Community Safety Resources
Explore Safety Solutions That Work.
Browse our resource library for policy guides, issue briefs, and other resources that can help to inform effective policymaking and advocacy on community safety.
Posted March 20, 2023
This guide explains how state and local lawmakers can use the American Rescue Plan Act to fund community safety programs.
Posted March 20, 2023
This guide explains how state and local lawmakers can use the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to fund community safety projects.
Posted March 20, 2023
This issue brief presents policy recommendations on how evidence-based investments can best keep youth and communities safe.
Posted March 20, 2023
This issue brief presents a survey of the evidence supporting preventative, holistic approaches to safety.
Posted March 20, 2023
This co-authored guide explains how local lawmakers can begin implementing community safety programs and policies.
Posted March 20, 2023
This co-authored guide explains explains how state lawmakers can begin implementing community safety programs and policies.
Posted March 20, 2023
This brief, “A new community safety blueprint: How the federal government can address violence and harm through a public health approach,” is designed to help federal lawmakers harness key insights into the Social Determinants of Safety, specifically by outlining a multi-disciplinary, evidence-based policy agenda that prioritizes upstream interventions to advance community safety.
Published by Brookings
Posted March 20, 2023
Building from insights in health, the “social determinants of safety” (SDOS) are the underlying social and structural conditions that drive both safety outcomes and contact with the criminal-legal system. As a framework, the accompanying approach involves identifying safety needs and implementing evidence-based solutions that address these underlying issues before violence and harm occur.
Posted March 20, 2023
Community safety is about advancing safety goals not by addressing symptoms or intervening far too late, but through evidence-based investments that prevent violence and harm upfront. This framework builds on what these “social determinants of safety” are—and how addressing them can make all of our communities truly safe.
Posted March 20, 2023
This memo briefly explains why crime rates are a poor way to evaluate safety, then makes a case for developing a new metric that more holistically and comprehensively assesses how safe a community is—a project that will require not only identifying data sources, but also interrogating conceptually what “safety” should include. The memo closes by sketching a proposed framework that could guide a project of metric development.