2018’s Safest States in America

There are many different potential threats to one's safety: crime, weather, pollution, dangerous workplaces. In choosing a place to live, how should people weigh the risks?

There is no risk-free place to live - every place exhibits risks of some nature. There are more incidents of some crimes when the weather is nice than when the weather is extremely cold. Other crimes are more likely in hot weather. Hot weather can increase pollution. Workplaces can be more dangerous because of weather extremes or pollution. Risk assessment is relative, involves tradeoffs, and depends on one's personal risk appetite.

Individuals make tradeoffs among the types of risks based on what they can control and what they cannot. Individuals should conduct a personal audit of the risks they are willing to tolerate vs. those they would not. Then evaluate those options over which they hold control vs. those they cannot choose. Unfortunately for many, money is the biggest impediment to choosing the "best" place to live - most of us have to settle for a "good enough" place, based on what risks we can afford to mitigate, and which ones we can't afford to avoid.

What actions can the Trump Administration undertake to reduce crime and improve public safety?

Public safety is the key goal of law enforcement in all levels of government. Police prevent and solve crimes. They are, by and large, doing well in this capacity, but their jobs are complicated by the proliferation of weaponry and distrust among many segments of the population. The Trump Administration, by bad-mouthing its own police agencies, is doing great harm to public safety. So the first thing the Administration needs to do is to revive public confidence in law enforcement by truly backing up its own judicial branch and the thousands of larger and small police departments throughout the country. Next, the administration needs to find a way to reinstitute the balance of armed power away from militant citizens to become, once again, the last resort of public safety officers. This will require a reinterpretation of the second amendment to permit safe and careful individual gun ownership, and reduce access to large stockpiles of high-powered guns that are not intended for individual sport or home protection purposes.

Do you agree with President Trump that increased border security will reduce crime?

It is likely that, by reducing the total number of individuals crossing the border with Mexico, some criminals will be stopped. But criminals have many other ways to enter the country, especially if they have the wherewithal to fly or take a boat, purchase fake documents, or buy their way in via other visa programs (such as the Einstein visa or the investment visa). The cost benefit of a wall is undoubtedly negative.

What can state and local policymakers do to reduce crime in their communities?

Community policing is a great way to offset the bad press police get when something bad happens involving an officer. Law enforcement has adopted several "community policing" programs that increase the trust in police while opening channels of communication. Most departments have active social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, NextDoor, and elsewhere to share what they do and who they are with the public, to notify the public of events and emergency incidents, and to invite information to solve local crimes. Other community policing events build bridges when the police participate in non-police events such as community picnics or local sports leagues, to put a human face on officers.

What tips do you have for consumers looking to improve their "financial" safety?

Never trust anyone on the phone who asks for money or personal information. If you get a letter from a government agency or bank, look up contact information for them on Google and call to see if it is legitimate. Never send a password or personal information in response to an unsolicited email. Right click on the sender to see if it comes from a legitimate source (and not an inappropriate email) and then use Google to find the real web site for any interaction. Use a well-established financial manager if you need one. There are no get rich schemes on the Internet - if it looks too good to be true, it is.

There are many different potential threats to one's safety: crime, weather, pollution, dangerous workplaces. In choosing a place to live, how should people weigh the risks?

Weighing risks associated with life is always problematic. Make sure that however you assess risk it is an accepted method of assessment. Take for example, crime risk. The proper assessment tools involve different measures of crime -- Uniform Crime Reports (FBI), Victimization Surveys (Department of Justice), and National Incident Based Reporting System (Bureau of Justice Statistics). These all offer a risk of criminal victimization, but are also aggregate assessments at one level. Look at how your community addresses crime, weather, pollution, or other similar threats. In some cases you can even find out data at the community or block level. It is this level of analysis that offers the citizen the most reasonable assessment of risk.

What actions can the Trump Administration undertake to reduce crime and improve public safety?

Since crime is mostly a local phenomenon, the federal government has a limited role, but having said this the funding for crime research is abysmal. We spend more money on researching cavities in dogs than we do on crime research. This is terrible. There needs to be a greater commitment to addressing crime in a systematic and uniform way, recognizing variances across communities. Additionally, governments should be encouraged to work with local universities and colleges to address crime issues unique to their communities. In this way, good research works in tandem with local communities to examine crime and proposes reasonable solutions to specific crime problems.

Do you agree with President Trump that increased border security will reduce crime?

