselves safe from the growing wave of neighborhood crime. The older woman had herself been a role model in this informal crimewatch effort. The event signalled the current limitations of this effort.

The following morning, I initiated the program functionally by rising early to clip the overgrown hedges that had hidden the two muggers. Within an hour, a number of the building’s residents had emerged to join in the shearing effort and to start planning a nightly building crimewatch. Light leafletting in the neighborhood brought forth several neighbors from adjacent blocks, who told of recent break-ins and further muggings. A nearby series of rapes during the previous October was recalled. The watch was maintained successfully until the cold nights of November. The watches were primarily social events, lubricated by refreshments and friendly networking across age, education, and experience groupings and interspersed casually with surveillance of strangers and the building.

At the instigation of an old-time resident with a connection to the police department, a community meeting was scheduled for late July at the Catholic school, which was the traditional neighborhood political and social gathering place. Approximately 70 people attended. The police screened a film, recited crimewatching pointers, and then prepared to dismiss the meeting. At that point, an organizer who was living locally and I helped the group to shift gears and start to become a community organization. At two well-attended subsequent meetings held in a second location, an important dialogue began between old timers, who were calling for better police protection, and newcomers, who increasingly were advocating the introduction of a neighborhood crimewatch. A negotiated solution was reached; walking watches were begun, and a City Council meeting was planned at a community location to hear (a) a description of the community’s planned crimewatch intervention; and (b) a set of requests for increased governmental services (e.g., the cutting-back of trees, increased lighting on the streets, and introduction of foot patrols).

Walking watches were begun at the lower and upper ends of the mile-long Cam- bridgeport section. On the basis of police statistics that indicated periods of greatest crime, the watches were scheduled for Friday and Saturday evenings between 8 PM and 12 midnight. On each evening, two 2-hour shifts were staffed by four or five walkers, who covered a mapped-out route over the five short and five long blocks on which the members lived. By January 1982, members had been signed up for once-a-month stints on each watch of the following year.

Results of the Crimewatch Within a year, the crime wave had been reversed. Figure 1 shows the mean number

of housebreaks over November-March periods for Neighborhood Three (Cambridgeport) from January 1979 (when the Cambridge Police Department [CPD] Crime Analysis Unit began to keep statistics) to March 1986. In advising the crime-watch organization, the November-to-March period had been selected by the CPD crime analyst for two reasons: First, the crime wave had occurred during those months; and, second, these months represented the typical highs and lows of any year of housebreaks.

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6o t t 4

I I I I I I I 1979- 1980- 1981- 1982- 1983- 1984- 1985-

80 81 82 83 84 85 86

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YEARS (NOVEMBER-MARCH)

Figure 1. Mean housebreaks in Neighborhood Three during late fall-winter months over 1979-86. Source: Crime Analysis Unit, Cambridge Police Department.

From a mean of 15 housebreaks/month in 1979-80, the mean of housebreaks/month jumped to 54 in 1980-81 and was designated by the CPD as a crime wave. After the initiation of the crime watch in September 1981, the mean of housebreaks/month dropped to 15.6 for 1981-82, to 11.6 for 1982-83, to 11 for 1983-84, rose slightly to 14.2 in 1984, and then dropped to a low of 8.8 in 1985-86. Thus, with the exception of the slight rise in 1984-85, the mean rate of housebreaks per month for the months of the original crime wave showed a steady decline. In 1985-86, it ultimately dropped to about 1/6, or 14% of the 1979-80 crime-wave rate.

The police department consistently ascribed a major portion of this result to the crimewatch. Eventually, as a total of 29 crimewatch groups formed across the city, a portrayal of crimewatches as dramatically reducing local crime was drawn by the police chief.

Of equal interest is the proportion of weekly crimewatches in existence during the period 1981-85. In February 1982, 70% of all possible watches were walking the route. During the second half of 1982, 54% of all possible watches were still walking; dis- counting those whose ranks had dropped to 2 or fewer persons, 71% were still going out.

