U.S Department of Justice

Office of Community Oriented Policing Services

A Policymaker’s Guide to

The Transformative Power of 

Police-Community Developer Partnerships

Bill Geller | Lisa Belsky

BUILDING OUR WAY

OUT OF CRIME

Foreword by Bill Bratton and Paul Grogan

A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 3

This project was supported by Grant Number 2005-CK-WX-0458 

awarded by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 

U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, conclusions, 

or recommendations contained in this publication are those of the 

authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or 

policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific 

agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered 

an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of 

the issues. 

www.cops.usdoj.gov

June 2009
4 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

The Focus of this Policymaker’s Guide 

and of the Book on which It Is Based

The material in this policymaker’s guide is drawn from a new book, Building Our Way 

Out of Crime: The Transformative Power of Police-Community Developer Partnerships,

by the same authors, and addresses a range of topics that normally command 

the attention of policymakers—elected and appointed officials at all levels of 

government, community development leaders, financial industry investment 

strategists, private foundation executives, and others. More specifically, it seeks to 

answer such questions as these:

« Does this strategy work? Says who? What’s the evidence?

« Is it feasible to implement in diverse cities?

« What are the policy or political incentives and disincentives to adopting this 

strategy?

« Do established experts in public safety, community development, and 

government circles believe this strategy represents a cost-effective, durable 

solution to neighborhood crime control and revitalization?

Those whom such policymakers may assign to probe the value and feasibility of 

investing in public safety-community development partnerships will find useful 

information in the entire book, which documents the following in much greater 

detail:

« The crime-reduction and neighborhood revitalization results of three case 

studies.

« How the community developers and their public safety and other collaborators 

achieved these results.

« How to implement these community development-public safety partnerships 

and how to overcome implementation challenges.

« Lessons learned.

« Next steps in disseminating this successful strategy to cities that will find it 

helpful in turning around crime-ridden, disinvested neighborhoods.

The Foreword to the book may be of particular interest to policymakers and, 

therefore, it is included in this Guide.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 5

Foreword

Police can do nothing about crime; and low-income communities are destined to 

remain poor and powerless. If we as a nation believe that, we might as well admit 

that the American dream is in serious jeopardy for a sizable swath of Americans. To 

the contrary, what our decades of work in two separate fields—urban policing and 

grassroots community economic development—tell us is that cops and community 

developers can contribute mightily to halting and reversing the spiral of “disorder 

and decline”1

 in poor neighborhoods throughout America.

In city after city, the police have helped cut crime in some of the most devastated 

neighborhoods.2

 And nonprofit community development corporations (CDC) have 

applied their street savvy, local credibility, knowledge of neighborhood problems, 

and ability to redevelop troubled property to replace block after blighted block with 

affordable, high-quality housing and viable businesses.

Indeed, in the celebrated crime drops of the 1990s, it is striking that the steepest 

declines (in New York City and elsewhere) typically occurred precisely where 

redevelopment was the most concentrated.3

 We believe this is no accident. Plunging 

crime helps create market conditions and a neighborhood ethos conducive to 

redevelopment. And redevelopment helps abate crime hot spots and give residents 

a real stake in the future of their neighborhood. They step up to maintain their 

properties and help establish and enforce standards for acceptable behavior.

In most urban centers in the United States, police and grassroots developers have 

been doing their good work in isolation from one another. There are historic reasons 

for this gulf, among them the balkanization of local government services (police 

departments and departments of neighborhood development infrequently do joint 

strategic planning, for instance); narrowly focused professional education for police 

and developers; and deeply-rooted distrust between many police and the community 

activists who often run CDCs. Community developers typically see themselves only 

as consumers of law enforcement services (seeking protection of their real estate 

investments and their fellow residents from crime), not as potential partners in a 

mutually beneficial strategic alliance. For their part, cops from street level to the 

chief frequently have scant understanding of the distinctive neighborhood rebuilding 

capabilities of community development corporations. As such, for most police, 

CDCs are indistinguishable among the sea of community groups clamoring for their 

attention.

So what’s the downside of this disconnect? When police and developers function 

unaware of one another’s strategies, plans, incremental victories, and challenges, 

they may not accomplish as much, as quickly, or as sustainably, as they could if they 

worked together. Sometimes, they might even unwittingly work at cross-purposes. 

But even in cases where their efforts, by happenstance, are complementary, a delayed 

reaction of developers to fertile conditions for community renewal may occur; that 
6 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

is, although market forces may propel redevelopment when developers and their 

financial investors realize that an area in a neighborhood has become safer, there 

may be a substantial lag time between the reality and perceptions of greater safety. 

 If, as the case studies in this valuable book demonstrate, so much can be 

accomplished to stabilize low-income communities when police (and prosecutors and 

other public safety practitioners) and locally credible developers work together in the 

same places at the same time, why leave these collaborations to chance as we do in 

most cities today? Why merely hope that targeted crime-fighting and investments in 

community revitalization, by luck, will align in a manner, sequence, time frame, and 

dosage that produce the greatest good and the best bang for the buck? Just wishing 

for convergence is foolish public safety and community development strategy. 

While police and developers cannot and should not set each other’s priorities, they 

can and should learn when, how, and why to make strategic investments that will 

appropriately leverage each other’s considerable capacity.

What’s needed is a shift in understanding and practice at all levels of government 

and among the variety of private-sector institutions that shape the nature 

and extent of community revitalization. This new understanding should impel 

widespread promotion of, and investment in, the purposeful, formal, strategic linkage 

of police and community developers on problems that will yield to their combined 

expertise and resources. Simply put, these collaborations work—they reduce crime; 

replace problem properties with quality, affordable housing; attract viable businesses 

in previously blighted commercial corridors; make more strategic and efficient 

use of public and private-sector resources; and build public confidence in, and 

cooperation with, local government and private organizations. To these ends, police 

and development organizations, propelled by results-driven, fiscally responsible 

leaders, should devise and adhere to new standard operating procedures that launch 

and support police-developer activities that are conducted—and analyzed—in an 

accountable, business-like way. 

Over time, both separately and together, we have advocated a more intentional 

connection between cops and community developers that affects how both parties 

do business. But until this book, our fields have lacked detailed chronicles of what 

this purposeful, officially-sanctioned linkage looks like and accomplishes on the 

ground. The substantial, multiyear improvements in focus areas in Charlotte (North 

Carolina), Minneapolis (Minnesota), and Providence (Rhode Island), which are 

portrayed in this book’s case studies, are remarkable. Before-after pictures illustrate 

the rejuvenation of low-income communities as neighborhood assets supplanted 

blighted homes and harmful commercial properties. And the graphs and tables show 

that, following police-developer interventions, there were rapid and durable declines 

in reported crime—mostly ranging from 55 percent to 84 percent—and sudden and 

sustained drops in calls for police service—ranging from 42 percent to 98 percent.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 7

These police and development practitioners built a base of understanding and trust 

that allowed them to act on what cops, urban planners, and developers widely 

understand intuitively: that one of the greatest threats to community revitalization 

is crime and that a big generator of crime is community disintegration. In the 

language of the broken-windows theory, physical deterioration leads to crime, and 

physical revitalization contributes to pushing crime back. By working closely with 

the authors to describe their methods and rationale and to compile quantitative 

and qualitative documentation of crime and revitalization accomplishments, the 

practitioners profiled in these case studies have done a service to their professions 

and to the nation.

There are many experts on policing and many experts on community development, 

but nobody knows more about the intersection of public safety and community 

development practice than Bill Geller and Lisa Belsky. Fifteen years ago, they cofounded a program—housed at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC, 

the nation’s largest community development umbrella organization)—that seeks 

to promote, guide, and learn lessons from police-developer partnerships in many 

jurisdictions. The resulting Community Safety Initiative continues as an important 

national LISC program.

Our belief in the value of greater, more routine police-developer interaction is 

confirmed by the quantitative and qualitative evidence that Geller and Belsky 

amassed in this book. These pages illustrate how and why police and grassroots 

community builders become greater stakeholders in, and defenders of, the 

investments made by each other to target crime and blight. The case studies show 

that veteran cops and developers coalesce because they find mutual advantage in the 

partnership. As a lieutenant working for Chief Dean Esserman in Providence put it 

simply, and best: “Community developers make my job easier.” 

At this juncture in the 21st century, these collaborations are necessary, not only 

because they are effective, but also because shrinking public resources require 

them. We can think of no better investment at the neighborhood level than a wellconceived, ongoing alliance between dedicated cops and high-capacity grassroots 

community developers. Some may say that nurturing this new synergy among 

police, neighborhoods, and community developers is a luxury we can ill afford when 

terrorists and economic woes challenge the nation. Nonsense. We can and must build 

homeland security and economic recovery on many fronts, not least in our poorest 

neighborhoods. As policymakers charged with doing more with less, we will achieve 

greater success if we create partnerships that produce results greater than any one 

partner could achieve acting alone. Better still, the strategy laid out in this book 

creates solutions that not only endure, but seem to require minimal police attention 

after problem properties are transformed. With goodwill, a modest investment in 

relationship building, and a limited deployment of resources, the police can influence 

and help community developers replace the worst of a neighborhood’s liabilities with 

assets that will serve it for the long term—literally building our way out of crime.
8 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

As the case studies make clear, very impressive turnarounds take several years, but 

they can be accomplished within 4-year election cycles. With this book in hand, 

newly elected public officials—from mayors to the President—and their experts on 

public safety and neighborhood development can hit the ground running and take 

practical steps that support robust public-private collaborations. We recommend 

Building Our Way Out of Crime to urban leaders everywhere. It offers an effective and 

practical road map that we can follow to knock crime down and keep it down in lowincome neighborhoods.

“Turnaround” and “comeback” are not the slogans of pessimists. Our optimism that 

police departments can be turned into ever-more effective engines of crime reduction 

and that America’s cities can be brought back as centers of population, commerce, 

and culture for people across the economic spectrum is bolstered by the results that 

these emerging police-community developer partnerships are producing. But too 

often, successes in policing and community development have tended to be heralded 

separately, in unrelated news accounts or policy analyses that look narrowly at one 

set of achievements.4

 Far-reaching replication will come only when we do more of 

what has been done by Geller and Belsky for Charlotte, Minneapolis, and Providence: 

that is, find ways to tell these stories in an integrated, analytic, and persuasive way.