Increases in border patrols, and a wall included, will do nothing to address crime in America. The actual rates of criminality among immigrant populations are very low, outside of the "horror story" or celebrated case that hits the media. The border crime issue has been presented as it has been for decades predicated on fear and ignorance with very little evidence to support it. This is a great strategy to garner political votes, but will do nothing to address crime and will harm dis-proportionally communities of color.

What can state and local policymakers do to reduce crime in their communities?

Again, since most traditional crime is local, there is much that can be done to address crime. Most fundamentally, we need to fix our failing public school systems, confront systemic poverty and segregation, and offer more ways to address affordable housing options, particularly in large urban communities. Remember, crime again is largely a local issue, and as such, local communities will have to come up with specific strategies to manage crime. State and local governments can promote differential approaches to crime reduction to get the biggest return on their investments of scarce resources.

Crime is a social problem. When crime occurs it is seen as a discrete event. But in the context of urban areas and more specifically areas in the inner city crime is better understood as the result of a number of factors including socio-economic conditions, urban decay, joblessness and despair.

Take Baltimore for example. In my WIRE class I show a slide depicting the areas where unemployment is most concentrated. Then I show a slide showing where arrests for drug related offenses are concentrated. The two slides virtually overlap.

The problem is not merely that some individuals are jobless and poor but that in some communities poverty is intensely concentrated. In the inner city this concentration of poverty and joblessness leads to social disorganization, a state in which norms of being law abiding, honest, etc. have broken down. Both Elijah Anderson in his book Code of the Street and William Julius Wilson in his book When Work Disappears both develop this basic point.

It wasn't always this way. But the forces of globalization, deindustrialization, and urban renewal have resulted in effect these city areas becoming socially isolated. In a real sense the inner city today, even more so, than fifty years ago is another America in which violence and crime goes hand in hand with urban decay.

Of course these urban areas are often in close proximity to areas of affluence. Overtown in Miami is not far from bustling downtown Miami. What is called the black grove is very near the affluent part of coconut grove with fine restaurants and hyper expensive condominiums.

The proximity between these two Americas much to do with the new policing. Today police have become hyper aggressive in urban areas. We see that in the controversy over New York's stop and frisk. We see it in the fact in Baltimore the City settled a suit at the cost of millions of dollars tacitly conceding in the eyes of many that it routinely yes routinely arrested tens of thousands of young black men without probable cause for low level offenses.

The over policing in my view exacerbates the problem. It makes it worse not better. It shifts the focus away from violent crime. It also targets communities as if the people in the communities are dangerous and bad when it is the conditions that are the problem.

If the goal is to fight fire I say you remove whatever substance it is that is burning. The fire will go out.

What is igniting the problem in our urban areas are things like dilapidated infrastructure, schools were failure is normalized, lack of jobs, opportunity.

Why not develop a program to rebuild the infrastructure of an inner city-Baltimore, Miami would be prime examples. If we spent just a few billion, -the money we spend on arresting people for marijuana possession for example you would create tens of thousands of jobs. The money we spend on a single F-16 would allow us to revamp a school. Re-investing in the inner city would have immediate and resounding impact in places where hope is dying or has died.

We cannot arrest our way to public safety in urban areas. Rather we must re-imagine the inner city as a place where there are jobs for everyone, good schools, opportunity, and beautiful streets instead of urban blight. We could call these Great Cities Programs. Baltimore has started something vaguely like this -- but they are light years away from making a real start.

Until then the search for the safest places will tend to be those in rural areas, gated communities, or condos with layer upon layer of surveillance or security.

What actions can the Trump Administration undertake to reduce crime and improve public safety?

Our policy awareness from the Trump Administration is mainly stuck in his campaign speeches and time will tell how he impacts public safety issues through various federal initiatives. However, the vast majority of us are impacted by local crime issues and local police contact that have little to do with federal oversight. That being said, there are opportunities for the Trump Administration to be politically creative by offering support for municipal law enforcement problem-oriented policing initiatives that challenge traditional reactive responses. These types of approaches could be pushed through new federal grants that encourage departments to become more analytical and data-driven through evidence-based policing. Policing strategies would then become problem-based and focused on long-term sustainable changes rather than incident-based strategies that are trapped in creating legal cases on behalf of attorneys. The Trump political brand was appealing for voters because it challenged what many perceived as an outdated status quo in government. That brand could also position itself to challenge the costs of our justice system that is driven by the reactive gatekeepers represented by the more than 18,000 police agencies nationwide.