In October 1983, only 25% of all possible watches were active and finally 12.5% (2 of 16 watches) in May 1985, when the walking activity formally was terminated. By


that time, except for the slight rise in 1984-85, housebreaks (and, also, crime in general in Sector Three) had been declining for 38 months. The significance of the walks had extended beyond the literal limits of crime prevention.

Methodology

To investigate the significance of the persistence of the crime watch, I asked the group for permission to study the campaign. The design was to be intersubjective and qualitative and also to complement the ongoing organizational process. A formal feedback process was instituted to correct investigator bias, to lend breadth to description, and to provide alternatives to interpretation of the data. The entire research process was supervised by a 6-person interdisciplinary doctoral committee.

A summary of the key events of the pre-research phase of the crimewatch (1981-83) was agreed upon:

1. The organizing and routinization of the original Cambridgeport crimewatches. Lower Cambridgeport CRAC agreed to remain exclusively focused on crime prevention and to apply a methodology that emphasized neighborhood social integration.

2. A media campaign that publicized the organization of the crimewatch. 3. The spinning-off of the crimewatch into two adjacent neighborhoods (which

constituted the entire inner-city section of Cambridge) resulted in a combined and coor- dinated effort that included regular meeting of representatives with police.

4. Further expansion of crimewatch into sections of more affluent Cambridge neighborhoods.

5. First steps in participation of the original lower Cambridgeport watch organization in three non-crime-related offshoots: A municipal Commission on Nuclear Dis- armament and Peace Education, the election of a progressive Democratic Ward Com- mittee, and a Civilian Review and Advisory Board.

One aspect of the participant-observation and intersubjective research methodology was my role as crimewatch organizer and liaison with the police, the city government, the press, and the public. I reviewed ongoing written and oral reports of citywide and CRAC crimewatch activity and feedback during pre-research and research phases. Sources both internal and external to the crimewatch provided ongoing interpretation, clarification, and corrective feedback to my study. Regular review was administered by three crimewatch members: An historian, a retired college administrator, and a copy editor. A further regular review was performed by my doctoral committee, which con- sisted of a social historian, a social psychologist, a college dean, a community organizer- chemist, a school director, and a fellow doctoral student in criminal justice education.

A short questionnaire was designed and administered with an open-ended inquiry. Questions were created to elicit directly changes in social control and feelings of empowerment and sense of security as a result of crimewatch. Over 2 years, 57 complete interviewhnquiries were administered to members of lower Cambridgeport CRAC, non- member neighbors, participants in other Cambridge crimewatches, local politicians, police, and community leaders. Additional oral and written sources were used to provide organizational, local, historical, and demographic data.

Analysis of the organizational data was accomplished through the drawing of a composite experiential narrative based on the interviews. The composite narrative was reviewed in draft form by the three crimewatch raters and one member (the social historian) of the doctoral committee. The community history section was reviewed by

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a local librarian-historian. Random feedback of interpretations of the data was solicited from crimewatch and non-crimewatch members.

An example of the composite narrative follows, drawn from responses to the questions “What did participation in the crimewatch mean to you?” and “What made CRAC work?”

Said Sister Rose: “People are eager to foster civilization; people don’t want to live among barbarians.” In a semi-cloistered society all of her religious life, she marveled that CRAC was “never corrupted. It was activity at a local level. In our society [Sacred Heart], we say life actually occurs in the community- even though we’re international. When people are personally involved, they are touched where they are.”

Empowerment was a theme of several reports of younger women. “When I participate,” noted Margaret, a French teacher in her mid-thirties, “I can control the situa- tion.” Elizabeth stated: “For me, it’s women, take back the night, without fear of get- ting bopped.”

A change in consciousness was stressed by several informants. Said Sarah: “CRAC works not because we’re there between 8 and 12 o’clock, but because it raised consciousness. I would now respond to a scream. It’s the making of a commitment by going onto a watch. It’s the taking of a half-baked idea, an abstract ideal, and putting it into action that raises consciousness. By abstract ideal, I mean: I’d like to live in a secure neighborhood, to take more control when seeing someone suspicious.”