The innovative linkage of hard-working, results-oriented police and community 

developers—organizing them to pull in the same direction at the same time—

produces the multiplier effect that Geller and Belsky so appropriately highlight 

in this book. With a national and city-by-city commitment to replicate and 

adapt the kind of collaborations described here, we believe long-suffering urban 

neighborhoods—which influence their city’s overall well-being in many ways—will 

be the beneficiaries for years to come.

Paul Grogan

President, Boston Foundation

Coauthor of Comeback

Cities: A Blueprint for Urban 

Neighborhood Revival

Past National President, Local 

Initiatives Support Corporation

Bill Bratton

Chief, Los Angeles Police 

Department

Former Commissioner, New York 

Police Department

Coauthor of Turnaround: How 

America’s Top Cop Reversed the 

Crime Epidemic. 
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 9

Endnotes

1

 Skogan, 1990.

2

 Bratton and Knobler, 1998.

3

 Grogan and Proscio, 2000.

4

 Grogan and Proscio, 2000.

References

Bratton, William J. and Peter Knobler. Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed 

the Crime Epidemic. New York: Random House, 1998.

Grogan, Paul S. and Tony Proscio. Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood 

Revival. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000.

Skogan, Wesley G. Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American 

Neighborhoods. New York: The Free Press, 1990.
10 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Contents

Foreword 5

Why Should Police Embrace the Power of Community 

Development? 12

The Policymaker’s Imperative: Foster Police-Community 

Developer Collaboration 14

Building Away Crime Is Necessary But Not Sufficient to Create 

Livable Neighborhoods 16

Evidence That Community Developer–Police Partnerships Have 

Converted Crime Hot Spots into Safety-Generating Community 

Assets 18

Brief Sketches of Pioneering Efforts 18

Seattle, Washington: Chinatown-International 

District 18

Kansas City, Missouri: Swope Parkway-Elmwood 

and Town Fork Creek Neighborhoods 18

St. Paul, Minnesota: Payne Avenue Commercial 

District 20

New York City: East New York Neighborhood 20

Highlights of the Three Main Case Studies 22

Providence, Rhode Island: Olneyville Neighborhood—

Collaboration between the Olneyville Housing Corporation and the 

Providence Police Department 22

Charlotte, North Carolina: Genesis Park and Druid Hills 

Neighborhoods—Collaboration between The Housing Partnership 

and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department 32

Minneapolis, Minnesota: Phillips Neighborhood Collaboration 

between the Great Neighborhoods! Development Corporation and 

the Minneapolis Police Department 47
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 11

How Police Fit into this Strategy 63

Sequencing of Safety and Development Interventions 64

The Type of Community Developers Involved in these Strategic 

Partnerships 65

Grassroots Community Developers Are Not in the Business 

of Gentrification 66

Policymakers Need to Help Police Leaders Differentiate 

CDCs from Other Types of Important Community 

Organizations 66

Some Ways Police Can Capture and Support the Power of 

Community Development 67

Increasing the Amount of Police–Community Developer 

Collaboration 69

Broadening the Impact and Opportunities to Hone the 

Strategy 70

Policy Leadership in Institutionalizing Police-Community 

Developer Collaboration 70

The Economic Environment—Still More Impetus for 

Collaborative Action 76

A Final Note 77

Endnotes 78

References 80

About the Authors 85

Summary Contents of Building Our Way Out of Crime: 

The Transformative Power of Police-Community Developer 

Partnerships 87
12 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

 “Dr. King said change never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It must be 

carried in on the backs of soldiers of our democracy willing to do the difficult 

work in the trenches, make the necessary sacrifices, to advance our nation. 

Community organizers, police officers, teachers—these are all people who 

are dealing with the everyday problems of our country and trying to find 

real, tangible solutions.”

—Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker, when asked by an interviewer about the 

contributions of community organizers to their neighborhoods.1

The old saying goes, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like 

a nail.” But what if the right tool for the job is a hammer, and the only tools you have 

are a badge and a gun?

Police departments around the nation have been discovering they can build their 

way out of crime problems that they have been unable to arrest their way out of. 

They have been doing that by working with nonprofit community developers—

local builders and organizations whose goal is to transform their own blighted 

neighborhoods into more livable, healthy communities. As problem-oriented 

policing designer Herman Goldstein would put it, police in these instances have been 

wisely shifting to, and sharing with, other community institutions and organizations 

the responsibility, cost, and work of addressing crime problems and neighborhood 

conditions that fuel crime.2

Why Should Police Embrace the Power of 

Community Development?

They should do so because it sustainably reduces crime and fosters livable 

communities. Figure 1(whose data are discussed later in more detail) highlights 

the crime-reduction piece of the answer: As the police discovered in our three case 

study sites—Charlotte, Minneapolis, and Providence—they can knock crime down 

and keep it down in a way they had not been able to do before they attacked the 

problems using the full power of high-capacity community developers. In a battle 

metaphor, police can take ground against durable crime but rarely can they alone 

hold that ground for very long. Developers, however, can physically alter that 

ground—change a place where crime has persisted and make it highly resistant to 

crime without necessitating heavy police deployment.

The reason community developers—and not just bulldozers—are needed is that 

merely eliminating a hot spot (a crack house, problem tavern, etc.) may reduce crime 

in the short run, but vacant lots are not a good long-term strategy for safer, thriving 

neighborhoods. The value of community-rooted developers is that they replace 

problem properties (including vacant lots) with community-friendly land uses that 

generate neighborhood well-being, just as the old ones produced problems.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 13

Percentage Declines in Crime, Calls for Service or Arrests in 

Focus Areas in Three Cities After Developer-Police Interventions 

Park 

Crime

Rep.

Crime

Park CFS Arrests

CFS

Kohler

Crime

Kohler

CFS

Orlando

Crime Crime CFS

Revit.

Area 

Crime

Revit.

Area 

CFS

Orlando

CFS

-83.7% -84.9%

-56.1%

-20%

0

-40%

-60%

-80%

-100%

-58.1% -55.8%

-41.6%

-25.0%

-98.2%

-92.4%

-59.7%

-86.6%

-57.4%

-80.6%

CFS=Calls for Service

Charlotte-Mecklenburg P Minneapolis rovidence

Figure 1: Large, multiyear improvements in public safety indicators followed community 

developer–police joint action to replace crime-generating commercial and residential 

properties with high-quality affordable housing and safety- and commerce-generating 

businesses. In Charlotte, North Carolina’s Druid Hills neighborhood, crime and calls for 

service fell between 1998 and 2006 in three focus areas (the Park, Kohler Avenue, and 

Olando Street)—considerably outpacing a comparison neighborhood and Mecklenburg 

County overall. In the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis between 2002 and 2007, 

reported crime, calls for service, and arrests related to a previously out-of-control 

street drug market declined in a 16-square-block area (with annual calls to police about 

narcotics problems in this zone dropping from 291 to 5). Progress in this focus zone 

substantially exceeded that in the entire Minneapolis police precinct serving Phillips. 

In two focus areas in Providence, Rhode Island’s Olneyville neighborhood (the “hot 

spots” and “revitalization” areas) double-digit reductions occurred in levels of crime 

and calls for service between 2002 and 2007—as in the other studies, far surpassing 

the improvements in public safety indicators for the police district and neighborhood 

overall.

Hot Spots Hot Spots
14 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

The Policymaker’s Imperative: Foster PoliceCommunity Developer Collaboration

Police leader Bill Bratton and community development leader Paul Grogan argue 

in their Foreword that crime is one of the greatest obstacles to community 

development and that community deterioration is one of the greatest attractors 

and generators of crime. A generation earlier, Justice Department official James 

“Chips” Stewart observed that “poverty causes crime, and crime causes poverty.” 

Not surprisingly, therefore, in many places where crime has declined substantially, 

revitalization has become easier, and where revitalization has flourished, crime 

has declined. For the most part, cops and developers know this and are grateful 

beneficiaries when a breakthrough by either party occurs in a problem part of a 

neighborhood. The question is not if police and developers welcome each others’ 

accomplishments, but whether they—and the mayors, city managers, and others 

who oversee and guide public-private collaboration—are content to leave to chance 

whether police and developers will decide independently to work on the same 

problems at the same time. Leaving things to chance risks not only reduced levels of 

accomplishment but even developers and police unintentionally undermining each 

other’s efforts to improve the neighborhood.

For years, insightful observers of policing strategy have noted the importance of 

police playing a role in community development. Indeed, in the 1967 landmark 

report of President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and 

Administration of Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, the chapter on 

“The Police” reported the Commission’s reasoning on this point and the resulting 

recommendation for upgrading the nation’s police services:

“One suggestion that the Commission believes merits attention is the 

creation of municipal planning boards on which police community-planning 

experts would sit, along with representatives of other city departments. 

The work of such city departments as those dealing with housing, parks, 

welfare, and health are all related to crime; and often such departments 

have law enforcement functions. Also, community planning is needed since 

it has a direct bearing on crime, and therefore on police business. The police 

often have knowledge on such subjects as where and how to build parks, 

schools, housing, and commercial developments, and as to the effects 

on the community of urban renewal and the relocation of population—

neighborhood conditions to which municipal attention should be directed.

The Commission recommends: The police should formally participate in community 

planning in all cities.”3
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 15

To be sure, the President’s Crime Commission was recommending multidepartment 

collaboration within city government rather than counseling interaction between 

police and private community planning and development groups, but we find that 

distinction unimportant in light of the fact that the field of private, nonprofit 

community development was just beginning to take root at the time the President’s 

Commission wrote its report. If, as many in the criminal justice field have 

recommended in 2008 and 2009, there is to be a new national crime commission, it 

would be valuable for such a commission to include the perspectives of institutions 

in the private sector, such as community developers, who could mightily contribute 

to public-private partnerships to prevent crime. As Attorney General Eric Holder, 

Jr., often said while serving as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, many of 

the crime problems that afflict cities are ones “we cannot arrest our way out of.” 