Traditionally, calls for law enforcement reform have been isolated to the Democrats while Republicans argue for smaller less intrusive government authority, but refuse any argument that challenges the role of standard law enforcement. While support for law enforcement in political speeches have been part of the right-wing tradition, and thus far President Trump offers no evidence that he will offer anything different, there are nevertheless opportunities to meet current challenges. These focus of questionable use of force, increase militarization, and the enormous increase in heavy armored SWAT raids. Models that challenge the status-quo could come from a Trump brand that incentivize agencies to utilize better analysis of local problems and use this information to help drive innovative responses that frequently don’t rely only on arrest. Adequate assessment of non-law enforcement responses could ensure accountability for agencies that receive federal financial support. These approaches can be used to better understand and impact some of our most pressing problems, including gun violence, opioid/heroin addiction, domestic violence, and school shootings.

What can state and local policymakers do to reduce crime in their communities?

Police offer daily and unique opportunities to impact local problems at the front end of the system without having to rely on the expensive, time-consuming, and often harmful judiciary and correctional industry. State and local policymakers should direct their efforts towards incentivizing municipal police leaders to exercise non law enforcement alternatives directed towards repeated problems rather than gathering legal evidence on individual incidents. In doing so, policymakers could look to reform standard police academy training to include teaching recruits how to properly analyze repeated problems and use the necessary critical thinking to direct a multitude of responses that are based on their localized analysis. New officers should spend several months out of the academy working collaboratively with community partners to help address their most pressing problems before they are asked to be responsible for caring a firearm and making legal arrests. State and local politicians could encourage in-service training that direct officers to utilize community collaboration for addressing local problems. This type of collaborative problem-oriented work could be transformational for many law enforcement careers.

Political trust and encouragement for police discretionary decision-making should also include protection against liability concerns that too often drive officer mistrust. Police should not be expected to be the only agencies addressing community problems that may include youth gun violence, drug addiction, mental health, domestic calls, etc. Many of these problems require a variety of community-based interventions that should have little to do with enforcing criminal statutes if we are going to truly address root causes of offending behavior. Police efforts need to be supported by community efforts that don’t rely only on them to address these issues, but instead offer support that seeks reactive law enforcement as a last resort.

Police agencies cannot be seen as revenue generators for local or state politicians. Instead, they must be seen as the face of governmental democracy, since most Americans will encounter their local police rather than their local or state politicians. As the face of government, we want to equip the police with the ability and incentive to solve local offending problems analytically and collaboratively without perceptions that they have to do so alone or in isolation from the “civilian” population.

There are many different potential threats to one’s safety: crime, weather, pollution, dangerous workplaces. In choosing a place to live, how should people weigh the risks?

Weather and pollution are the biggest risks to human safety. Especially when the government is unwilling to change or rebuild cities to withstand serious weather events. You are more likely to be negatively affected by pollution and climate disasters than the other factors listed. Someone should avoid a city that does not acknowledge the impacts of industrial and automobile pollution and does not prepare for climate disasters.

What actions can the Trump Administration undertake to reduce crime and improve public safety?

Trump should give authority for communities to control misconduct by police departments and their unions.

He should make marijuana and hemp federally legal.

He should provide public funding to improve public transportation.

He should tax the wealthiest Americans and put that money into community programs, job programs, drug rehab, and healthcare.

Do you agree with President Trump that increased border security will reduce crime?

No. Increased "border security" will not reduce crime.

Increased border security has to be defined. And what crimes are we looking to reduce?

What will reduce crime is stopping multinational corporations from shipping chemicals do drug pushers cannot manufacture synthetic opiates.

What can state and local policymakers do to reduce crime in their communities?

Spend more money on job training, after school programs, and public works that will employ people.

Reduce income inequality.

Make Marijuana and its derivatives fully legal.

Create a stricter process for buying guns.

Give jobs from those newly released from prison.

Create a gun buyback programs.

What tips do you have for consumers looking to improve their “financial” safety?

Hold elected officials accountable to create laws that will protect consumer data.

What can state and local policymakers do to reduce crime in their communities?

It is important that policymakers understand that the most effective way to reduce crime in their communities is to prevent it from happening in the first place. The social and economic burdens of justice system involvement are insurmountable with individuals (particularly youthful offenders) who make contact with the system having an increased likelihood of an array of negative outcomes, including dropping out of school and being unemployed. Supporting initiatives to prevent crime, as well as adopting evidence-based programs, have not only been demonstrated to be more cost effective, but can improve the chances that offenders are properly rehabilitated, in turn, fostering safer communities.