For some members, the sense of empowerment derived from trying out new relationships with people of a different age, across racial and class lines, or enthusiastically, with people who lived in a community (other than a religious one). Commented the nuns:

We were the ninth wonder of the world when we joined the crimewatch. . . . We think it’s great, fascinating! At first we thought, we’d never met that type before. A crimewatcher active in Upper Cambridgeport mentioned being thrilled to spend

time with older people; a gay activist, she, too, had felt cloistered by her calling. Sarah, who described herself as shy, said,

I really actively talk to my neighbors, to elderly single people. I really have a little itch; feel more normal about it. I almost on principle do that.

Margaret, who lives in a new condo garden apartment with its sheltered walkways and carports, developed a close relationship with a next door working-class Black family, who have lived in Cambridgeport for years:

I used to feel embarrassed, but since they were neighborly, I soon didn’t feel un- comfortable asking for help. Empowerment had tangible crime-fighting manifestations, as described in a vignette

I was recently crossing the BU Bridge. One car in front of another slowed down, the other was tailgating; the front car continued to slow down until the one in back finally tapped him. A Black woman got out threatening. I said to them “why don’t you go on?’’ The White guy went for a hammer. Finally, I yelled at both: “Get in your cars!” They both did and drove off. (He chuckled). My propensity to do this has increased. This is the way crimewatch works: Consciousness is raised, so not just when you’re at a meeting or on a walk, you’re predisposed to take constructive action.

offered by slightly built Edgar:


Results

In the community organizing strategy, it was assumed by the group that crime was a byproduct of a lack of social cohesiveness in the community. Both formal and informal crimewatch interventions were employed and included the modeling of neighborly behavior for other residents. Police support was solicited and maintained, but was considered a back-up function.

Implementation included (a) the establishment of a manageable, realistic watch task for all members; (b) the sharing of organization maintenance responsibilities widely among members; (c) the application of a democratic, participatory structure of government; (d) the use of socioeconomic differences among members of the community as a vital organizational dialectic; (e) the creation of a shared and ongoing analytic framework of community history, development and possibility in order to emphasize the long-range importance of the program; and (f) finally, the conscious working toward an enhanced sense of community that extended well beyond the crimewatch activity and into the daily life of all persons who were residing in the community.

Sense of Community Applying the sense of community theory of McMillan and Chavis (1986) helps to

clarify the present data in several respects. Membership played a crucial role in pro- viding boundaries at both organizational and community levels. Thus, members experienced the limits of a carefully defined organization, which provided them with access to a distinctly bounded geographic community of the crimewatch. Influence pro- vides a crucial explanatory model for the citizen participatory approach of the crimewatch. The reinforcing of the group cohesiveness contributed markedly to the con- current empowerment of the members and the group. As members conformed to group norms, they also found a place to express individual talents and personality, a function that influence also makes occur. Integration and fulfillment of needs seemed to explain the preponderance of newcomers and young professionals of moderate political orien- tation in the crimewatch leadership. Finally, the shared emotional connection was crucial - and remains crucial at this writing-in defining and empowering the membership. At a recent (1986) session of taping the watch experience for a magazine article, both homogeneity and significant variations of a rich recollection of members were evident. One watch of older walkers reported that on watches they had been given a continuous course in neighborhood social history by an old-time neighborhood resident on the watch. Younger walkers told of their regular study of the community’s architec- ture. The “working it out” strategy served to enhance this factor and to create the component that simultaneously gave democratic form and a mental health dynamic to the program. The sharing across neighbors with different experience and background provided the basis for an autonomous, non-crime-related raison d’etre for the organization.

The interview data and composite narrative were reviewed for evidence of changes in social control, individual and group empowerment, and sense of community. Community Control

Reports of increased confidence in the future of the community as a result of control of the physical and social neighborhood domain characteristically were reported in crimewatch member interviews. High increases in feelings of security at home and in the immediate neighborhood also were reported consistently by walking crimewatchers.