Rather, they require “holistic approaches” in which police, prosecutors and other 

criminal justice officials actively engage the community.4

The notion that police and community planners and developers should play an 

influential role in each others’ core business—shaping priorities and methods—is 

easy to say but to this day still flies in the face of jealousy guarded prerogatives on 

each side of a potential partnership in many jurisdictions. In the current state of 

play, it is not surprising that where you find a distressed, crime-plagued community, 

you are likely to find a fair amount of concern and activity by police and perhaps by 

community developers. But police and developers have, for the most part, operated 

independently in such low-income neighborhoods. It has been a coincidence—a 

worthwhile one for both community and law enforcement—when they happened to 

target the same problem locations at the same time and in a complementary way.

The value of police-community developer partnerships...

“Partnering with community developers can be hard work, but even 

though it may take a couple of years to see results, it really does 

work. At a lot of conferences we go to, the police think you’re just 

blowing smoke at them when you talk about how collaborating can 

be effective. But police partnerships with developers really do work.”

—Detective Tom Masse, Providence (Rhode Island) Police Department
16 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Questions, therefore, arise for policymakers and those striving to successfully 

implement policy.

« Can and should police and developers coordinate their efforts purposefully? 

« If so, given the different organizational cultures, imperatives, and knowledge 

and skill sets in each domain, how could they help each other? 

« Since each has limited resources, can police and developers justify helping each 

other on the grounds of self-interest? 

« Beyond merely gaining some welcomed assistance, is there potential for synergy 

between public safety and community development work? In other words, 

by assisting each other rather than working alone, can developers and police 

actually serve their own separate missions—within politically acceptable time 

frames—more effectively, efficiently, and sustainably?

« If so, should organizational leaders, public policymakers, and appropriators 

consider community developer–police collaborations to be mission critical for 

each entity, or at least a recommended best practice?

Building Away Crime Is Necessary But Not Sufficient to 

Create Livable Neighborhoods

Whatever value police (and other public safety workers) and collaborating 

developers can bring to neighborhoods through physical revitalization and crime 

control is important, but hardly sufficient to make a really unlivable place livable. 

Municipal leadership, police, community developers, residents of the challenged 

neighborhoods, and elected and appointed government officials understand that 

many other elements must also be addressed.

We say this because in our enthusiasm on the pages that follow for the combined 

power of cops and community developers, we may sometimes sound as if we think 

these two sets of neighborhood workers together hold the keys to the kingdom of 

neighborhood resurrection. There are, of course, many keys—a veritable janitor’s 

ring—needed to open the doors to those better places.

Some of the keys are held by private-sector nonprofit developers of commercial 

properties and housing. Others are held by government agencies. In these early days 

of President Barack Obama’s Administration in 2009, it seems clear that one of the 

most important objectives is for government-based community developers at the 

federal, state, and local levels and private-sector community developers to better 

synchronize their goals and strategies so that they do not work at cross-purposes. 

This means, for instance, that developers in all sectors should recognize the 

importance of building decent housing to help elevate the livability of low-income 

neighborhoods. By contrast, building poor housing for poor people merely feeds 

a vicious cycle of impoverishing the poor and makes it harder to comprehensively 
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 17

address the array of problems facing low-income communities. When any developer 

builds low-grade housing, those properties further degrade the neighborhood, fail to 

attract reinvestment, and isolate their residents.

As the Obama Administration begins to address such problems, urban policy expert 

Robert Weissbourd describes the comprehensiveness of the Administration’s 

strategic thinking: “Housing is part of a community’s assets and can contribute to 

healthy, mixed income, mixed use communities, if developed at least in the context 

of, and ideally in coordination with, transit, amenities and family and community 

asset building.” He cautions that any one intervention—housing improvement, 

better public safety services, better transportation to jobs, etc.—done in isolation is 

unlikely to yield rapid, significant and sustainable neighborhood improvement.5

The necessity but insufficiency of building away crime to lift up challenged 

neighborhoods was emphasized as well by Alexander Polikoff, a desegregation law 

and policy reformer. For devastated neighborhoods to become better places to live, 

he argued, there must be simultaneous, integrated improvements on many fronts—

housing, education, jobs, safety, health, etc. An advance in any one area, such as jobs 

or safety, “really rests on layers of supporting programs.” Absent those supports, he 

says, “it’s like pointing to the apex of a pyramid and saying, ‘build that.’”6

The more comprehensive the community development, the easier it should 

be for police to help safeguard a neighborhood. The practical importance of 

multidimensional development to police is that sometimes progress on one 

development front can be undone by failure to address other aspects of building a 

healthy community. Even worse, single-issue development progress may intensify 

problems in the neighborhood. For instance, developing real estate without ensuring 

that there is sufficient progress in building “social capital” among the neighbors on 

the block and without attending to vocational needs and gang resistance for area 

youth could lead to an increase in home burglaries. Higher-value homes, unprotected 

by various means, including watchful neighbors, make higher-value targets for those 

who choose to commit burglaries.7

 And a thief who discovers a resident at home 

and persists in the crime has gone beyond burglary and committed a personal crime, 

perhaps including violence. Thus, from the police point of view, there are powerful 

crime-control incentives to encourage and contribute to the success of multifaceted 

community development.

To decide whether to support the kind of strategic alliances described here, police 

and community development leaders, and mayors and other policymakers will 

have a number of threshold questions, among them: What kinds of neighborhood 

crime-related problems do such strategic alliances typically address? What kinds of 

outcomes have they achieved?
18 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Evidence That Community Developer–Police 

Partnerships Have Converted Crime Hot Spots 

into Safety-Generating Community Assets

Brief Sketches of Pioneering Efforts

In more than 15 years of working closely with police-community developer 

partnerships in many cities, the authors have amassed evidence of the physical 

transformation of hot spots into attractive, affordable homes, desirable retail 

businesses, wholesome and safe recreational spaces, and other assets. Included here 

are a few pioneering examples (discussed more fully in the Building Our Way Out of 

Crime book), after which key findings from the book’s three main case studies are 

highlighted.

Seattle, Washington: Chinatown-International District

Two accomplishments during the mid-1990s illustrate the power of the developerpolice strategic alliance: (1) A tavern known for violent customers was converted 

into a family-friendly Cambodian restaurant that served better food, hired more 

staff from the neighborhood, made better profits, and attracted peaceful customers. 

(2) For decades, a block-long homeless camp under an Interstate highway overpass 

a stone’s throw from Seattle’s historic Skid Row (now Pioneer Square), menaced 

the neighborhood with disorder and property and violent crime and endangered 

police officers. The camp was transformed into the multimillion dollar Pacific Rim 

Center, a multi-use facility that provided retail, office, and residential space, and 

generated community jobs. This and other work in this Seattle neighborhood 

was actively supported by LISC’s national Community Safety Initiative (CSI). The 

partners’ accomplishments were examined and hailed in Harvard University’s 

Kennedy School of Government case studies and an analytic paper.8

 More recently, 

excellent “building away crime” progress also has been made through commercial 

development and affordable housing development in another Seattle neighborhood, 

Columbia City.

Kansas City, Missouri: Swope Parkway-Elmwood and Town 

Fork Creek Neighborhoods

In a blighted tract of a primarily African American neighborhood near downtown—a 

neighborhood long widely regarded as “the worst in Kansas City” and where no 

significant development or infrastructure improvements had occurred for more than 

30 years—a high-capacity community developer transformed a generator of crime, 

health hazards, and disinvestment into a sterling community asset. With strategic 

assistance from police—including captains presenting accurate crime statistics to 

prospective investors to dispel myths that the neighborhood was hopelessly crimeridden—the community developer created a 70-acre, $135 million commercial 
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 19

and residential development called the Mt. Cleveland Initiative. The development 

project included building from the ground up a hospital-size community health 

center; 192 units of affordable housing and a 54-unit senior housing facility; a $35 

million shopping center (including national retail stores and a substation donated 

to the Kansas City Police Department); acres of parkland; and a $20 million, 85,000-

square-foot regional service center for H&R Block that brought the neighborhood a 

$14.2 million payroll for several hundred year-round employees and approximately 

1,000 during tax season. In 2008, the Mt. Cleveland Initiative area remains 

attractive, livable, commercially successful, and safe. And this development forms a 

bridge between this once disenfranchised section of town and Kansas City’s thriving 

downtown commercial center (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. The CDC-developed H&R Block Call Center was part of the Mt. 

Cleveland Initiative, which provided affordable housing, neighborhood 

services, retail outlets, and integrated community health services. H&R 

Block decided to become an anchor for the project based on police 

statistics that dispelled myths about the area.
20 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

St. Paul, Minnesota: Payne Avenue Commercial District

The serious decline of a once-thriving business district was reversed through 

determined collaboration over several years by a local CDC, the St. Paul Police 

Department, a local merchants association, and city government. While police 

worked with merchants to more actively control aggressive panhandling and other 

street disorder, the developers made more than $24 million in improvements to 69 

places of business (about half the establishments along Payne Avenue). Investments 

included major rehabs, façade improvements, painting, new awnings, and better 

signage. Attracted by Payne Avenue’s new vitality and safety, more than a dozen 

new, desirable businesses moved into the Payne Avenue corridor. During a 3-year 

period, the commercial district enjoyed declines in both major crimes (26 percent) 

and calls for service related to quality-of-life crimes (25 percent)—whereas in 

comparison neighborhoods, which lacked police-developer collaboration, there were 

double-digit increases. An enduring emblem of Payne Avenue’s turnaround was the 

transformation of a crime hot spot—the Payne Reliever strip club—into a building 

housing a restaurant, community meeting space, and bingo hall.

New York City: East New York Neighborhood

A police chief once introduced himself at a national meeting by saying, “I’m from 

East Palo Alto, and in America you really don’t want to be from East Anywhere.” 

His quip certainly applied to the 5.6-square-mile East New York neighborhood of 

Brooklyn, which from the late 1970s until the late 1990s was a densely-packed, 

disinvested, dangerous slum in the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) 75th

Precinct, where 129 homicides took place in 1993. By some reckonings this precinct 

and neighborhood were the most violent and destitute in America. With strategic 

guidance from a technical assistance expert and the encouragement of thenPolice Commissioner Bill Bratton, 75th Precinct officers and a local CDC tackled 

the worst 20-square-block area of East New York in hopes of reversing the entire 

neighborhood’s fortunes. By shutting down a multiblock street drug market and 

converting the worst stretch into a barricaded play street for area youth, the NYPD 

created an environment of livability and hope and paved the way for much needed 

reinvestment. A CDC-developed youth center flourished, housing antitruancy 

programming (one of the best in the city), tutoring, sports, police-youth dialogs, 

etc. A youth-run bicycle repair shop employed local kids, trained them in bike 

maintenance, and provided them with legitimate income. And crime dropped 

dramatically—outstripping adjacent precincts. The CDC’s housing development 

sky-rocketed. The Parks Department teamed up with the community developer, 

other community groups, the NYPD, and AmeriCorps volunteers to create the blocklong Success Gardens, one of the first attractive parks in the entire neighborhood. 

The park provided a vibrant, popular, and safe gathering place both day and night. 

Writing in 2000, a Harvard University case writer described the area 5 years after 

the police and developers joined forces:
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 21

“The neighborhood that had once been East New York’s worst was now 

considered by the police to be one of the safest. ‘We still have our drug 

problems, but it’s mostly marijuana-related,’ says Officer Hinchey. ‘Three 

years ago, four years ago, five when it was the worst, you’d never see anybody 

out on the streets. It wasn’t a safe place. You’d see people running to the 

store and running back home. Now you go down there any time of the day, 

especially when school’s out, and there are people everywhere. There’s kids 

on every corner—young kids. I mean, parents will sit on the stoop and let 

their kids roam the streets. I like to see that. To me, that means there’s an 

improvement. Four years ago, somebody would have gotten shot if they’d 

done that.’ ... Throughout the [neighborhood], new shops had appeared.... 

Property values..., once rock bottom, shot upwards. Ten years ago, Rosa 

Fenton, [a target area] resident..., had wanted to sell her house and move 

out. She couldn’t give it away. ‘I could sell my house now for $150,000,’ says 

Fenton. ‘Before no one would touch it.’ However, Fenton no longer wanted to 

move. Instead, she was renovating.”9

Beyond the preceding sketches of success, the most detailed evidence amassed 

to date is in the book’s three lengthy case studies—in Providence, Rhode Island; 

Charlotte, North Carolina; and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The public safety 

improvements and physical revitalization accomplishments in these three urban 

neighborhoods are highlighted below. 
22 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Highlights of the Three Main Case Studies

Providence, Rhode Island: Olneyville Neighborhood—

Collaboration between the Olneyville Housing Corporation 

and the Providence Police Department 

Providence and Organization Facts

« City population (2000): 173,618, living in 18.2 square miles

« Police Department (2008): 482 sworn personnel; budget = $43.3 million

« Olneyville Housing Corporation: 2007 budget=$450,000; full-time staff = 9

« Rhode Island LISC: From 1991 to 2008, invested more than $210 million 

and leveraged another $400 million in community development statewide, producing more than 6,000 affordable homes and more than 

600,000 square feet of community, child care, and retail space. 

Olneyville Neighborhood Facts (2000 Census)

 6,495 residents in 0.55 square miles 

 Race/ethnicity:

« 57% Hispanic (various races)

« 22% Non-Hispanic White

« 14% African American

« 7% Asian-Pacific Islander

« 2% Native American

 30% foreign born

 65% speak a language other than English at home

 2nd poorest Providence neighborhood (Median family income = $19,046)

 82% housing units are renter occupied (but many, especially 3 flats, have 

owner + tenants)

 Of 2,644 housing units...

« 12% single family

« 19% duplexes

« 70% multifamily

Figure 3: Facts about Providence and Olneyville
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 23

Anatomy of a Neighborhood’s Decline

A prosperous hub of New England’s textile mills and other manufacturing for nearly 

3 centuries, Olneyville and many communities like it fell on hard times after World 

War II.

“Industries moved out of the city for cities in the southern United States 

or shut down altogether. The effect of this demise on the Olneyville 

neighborhood was devastating. Thousands of jobs were lost and were never 

replaced... As jobs declined, Olneyville became severely depopulated as more 

and more residents left the neighborhood to seek new employment. This 

flight was exacerbated by the construction of the Route 6 connector in the 

early 1950s [which] ... had the effect of destroying a great deal of affordable, 

working-class housing.”10

With the mills largely vacant and a 15-mile long river that had powered the mills 

significantly polluted from factories’ chemical waste and raw sewage discharges, the 

residential and commercial properties near the river were substantially abandoned. 

A tract just north of the river, between the commercial artery of Manton Avenue 

and Aleppo Street, was filled with vacant lots and abandoned properties and had 

become a haven for prostitution, drug dealing, drug abuse, and violence. In 2002, 

Olneyville had the third-highest rate of violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, and 

aggravated assault) among the city’s 25 neighborhoods: 13.9 such crimes per 1,000 

residents. The previous year, three murders occurred within this half-square-mile 

neighborhood. 

Olneyville Housing Corporation (OHC) Executive Director Frank Shea recalled: “For 

four or five years, ‘you saw a neighborhood that was all but forgotten. If it wasn’t for 

drugs and prostitution, there really wasn’t any reason to be on Aleppo Street at all.” 

The area between Aleppo and Manton Avenue was off-limits for children growing 

up in Olneyville. One young woman recalled that 10 years ago “her mother had a 

strict rule. Don’t walk on Manton Avenue and don’t cross over to the area south 

of Manton.... You can get kidnapped. You can get shot. There’s a lot of bad people 

there.”11 A great Olneyville edifice, Riverside Mills, burned to the ground on its 

Aleppo Street site in 1989, leaving a 9-acre brownfield that added health hazards to 

the area’s crime dangers.

Figure 3 provides current facts and figures about Olneyville and Providence.
24 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

A New Policy Environment Catalyzes Community DeveloperPublic Safety Collaboration

OHC’s Frank Shea and several of his key allies, particularly Rhode Island LISC 

Executive Director Barbara Fields, saw a golden opportunity for Olneyville with 

the election in 2002 of reformer David Cicilline as Providence mayor and his 

appointment in early 2003 of community policing expert Dean Esserman as chief of 

police. After extensive planning, a broad public-private coalition established a game 

plan: They would resuscitate the polluted river and convert the brownfield into a 

9-acre park with a bike path that connected to downtown Providence. Across from 

these new public attractions, along Aleppo, Manton, and streets in between, OHC 

would begin building a new community featuring high-quality, affordable homes for 

ownership and rental.

The housing would rise on the area’s vacant and abandoned lots, replacing or 

rehabilitating the three worst residential and commercial properties in Olneyville, 

which were within a few hundred yards of each other. The blocks containing these 

three properties, which constitute the “Hot Spots Area” in Figures 4 and 5, in 

2002 were just 3 percent of Olneyville’s area but accounted for 15.8 percent of the 

entire neighborhood’s calls for service to the Providence Police Department. OHC’s 

larger “Revitalization Area,” which included the hot spots, was just 7.8 percent 

of the neighborhood’s geography but produced 24.7 percent of all neighborhood 

calls to the police. The worst of the three hot spots was on Manton Avenue, at 

the intersection that would be the gateway to the planned Riverside Park. Police, 

developers, community members, and all other stakeholders agreed that the fate 

of this corner on Manton would make or break the park, which in turn would 

determine the success of the entire neighborhood turnaround plan. 

Investments and the Neighborhood Turnaround

With considerable assistance from the police and the Nuisance Abatement Task 

Force of then-Rhode Island Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse (now a U.S. 

Senator from Rhode Island), OHC was able to acquire the Manton property and 

the other hot spots, relocate their problem tenants, and invest $12.1 million in the 

construction of 60 new units of affordable housing. This investment was coupled 

with another $4 million in public and private expenditures for river reclamation, 

brownfield remediation, park and playground construction, and road rebuilding. The 

tangible and intangible returns on this $16 million investment are suggested in the 

following graphs and photos, which highlight the public safety improvements and 

revitalization of this once-forlorn part of Providence. 
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 25

Figure 4: Reported Crime, Focus Areas in Olneyville Neighborhood, 2002–2007. 

Reported crime includes murder, rape, robbery, felony assault with (and without) 

a firearm, burglary, motor vehicle theft, larceny from a motor vehicle, “other 

larceny,” simple assault, other sexual assault, drug-related offenses, vandalism, 

“liquor” violations, and other “weapons” crimes. (“Other Larceny” includes 

shoplifting, pickpocket, purse snatch, from building, bicycles, motor vehicle parts 

or accessories, and other.)

Reported Crimes, Olneyville Areas
26 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Calls for Service, Olneyville Area

Figure 5: Calls for Service, Focus Areas in Olneyville Neighborhood, 2002-2007. 

The CFS include shots fired, person with a gun, drugs, and loud music/party.

Figure 6 illustrates that the Hot Spots Area and the Revitalization Area, before

the interventions, consumed a considerably larger share of the neighborhood’s 

police services than one might expect considering their physical area. After the 

interventions, these two focus areas claimed a much smaller proportion of police 

attention—almost identical to what their land area would predict. Specifically, 

the Hot Spots Area, which constitutes 3 percent of the Olneyville land, accounted 

for 15.8 percent of the entire neighborhood’s calls for service before the principal 

interventions, a demand level that fell to 3.3 percent after the interventions began in 

earnest. Similarly, the OHC Revitalization Area (7.8 percent of the neighborhood land) 

used to account for 24.7 percent of Olneyville’s calls for service, but after interventions 

that percentage dropped to 7.5 percent. The handiwork of the developer-public safety 

team reduced these areas of Olneyville from police service hogs to normal consumers 

of these important and expensive public services, freeing the police, developers, and 

others to work more intensively in other areas of great need.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 27

Perspectives on the Partnerships, Outcomes, 

and Replicability

After an awards ceremony honoring the Olneyville turnaround, policing expert 

Herman Goldstein, who attended the event at Chief Esserman’s invitation, told a 

reporter: “What has occurred in Olneyville, in many respects, is a ‘perfect example’ 

of problem-oriented policing.... Rather than repetitively respond to crimes at the 

dens of prostitution and drug-peddling and prosecute their habitués in the criminal 

justice system, according to problem-oriented policing, it is much preferable 

to eliminate those dens.”12 In problem-oriented policing terms, as Herman 

Goldstein put it to Bill Geller some years earlier, the problem being addressed here 

is community disintegration, and the response is multidimensional community 

development and production of safety.