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Several active members indicated that the crimewatch activity had helped them decide to establish permanent roots in the community. New participation in non-crimewatch- related community and political activities was reported by about half of the active members interviewed. Increase in positive feelings with regard to the community was reported by all active members. Ernpo werrnent

A general increase in empowerment was judged to be present as a result of the considerable influence of the crimewatch in community and municipal affairs. The significant participation of the crimewatch in the three spin-off activities was evaluated as further evidence of a major increase in empowerment. In the crimewatch’s participation in the Ward Five election, the crimewatch supported a reform slate committed to monitoring city government and neighborhood development interests. Four active crimewatchers participated in stabilizing the “Peace” commission, thus drawing a connection between crimewatch and disarmament. Finally, the crimewatch played a temper- ing role in the establishment of New England’s first civilian review board.

The crimewatch strategy was evaluated, as well, for evidence of social problems and opportunity reduction approaches. Physical integration aspects (e.g., a street-cleaning campaign) and social integration aspects (e.g., the formal and informal modeling of neighborliness) were two major social problems approaches found to be present. On the other hand, the hardening of the targets of home and person that was practiced regularly by crimewatchers, and the walking activity itself, were opportunity reduction strategies essential to the program.

This finding strongly supports Podolefsky’s (1983a) observation that the two approaches probably operate in a complementary fashion. The larger implication is that when citizens participate in designing their own crimewatches, they select according to need rather than academic theory.

Discussion

The considerable success of the community re-creation, mixed social problems and community reduction methodology, has several implications for neighborhood crimewatch practice, planning, and theory. First, an open, participatory, democratic organizing model seems to be inherently generative of creative group and individual energies. I have contrasted this organizing strategy with community restoration models of six neighborhood crimewatch organizations in two other more affluent and homogeneous Cambridge sections (Levine, 1986). These groups all were characterized by less citizen participation and greater reliance on the police than was evident in the community re-creation groups. Some of these communities tended to use their organizations to strengthen existing social and physical integration, although one group worked hard to monitor development in their neighborhood. The notion of an urban neighborhood as the dynamic site of social differences seemed relatively unimportant to these groups. On the other hand, in the present example, the creative constructive offshoots of the crimewatch, which extended to the ward and the municipality, seem to provide clear evidence of Boyte’s (1981) notion of “backyard revolution.” Finally, they are also examples of community psychology in practice.

The implications of an interactive model of organizing and research are two-fold. The first concerns how crimewatch and community are to be conceptualized and pro- posed by professional and lay crime prevention communities; the second concerns the role of the community psychologist.


Kelling’s (1985) uncovering of a dominant strategy of citizen participation and volun- tarism in the Boston-area crimewatches and possibly elsewhere supports my sense that these are at least a viable alternative to the more common police-led, non-participatory groups. Particular demographic mixes, as well as particular antecedent organizing experience, may facilitate citizen participation. These factors may play an even more important role in stimulating the creation of community re-creation organizing strategies. This study offers evidence in support of the planning of socially and economically integrated communities grounded philosophically in the quest for community tradition. The tradition of the development of “garden cities” offers an instructive example. The garden city emerged from the early nineteenth century community restoration critique of the city as alienating; it represents a compromise between the town and country and the values and opportunities of each. Stein (1957) has documented the creation of a series of garden cities, whose pioneering representative was Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York, established in the mid-nineteen-twenties. Thoughtful social, economic, and architectural planning resulted in a mixed working-class, middle-class, and professional community of about 2,000 residents, which developed an empowered sense of community of considerable impact. Mumford (1984), who lived 12 years in Sunnyside Gardens after he helped to plan the community, used this experience to frame his notion of neighborliness. I derived many of the approaches to community and to community organizing described in this paper from my own experience growing up in this community.

Community psychologists could play a significant role in the researching, planning, strengthening, and implementing of such economically and socially integrated communities. Over the years, monetary, status, and other considerations (including personal style) have placed limits on the activist role of the community psychologist - despite a value system that dictated otherwise (Sarason, 1982). This article suggests that the activist role might prove crucial in the present period of increasing social fragmentation and that, in addition to facilitating community re-creation and restoration, the community psychologist might become an agent of democracy.

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Working it out: A community re-creation approach to crime prevention