Figures 7 and 8 show the profound changes that took place in the Olneyville 

neighborhood.

Figure 6: Before data are from 2002, when the Hot Spots Area had 112 of Olneyville’s 

708 calls for service and the Revitalization Area had 175 of Olneyville’s 708 calls for 

service. After data are from 2007, when the Hot Spots Area had 15 of Olneyville’s 454 

CFS and the Revitalization Area had 34 of Olneyville’s 454 calls for service. The calls 

for service include shots fired, person with a gun, drugs, and loud music/party.

Impact Of Interventions on Equitable Distribution 

of Police Service to Olneyville Areas
28 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Figure 7: An environmentally and criminally hazardous swath of Providence’s Olneyville 

neighborhood gave way to dozens of beautiful, affordable new homes, a park, a bicycle path, 

and a community garden. The homes are part of the Olneyville Housing Corporation’s Riverside 

Gateway development along Aleppo Street , a part of Olneyville where, a community leader 

noted, “nobody used to come before except for drugs and prostitution.”

From brownfield to sprouting community.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 29

Figure 8: Riverside Park and a bicycle path are safe, attractive amenities 

for the residents of Riverside Gateway. 

The authors asked police and community development leaders in Providence to reflect 

on the strategy they have used together over the past several years and tell them 

whether, all things considered, they would invest in similar collaborations again. 

Not one person hesitated about making further investments, notwithstanding the 

economic hardships facing their organizations. Chief Esserman said:

“What I’ve realized as a police chief facing budget challenges is that 

investing police resources in working with community developers becomes 

a force multiplier. We’re investing dollars beyond the immediate response 

to crime. And those investments have paid off in lower crime rates, safer, 

stronger neighborhoods and better working relationships between cops and 

communities.

Our work with developers has also had benefits in terms of police satisfaction 

with the job. Because of work over the past few years, we now have several 

lieutenants, plus one who has gone on to be a captain, who have gotten 

enormous satisfaction out of leading their Police District’s partnerships with 

developers. Each of them came to this kind of collaboration as crime fighter 

purists who had to be convinced. Well, their experiences did convince them, 

and as they say, converts make the best preachers.
30 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

I see the passion that our field commanders are developing about building 

homes, about providing their neighborhoods with a good gym, boxing rings 

and other recreational facilities. It’s very exciting to see. Among other things, 

those lieutenants are asking themselves, ‘What can I do to help build capacity 

in the neighborhood?’ Those are great questions for our Department and our 

community partners to be addressing together.”

Frank Shea expressed confidence that continuing to invest in his agency’s close 

working relationship with the police is time and money well spent. Each of the four 

lieutenants who have commanded the district that serves Olneyville during the past 

6 years has been a great partner for the Olneyville Housing Corporation. The current 

commander, Dean Isabella, honors that tradition, according to Shea: “He really gets 

what we are doing and how it all fits. But this really works,” Shea said, for reasons 

beyond individual personalities and talents. It works “because structurally our work 

is so complementary. With support from the top (mayor and chief), it will succeed 

because our work makes it possible for them to reach their community policing goals 

and vice versa.”

A November 2007 ceremony honoring the accomplishments of OHC, the police, and 

others was held in the children’s playground at the new Riverside Park (see Figure 

9) nestled between the reclaimed river and the attractive, affordable new homes 

on Aleppo Street—the street where, as Frank Shea once said, nobody used to come 

except for drugs and prostitution. Surveying this landscape and reflecting on the 

creative, diligent, collaborative efforts that produced it, Rhode Island LISC Executive 

Director Barbara Fields told the assembled crowd: “I think we need to take a moment 

to appreciate the ‘wow’ of what has happened in this community.” She added in a 

Rhode Island LISC newsletter: “And to think that in the early ’90s I was told that 

the best plan for Olneyville would be to knock it down and pave it over for an 

industrial park. Fortunately, OHC board and staff have the vision, persistence, and 

determination that is turning a disinvested neighborhood into a strong and resilient 

community.”

To the question of whether she will continue to invest in a building our way out of 

crime strategy, Fields replied: “Would I do it again? Yes, over and over again.... It was 

worth every ache, every pain—and there were many. Through persistence, goodwill, 

and hard work, we changed the way development gets done in Olneyville.”
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 31

The neighborhood resident quoted earlier, whose mother a decade ago forbad her to 

walk on Manton Avenue or cross over south of there, offered her take on what has 

happened in Olneyville and her own involvement in the transformation:

“It was an amazing experience being able to help with planning the 

playground and coming out with my children to build the park.... [As a young 

teen] I knew not to come down by the old burned down mills on Aleppo 

Street where today it is Riverside Park. Now I don’t have to react as my mom 

did with me scared and worried because I was on the ‘other side’. I now feel 

safe about my own children playing down at Riverside Park with no worries.... 

Where once laid pieces of burned wood, knocked over trees, trash and 

bricks today stands a beautiful playground surrounded by beautiful homes, 

providing my old neighborhood security and life.”14

Figure 9: At an award ceremony in Riverside Park, 

Providence Mayor David Cicilline hailed Olneyville 

as setting a new standard for neighborhood 

transformation in Providence. During a prior OHC 

ribbon-cutting, the mayor noted the profound 

effects of the collaborators’ work on peoples’ lives: 

The apartments and condominiums being dedicated 

will “allow working families to enjoy the benefits 

of safe, decent housing in a neighborhood of their 

choice.”13 (Photo: Joe Vaughan, for Rhode Island 

LISC, 11/07)

Mayor Cicilline also described the strategy behind 

these results: “Poverty is, fundamentally, a lack 

of opportunities and a deficit of supports. In 

Providence, we’ve sought to address this reality 

head on. We know that you can’t fight poverty and stimulate neighborhood-based 

economic development without focusing on crime prevention and reduction—and vice 

versa. We also know that public-private partnerships—built between stakeholders, the 

community and the men and women of our police force—can make all the difference. 

But while many jurisdictions see these as parallel tracks, Providence’s success has been 

based on the intentional merger of the public safety and community development 

strategies—a joining of forces that has resulted in better housing, better organized 

citizens, safer streets, and sustainable change.” (Cicilline, 2009)
32 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Charlotte, North Carolina: Genesis Park and Druid Hills 

Neighborhoods—Collaboration between The Housing 

Partnership and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police 

Department

Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Organization Facts

« Population (2007 estimate of population served by Charlotte-Mecklenburg 

Police Department): 753,000, living in 450 square miles

« Police Department: sworn personnel (2008) = 1,638; 2007 

budget = $174 million

« The Housing Partnership: 2006 budget = $6.2 million; full-time staff = 

40. From 1989 to 2007, THP invested $186 million, producing 2,850 units 

of affordable housing in several Charlotte neighborhoods. The Housing 

Partnership’s investment in Druid Hills as of 2006 was $12.8 million

Druid Hills Neighborhood Facts (2000 Census)

 2,287 residents in 1.5 square miles 

 Race/ethnicity:

« 81.5% African American

« 4.9% White

« 2.4% Asian

« 2.5% Other

« 1.2% “Two Plus”

« 7.5% Hispanic Origin (of any race)

« < 1% Indian

 Median household income = $21,181

 886 housing units, of which 67% are renter occupied

Figure 10: Facts about Charlotte-Mecklenburg and the Druid Hills Neighborhood.

An Urban Policy Response to the Affordable 

Housing Challenge

The Housing Partnership (THP, which originally was called Charlotte-Mecklenburg 

Housing Partnership) was established in 1988 by the city of Charlotte and 

Mecklenburg County governments and a number of Charlotte’s leading banks to 

address “a gap of housing affordability between families served by the public housing 

authority and those served by the market.” The organization is a “private, nonprofit 

housing development and finance corporation organized to expand affordable 

and well-maintained housing within stable neighborhoods for low and moderate 

income families....” It conducts its work with “a continuing interest in the ability 
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 33

of occupants to more fully enter the economic mainstream.” (THP web site) THP is 

committed to aggressive development and revitalization, integrated with proactive 

police approaches, which together will erode crime and create stable, mixed-income 

neighborhoods without displacing good low- and moderate-income residents from 

their improving communities. See Figure 10 for facts about the area.

A Housing Developer in the Crime-Control Business

Having crime reduction as a core purpose is a characteristic that The Housing 

Partnership shares with the other community developers in the main case studies. 

For each featured developer, this crime-control mission means both suppressing 

crime to make development possible and doing the kind of neighborhood 

revitalization that will contribute to durably cutting crime. The front-end crime 

suppression relies heavily on the police; the long-term suppression happens 

organically in the healthy functioning of the renewed neighborhood and 

considerably reduces demand on the police and other components of the criminal 

justice system.

Genesis Park—The Beginning of Active Developer-Police 

Collaboration

One of the first neighborhoods where The Housing Partnership chose to work—at 

the urging of local pastor and community organizer Barbara Brewton-Cameron—

had a miniscule footprint of 35 acres or about 1/20th of a square mile, but during 

the 1980s and 1990s produced the biggest violent crime problems in Charlotte, 

with 21 murders on two main roads between 1988 and 1993. Indeed, police said the 

drug dealing and associated violence and death emanating from these few blocks 

was the worst crime concentration in the Carolinas. “The deteriorated dwellings and 

overgrown yards contained many squatters and numerous drug and shot houses 

(where liquor is sold by the drink). The streets were open-air markets for a variety 

of drugs.”15 The worst block of all was Wayt Street, which “was ruled by drug dealers 

peddling heroin and cocaine.”16 A close second was Gibbs Street. The Charlotte 

Observer wrote:

“a stroll down Gibbs Street...might have been worth your life. Drug dealers 

sold death in small plastic bags there; and when they weren’t paid to their 

liking, they filled the street with gunfire. Residents lived and sometimes died 

in squalid duplexes where the paint hung in tatters, the plumbing worked 

intermittently and cardboard replaced glass in the windows.” 17

Forging a neighborhood tipping point strategy. The data the authors collected 

focus on the development project The Housing Partnership and the CharlotteMecklenburg Police launched immediately following their work in this hot spot, but 

other data and photos are available to document this early project, during which the 
34 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

police and developer forged their potent working relationship. Pat Garrett, president 

of The Housing Partnership, readily admits that in their Genesis Park days (the early 

1990s), she and her staff were heavily reliant on the police to teach them how to do 

revitalization that would durably support neighborhood safety. She told us:

“The first time we did one of these ‘take back the neighborhood’ deals, we were 

relying a lot more on police guidance than they were on us because we didn’t 

have a clue as to what we were getting into. In a crime-ridden area with three 

to four streets that had serious problems, we thought we could buy 40 houses 

and fix it. But there were really 150 [problem properties] in the neighborhood. 

We found out we had to buy houses behind the 40, and it just kept going like 

that. We were pretty naïve. What we relied on a lot was police advice about 

what we have to do to get control. For us it really is a control issue: What do we 

need to do to get control of the properties, to get rid of the bad guys?”

Garrett and her colleagues (just like community developers in Providence and 

Minneapolis) proved to be open-minded, excellent consumers of the sound crimecontrol advice they got from police. For Garrett, those recommendations came 

principally from then-Captain Stan Cook (who after retirement joined THP’s staff 

as an in-house public safety expert and project liaison to the police and other units 

of local government). With the help of the police, THP acquired the blighted homes 

that harbored the drug merchants and murderers, relocated their occupants (in many 

cases to prison), and converted the dwellings from dilapidated duplexes to attractive, 

affordable single-family homes. Starting in 1992, THP bought and converted nearly 

200 units and assisted approximately 100 families on their path to homeownership by 

providing counseling and below-market financing. Scaling the housing development 

program to the size of the neighborhood’s problems was key, for as Cook suggested, “If 

you build a single home in an area that has a lot of disorder, then sure somebody gets a 

roof over their head but they may not feel safe living there.”

The transformed neighborhood was renamed Genesis Park. An Abt Associates study 

funded by the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice reported: 

“Genesis Park provides an example of a complex intervention in a troubled, 

low-income neighborhood, with the goal of reducing crime and improving the 

quality of life for residents.... According to police statistics, crime in Genesis 

Park dropped by 74 percent from 1993 to 1994, and the neighborhood moved 

from number 1 to number 41 in a ranking by neighborhood of violent crime 

rates in the city.”18
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 35

A cover story in The New York Times Magazine in 1996 by antipoverty policy writer 

Jason DeParle lauded the turnaround agents who created Genesis Park:

“Pat Garrett is what a housing solution might look like if the country had 

more money and will. She’s just the sort of streetwise character that a 

housing organization needs—part social worker, part bottom-line banker. 

Her precepts are those of other successful managers: screen tenants, tend 

to maintenance and evict troublemakers. ‘If you don’t have a good property 

manager, you’re going to be in a world of hurt,’ she says.”19

Citing the dramatic drop in violent crime between 1993 and 1994 in Genesis Park, 

DeParle applauded the “civic concern” that prompted city, bank, and business 

leadership to invest local money—not just federal funds granted to Charlotte—in 

producing and making available decent, safe, affordable housing for low-income 

families in Charlotte. At the time, the city’s investments in such housing, including 

grants to THP and other groups, ran about $10 million per year, only about 40 

percent of which came from the federal government.20 DeParle concluded: “No 

neighborhood shows the payoff [for these investments] more than Genesis Park. 

The neighborhood was a drug market of such renown that even the adjacent housing 

project put up a wall to protect itself.”21 See Figure 11.

Figure 11: Prior to their collaboration in the Charlotte neighborhood of Druid Hills, the police and 

THP worked together to transform a nearby downtrodden neighborhood, notorious for the worst 

and most violent drug market in the Carolinas, into the renamed Genesis Park community. To 

rejuvenate the neighborhood, dilapidated homes were significantly renovated, as illustrated by 

the before and after photos of this house. (Photos c. 1989 and 1994)

Genesis Park Before and After
36 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

At a news conference announcing the renaming and reclaiming of the neighborhood, 

a developer on the board of Reverend Brewton’s housing organization recalled, “You 

couldn’t believe how many people said, You’re crazy. It will never work. Nobody wants to 

live there.”22 See Figure 12.

On to Druid Hills

With Genesis Park now producing safety rather than danger and disinvestment, THP was 

able in the late 1990s to launch a development agenda a few blocks away in the adjacent 

neighborhood of Druid Hills.

Once again, THP was tackling a beleaguered community. Druid Hills residents lived in 

fear—their neighborhood was at the mercy of street-level drug dealers, prostitutes, 

and criminals whose acts ranged from larceny to homicide. Residents said they were 

tired of what they faced on the streets each day. The hawking of drugs, sex, or both was 

relentless. Druid Hills was one of the few Charlotte neighborhoods that lacked even a 

single park. With no public recreation space, residents were forced to seek playgrounds, 

parks, and green spaces far afield. People were afraid to walk or drive through Druid Hills 

after dark because the night air was so often filled with gunfire. The market for decent, 

affordable housing was bleak. “It’s hard to sell houses if people are running around the 

street shooting,” observed former Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Deputy 

Chief Stan Cook.

Figure 12: Rev. Barbara Brewton-Cameron in a July 

18, 1994 street-renaming ceremony celebrates 

the conversion of Genesis Park from a “drug 

supermarket” to a safe, stable community. Rev. 

Brewton’s husband several years earlier was one 

of the neighborhood’s homicide victims. 
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 37

In September 2003, The Housing Partnership and its collaborators cut the ribbon on 

their first major development in Druid Hills, The Gables—a $4.9 million, beautifully 

landscaped, three-story, 63-unit housing complex for “active adults over 55 years 

old and earning below 50 percent of the area median income.” Stan Cook said that 

The Gables, located on Kohler Avenue, has strategic importance because “it’s the 

southern gateway to the Druid Hills neighborhood.” The area had a significant need 

for seniors housing and by beginning to meet this need “The Gables provided a 

foundation for what further development would look like in the Kohler area.”

While The Gables successfully replaced vacant property that had been a reasonably 

active crime spot, it soon became clear that a growing menace to The Gables’ 

sustainability—and to Genesis Park—was coming from a block-long violent drug 

market across the street from the seniors’ complex, in the 1200 block of Kohler 

Avenue, a cul-de-sac. Chief Darrel Stephens said that that block was “a hotbed of 

the heroin trade in Charlotte.” Thus, as they had before, THP and the CharlotteMecklenburg Police Department, working with residents and many others, 

crafted a plan to safeguard previous accomplishments and further advance the 

neighborhood’s revitalization.

Part of the local policymakers’ commitment to focused interagency 

teamwork. The collaborators worked with, and as members of, a city managerinitiated Neighborhood Action Team (NAT) that included representatives, assigned 

to “fragile” Charlotte neighborhoods, from such city departments as police, 

Neighborhood Development, and Engineering. The NAT’s purpose was to address 

a variety of problems including crime; housing stock; neighborhood infrastructure 

such as curb, gutter, and sidewalks; lack of access to transportation; social services; 

job creation; and community appearance. The establishment by the city of the NAT 

constituted a commitment to concentrate both financial and personnel resources in 

one area for an extended period until monitoring revealed acceptable progress on 

enumerated goals, and the neighborhoods were no longer classified as fragile.

THP was a potent component of this multiparty approach to improving Druid Hills. 

The police, knowing they could rely on THP to follow heavy police enforcement with 

more durable, physical development solutions, clamped down on Kohler Avenue, 

assigning four officers to work at this and other locations in Druid Hills. As the 

police brought the drug market under control, THP—with funds that a deputy police 

chief helped persuade the city to make available—bought the entire block, razed it, 

and will redevelop the property as part of a large-scale affordable housing plan for 86 

acres adjacent to and including Kohler Avenue.

Kohler Avenue was one of three focus areas for the development-public safety 

partnership in Druid Hills. Another was a residential area surrounding Olando and 

Rachel Streets. The third came to be called the Park area because the objective was to 

work with the county to buy and remove decrepit and crime attracting/generating 

houses and have the County Parks Department replace them with the first public 
38 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

recreational area ever in Druid Hills. THP, for its part, would purchase parcels 

rimming the new park site and develop affordable homes for families who would 

have a stake in the success of the park and be able to keep watchful eyes on it.

Public safety improvements. The public safety improvements that followed 

the partnerships’ concerted actions in these three focus areas in Druid Hills are 

highlighted in Figures 13 and 14. They depict improvements in the three areas 

ranging from 56 percent to 84 percent drops in reported serious crimes and declines 

from 64 percent to 93 percent in the public’s calls for service about disorder 

problems. 

The big declines in crime and calls for service in Druid Hills’ three focus areas 

generally coincided with THP gaining control in 2000 and 2001 over the troublemaking residential units. The salience of site control is that the developer, working 

with law enforcement collaborators, was able to build away crime-generating 

conditions (blight, drug houses, etc.) through renovation or demolition and was 

able to remove criminals and enablers of criminal activity from the properties 

through relocations, voluntary departures, evictions, or convictions. Reflecting 

the views of many who know Druid Hills well, Stan Cook said: “At the end of the 

day, the evidence is absolutely clear that the acquisition of the troubled property is 

what caused the reduction in repeat calls for service because the times of purchase 

correlate directly with the reductions.”

Druid Hills Neighborhood Reported Part 1 Crime

Figure 13: Reported Part I crime includes homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, 

larceny, auto theft, arson.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 39

Police involvement is a reflection of a problem-solving approach to crime 

control. The philosophy that guided Stan Cook and his police colleagues in judging 

whether and how to engage robustly with a high-capacity community developer 

was the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s strong interest in community 

policing and problem-oriented policing. That interest, in turn, came from having two 

consecutive police chiefs, Dennis Nowicki and Darrel Stephens, who were nationally 

admired for their strategic, innovative leadership in the policing field. Nowicki 

brought ideas from the outside world into the department in many ways, including 

a year-long residency in the organization for University of Wisconsin Professor 

Herman Goldstein, the “father” of problem-oriented policing. Stephens, in several 

police leadership posts before coming to Charlotte, was a pioneer in implementing 

and helping Goldstein and his protégés hone the methodology of problem-solving 

police work. Both chiefs served stints on THP’s board of directors.

The authors interviewed Nowicki, who was chief from 1994 to 1999, for a 2002 LISC 

Community Safety Initiative newsletter, during which he recounted some of his 

thinking about the police becoming actively involved with community developers:

“A lot of research links crime to economic conditions. If you accept that 

research, as I do, then police who are worried about preventing crime should 

assist in improving the economic status of the communities they serve. 

We can’t do everything of course, but we should do the things that make a 

difference. When I was chief in Charlotte, the police department confiscated 

a strip mall-type shopping center because it was hosting drug sales. Under 

the asset forfeiture laws, the City of Charlotte became co-owner with the 

federal government of this shopping center. A CDC approached the police and 

wanted us to give them the shopping center. I thought that was a good idea. 

I approached our U.S. Attorney, Mark Calloway, who said we could not give 

the CDC the shopping center unless it was a Weed and Seed site, but he was 

willing to go to bat for us and get the site declared a Weed and Seed site. The 

police backed him up, and we succeeded. The CDC took ownership and did an 

excellent job renovating it and lining up good retail occupants.

If the police agency is doing real community policing and problem-solving—

spending its resources and reputation to support officers who work effectively 

with the community—I don’t think structural changes are required [to 

spur active police-developer partnerships]. Such an agency should jump on 

opportunities to significantly improve the neighborhood, which is what 

a talented CDC is good at. If the mission of police is to prevent the next 

crime—which I believe is ‘job 1’—working with CDCs is just common sense. 

Where police may need to change if they are to be really helpful to CDCs is 

by becoming more informed about and cooperative with other parts of local 

government (department of neighborhoods, budget, public works, etc.). 
40 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

A multi-agency team we assembled in Charlotte worked with a CDC as a 

full partner to convert a convenience store that hosted drug dealing into a 

responsible store that really served the community. In turn, the CDC helped 

the police by providing space for a police storefront office.”23

Figure 14: The types of disorder calls included here are those that Charlotte-Mecklenburg 

Police Department (CMPD) Crime Analyst Mike Humphrey told us had long been particularly 

troublesome in Druid Hills: drug-related issues, fights, alcohol-beverage control problems, 

weapon-related events, prowlers, and suspicious people or vehicles. The double-digit declines in 

calls to the CMPD about these disorder problems in Druid Hills’ three focus areas (the highestcrime areas in the community) had ripple effects throughout Druid Hills; the drop in disorder 

calls neighborhood-wide over this period was 58.7 percent. These accomplishments outpaced 

progress on the same call types over the same period in a comparison Charlotte neighborhood, 

Smallwood, where the decline was only 8.9 percent. And over the Department’s entire 

jurisdiction (Mecklenburg County), during these years the number of calls to police about these 

problems increased by 26.6 percent. None of these percentages adjust for the county’s and city’s 

large population increases during these years. Data for 2002 are not presented due to a change 

in the Department’s computer-aided dispatch system, which makes comparison to other years 

misleading.

Druid Hills Disorder-Related Calls For Service
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 41

The authors also asked Dennis Nowicki whether police-community development 

corporation partnerships are just too time-consuming for local police, given their 

other pressing obligations. “If police are willing to ignore their mission to prevent 

crime just because everyone is focused on terrorism, shame on us,” he said. “If 

anything, [today’s] economic stresses...justify more than ever that police form 

powerful, productive alliances with groups such as CDCs.”

Former police executive Stan Cook agrees with Nowicki that police departments 

should see great value in working with effective developers. Budget, workload, or 

officer competency issues, Cook argues, are not plausible excuses for most police 

agencies to refrain from engaging in these collaborations: 

“All police departments have the capacity to work with developers to 

achieve results. But all police departments do not have the will to do it. I’m 

convinced of that. The problem is where folks’ attitudes are at. If you value 

problem solving, and you’re willing to look at problems from many different 

perspectives and determine how you fit in, as an organizational partner, to 

making this problem-solving work successful, then you can bring to bear 

whatever resources you have, in a very concentrated and effective way.”

Figure 15: After the transformation of Genesis Park, the adjacent Druid Hills neighborhood became 

the site of the region’s worst drug market, based on Kohler Avenue in homes such as that in the 

photo on the left. The Kohler Avenue crime hot spot threatened the sustainability of a recent $4.9 

million Housing Partnership development (The Gables Seniors Housing complex, right photo), 

down the block on Kohler. The Housing Partnership acquired and razed the entire problem-block 

on Kohler and will build high-quality affordable housing there as part of an 86-acre development 

plan. Besides providing much-needed housing for Druid Hills’ low-income elderly, The Gables 

stands at the southern gateway to the Druid Hills neighborhood, setting a tone of optimism and 

reinvestment for the entire community. (Photos c. 2000 and 2003) 
42 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Figure 16: Elsewhere in Druid Hills, The Housing Partnership and the county worked together to 

purchase and remove crime-generating, blighted housing stock (left photo) and in its place to 

construct the first-ever public park in the entire neighborhood. Finally, Druid Hills’ families have 

a safe and attractive playground for their children in their own resurging community. (Photos c. 

2002 and November 2007) 

Some Lessons for Policymakers

In the absence of homeownership, good property management is key to safe, 

stable rental properties. This is a proposition on which Pat Garrett, Stan Cook, and 

others firmly concur.24 When Darrel Stephens was chief, the Department analyzed 

crime patterns in different types of owned and rented residential properties.25 

Stephens summarized the findings: 

“The key variable may be not the percentage of properties which are rentals 

but how well the rental properties—especially multifamily rental units—

are managed. The CMPD’s experience suggests (to me anyway) that for 

multifamily rentals management is in fact the key issue as it relates to crime 

and police calls for service.”

According to Cook, starting in 1998 police, developers, and others helped increase 

the level of code enforcement, a crucial step in stemming crime. “Where there’s poor 

management of low-income properties, you’re going to have crime problems,” he 

declared.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 43

Strategic approaches that build critical mass. THP President Pat Garrett and the 

police have honed their strategy since their early projects. They have realized that 

a key success factor is achieving “a critical mass of stability” (in the words of THP’s 

long-term Statesville Avenue Corridor Plan, adopted in 2001). To reach critical 

mass—a tipping point for a neighborhood—police experts believe that the scale of 

the solutions has to match the scale of the problems. Building a handful of highquality affordable homes in the midst of uncontrolled blocks of blighted, crime 

attracting-generating units will not turn a beleaguered neighborhood around.

An orderly, persistent process. One of the main takeaways from the Charlotte 

partnership between developers and public safety practitioners is that there is 

a relatively orderly process at work. The history of this collaboration certainly 

includes—and, indeed, embraces and takes sustenance from—instances of police 

officers, community organizers, and others who have taken entrepreneurial, 

sometimes beyond-the-call-of duty action against the daunting realities of crime, 

grime, and hopelessness. Those heroics, however, mostly belong in the color 

commentary to this methodical success. The main story of Charlotte’s success is 

about a long-term, business-like, planned, budgeted, structured, and infrastructured

program driven by competent managers in the community development, public 

safety, and other industries. 

The champions and technicians of Charlotte’s systematic process follow it not out of 

spurts of adventurism or as departures from their real jobs but because they believe, 

based on accumulating evidence, that this process has succeeded and will continue 

to succeed. The day-to-day challenges and setbacks are survivable because there is a 

long-term vision, strategic plan, and expectation of success to be achieved through 

dutiful implementation of the plan. For people like THP President Garrett and 

former Deputy Chief Cook to abandon a joint development-public safety strategy 

because of setbacks in one or more projects would be like Amtrak deciding to get out 

of the railroad business because a couple of trains derailed.

Still, as we caution in each of our case studies, the public safety-development 

strategy at this time in America is young and fragile. It is very much alive and 

growing because of those in leadership positions who believe it is a better way to do 

business, especially in an era of very tight municipal resources. Cops and community 

members everywhere can attest that a valuable strategy that took years to build and 

has begun to hit pay dirt can be undermined if it is neglected by those who hold the 

purse strings and direct public safety operations.
44 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Would You Do It Again?

From the developer’s perspective, Garrett told the authors:

“Absolutely. It was really expensive for us to do. We spent lots of staff time 

and lots of money doing things that cannot be tied to an actual house—we 

had to clean up lots, plant extra bushes, etc.... We believe...the return 

eventually exceeded the cost. The thing that I would worry about the most is 

that elected officials don’t realize the importance of ‘patience’ money (money 

that gives someone the ability to write a check when the slum landlord is 

ready to sell). In addition, practitioners should realize that this is a longterm project. It took us years to complete and cost us lots of unrestricted 

money. I also caution other developers that money with federal restrictions 

cannot do everything that needs to be done in an area such as Genesis Park. 

Still, I absolutely would do this kind of project again. It was the right thing 

to do, and it was extremely rewarding to see it happening despite all the 

challenges.”

“You can see clear results in neighborhood 

after neighborhood where The Housing 

Partnership has been working. It changes 

the quality of life. We will usually see 

a spike in the number of calls when 

revitalization efforts begin because 

residents are starting to exert control over 

their community space. Then it really drops 

off as the environment becomes stable. 

From a public safety standpoint, the more 

people feel like they own part of their 

neighborhood, the less difficulty there is.

Kohler Avenue is a perfect example. There 

were 12-13 rental duplexes on a short, 

dead-end street where we repeatedly 

arrested and evicted drug dealers. The 

Housing Partnership was able to come in and buy the units and tear them 

down. This made long-term change possible. 

When The Housing Partnership builds—or rebuilds— they do an excellent job 

of managing the property. This is extremely important. Problems arise when 

absentee landlords and investors are not concerned about their properties or the 

communities surrounding them. In fact, I wish that we could somehow use The 

Housing Partnership as an example of how everyone should manage property.”

CMPD Chief Darrel W. Stephens, quoted in The Housing Partnership’s

2005 annual report.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 45

Besides comments that we have presented from other CMPD executives, we asked 

“would you do it again” of former Deputy Chief Stan Cook and current Deputy Chief 

Ken Miller.

Stan Cook said that problem-solving police will keep working with highly effective 

community developers, over and over, because police

“can’t achieve these kinds of sustainable crime reductions without dealing 

with specific problem properties. You need a plan that changes what goes on 

there—better management of rental properties, acquisition and demolition, 

etc. You can’t solve that problem with enforcement, short of parking a 

police car there 24 hours a day. Sustainability comes from changing the 

environment. Without a partner who can help change the environment—by 

tackling specific locations and doing revitalization—the police are swimming 

upstream all the time because they are not really treating the problem, 

they’re treating symptoms.”

Ken Miller is the deputy chief for the Administrative Services Group, and part of 

his job is to mind the budget and think about questions like return on investment 

of police resources. Earlier in his career, Miller commanded the district that serves 

Druid Hills, and he has kept a keen eye on progress there in the years since he was 

promoted. Deputy Chief Miller told us:

“I don’t think you can overstate the value of the police collaboration with 

housing redevelopment groups like The Housing Partnership. They do good 

work in the revitalization of housing and neighborhoods and in management 

of tenants in their rentals. They turn neighborhoods around. I worked 

in Druid Hills. It was amazing how they turned around those houses. In 

Druid Hills there were a few homes nicely maintained but most were not. I 

remember going into one home on a search warrant, where the floor joists 

were broken and they were cooking on a stove that was leaning about 30 

degrees.

Stan Cook and Mike Humphrey (of our Research, Planning and Analysis unit) 

have spent a lot of time looking at the right properties for THP to acquire so 

they can build their way out of crime. They’re careful about it and good at it... 

They will look at dilapidated housing and match it up with crime to prioritize 

THP’s investment. THP is trying to stabilize communities, so what better way 

to do it than to pick off the houses that are causing the most trouble?

The only [kind of analysis of return on investment] we can’t do until we start 

tracking people is to see whether, when we build our way out of crime here, 

we move it somewhere else. All the research on displacement suggests that 

crime doesn’t come back at the same level. Beyond crime reductions, one of 

the additional benefits of our collaboration with The Housing Partnership and 

the residents of the revitalizing neighborhoods is improvements in trust. We 
46 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

are keenly aware that it’s a hard climb to the top of public trust and a short 

fall to the bottom. We have to be vigilant to protect the public trust and act 

in the public interest. I think our work with The Housing Partnership is really 

important in that regard.”26

A recent study by THP compiled data on police workload that adds a dimension 

to the return-on-investment consideration. In one of THP’s first revitalization 

areas, the miniscule neighborhood of Genesis Park, the amount of time police 

spent annually responding to “citizen-initiated calls for service” declined about 

80 percent—from “a high of over 1,000 hours in 1989 to the 2006 level of 

approximately 200 hours.”27 That diminution in police activity had been achieved 

in Genesis Park in 2003, hot on the heels of the revitalization, and has not ticked 

up since. In Druid Hills, where THP intervened more recently, the high-water mark 

for police time spent on calls was 3,000 hours per year (which remained remarkably 

consistent from 1996 through 2000). By 2003, following concerted developer-police 

interventions, that number fell to about 1,300 hours and hovered between that level 

and about 1,500 hours through 2006, representing about a 50 percent reduction in 

the number of hours police had to dedicate to Druid Hills’ service needs.28

Taking Stock of Progress in Druid Hills

Reflecting on their work in Charlotte thus far, developers and police concede that there 

is still work to be done in Druid Hills—especially attracting new stores and restaurants 

that serve the neighborhood and give it a stronger sense of community—but they feel 

they have made substantial progress. Blocks once dominated by dilapidated housing 

and criminal activity have given way to Druid Hill’s first park which, though still in 

the early stages of development, is already proving to be a stabilizing and unifying 

force for the entire neighborhood. Parents no longer have to drive their children to 

another neighborhood to use a playground. New homes being constructed on the 

perimeter of Druid Hills Park will have front porches that encourage “eyes on the park” 

by neighbors. For the first time in decades, there is safe, attractive, affordable rental 

housing for many Druid Hills seniors. See Figures 15 and 16.

One officer assigned to Druid Hills said, “When I patrol Druid Hills, I no longer see 

the past; I see the future. There is so much potential.” Residents reinforce that view, 

reporting that they feel safer and trust police. Since THP’s early work in Genesis 

Park, and even before that in the adjacent neighborhood of Greenville, dedicated 

officers have done much to earn community members’ trust. Officers were regularly 

among the volunteers giving of their personal time in neighborhood cleanups, 

construction of Habitat for Humanity homes, and other community rebuilding 

efforts. Community reactions were predictably positive: “They’re not just officers, 

they’re more or less friends,” said community leader Thomas “Pop” Sadler of Officers 

Mike Warren and Pat Tynan, who devoted themselves on- and off-duty to the 

communities of Genesis Park and Greenville.29 Mike Warren said at the time how 

good it felt to be able to form positive relationships with neighborhood kids, who 

“are so used to seeing us arresting their aunts and uncles.”30
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 47

A 45-year old Druid Hills resident, when asked to describe his neighborhood in 

1997, said: “In the evening when the stars came out, the gunfire did too.” But by 

2008, he said, “when the stars come out, the people come out. They walk their dogs, 

sit on their porches, and take evening walks for exercise. When the stars come out, 

the sound they now hear is owls hooting, a welcome change from the gunfire of the 

Druid Hills of a decade ago.”

Minneapolis, Minnesota: Phillips Neighborhood 

Collaboration between the Great Neighborhoods! Development 

Corporation and the Minneapolis Police Department

Minneapolis and Organization Facts

« City Population (2000): 382,618, living in 52 square miles

« Police Department (2008): sworn personnel = 879; budget = $122 million

« Great Neighborhoods! Development Corporation (GNDC): 2008 budget = $3.1 

million; as of 2008 holds $13.6 million in commercial real estate assets; serves 

50 businesses on GNDC-owned property with more than 500 employees and 

about 30,000 customers, clients, patients, and visitors annually. Staff (2008) = 5 

full-time, 2 part-time, plus 35 to 40 contractors

Phillips Neighborhood Facts (2000 Census)

 19,805 residents (5% of city total) in 1.6 square miles 

(2.7% of city’s 59 sq. miles) 

 Race/ethnicity:

« 22.1% Hispanic (various races)

« 24.4% Non-Hispanic White

« 29.1% African American

« 5.9% Asian-Pacific Islander

« 10.8% Native American

 Phillips is the city’s poorest community (median family income = $22,044)

 13% of Phillips residents are unemployed (more than twice the city-wide rate)

 34% of residents below poverty level – double the city-wide poverty rate

 78% of the 6,734 housing units are renter occupied

Figure 17: Minneapolis and Phillips neighborhood facts and figures.
48 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

The Debris of Urban Renewal

The Minneapolis community of Phillips, just eight blocks south of the Hubert H. 

Humphrey Metrodome and downtown, is the largest, poorest, and most racially and 

culturally diverse neighborhood in Minnesota (See figure 17). At least through the 

1990s, it was home to the nation’s largest community of urban Native Americans.31

Between 1980 and 2000, Phillips’ Black population rose from 8 percent to 22 

percent, mostly driven by a wave of East African and Somali immigrants. The main 

thoroughfare through Phillips, East Franklin Avenue, was once “a vital, workingclass commercial artery”32 “that mixed neighborhood groceries and hardware 

stores with homes and apartment blocks.”33 But for decades following World War 

II, Phillips and its commercial corridor declined in the face of suburban migration 

and urban renewal—and urban renewal’s characteristic sundering and isolation of 

neighborhoods ringing the resurgent downtown:

“The 1960s bracketing of the neighborhood on three sides by highways 

and the city’s reclamation of the Nicollet Island, Washington Avenue and 

Loring Park areas gutted and isolated large segments of the neighborhood 

and flooded it with thousands of working poor whose old dwellings were 

demolished to make way for parks, skyscrapers, condominiums and other 

urban renewal. Businesses and neighbors moved. Storefronts went vacant. 

Soup kitchens and bars flourished and crime rose. Property values fell, despite 

the best efforts of some residents, businesses and urban pioneers.”34

The hardware stores and mom-and-pop groceries gave way to an endless string of 

porn shops, liquor stores, and gin joints along Franklin Avenue. Theresa Carr, CEO 

of Great Neighborhoods! Development Corporation, recalled in an August 2008 

conversation with the authors that “Franklin Avenue in 1975 was just bar, bar, 

bar, liquor, liquor, liquor. You’d see people passed out on the street.” The executive 

director of the National Business Incubation Association offered a vivid recollection 

of conditions in Phillips during the late 1980s: “I saw people in the street selling 

their blood to make a living,” she told a reporter.35 A 1990 newspaper story said that 

during most of the 1980s, the 1-mile stretch of Franklin Avenue that runs through 

Phillips was “a place for most people to avoid, or ignore.”36

It became harder to ignore when Phillips became the driver of a spike in homicides 

which, in 1995, had local and national press calling the city “Murderapolis.” A 

convenience store-gas station at a busy intersection on Franklin Avenue was the 

subject of 517 calls for service to the police in just 1 year, 1999. A bar across the 

street was another driver of neighborhood violence, drunk and disorderly behavior, 

and disinvestment. It had been decades since Phillips—with a large population of 

elderly, a low rate of motor vehicle ownership, and poor public transportation—had 

a full-service grocery story, a pharmacy, or a real bank. To paraphrase a journalist 

who grew up in the community, Phillips was frayed and afraid.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 49

A Vision of Community Renewal through Commercial 

Corridor Transformation

Many years earlier, spurred by ancestral pride and a belief born of the 1960s that 

“we could change the world,” a small group of American Indian women who lived in 

Phillips decided to band together to revive their neighborhood. In 1975 they created 

the American Indian Business Development Corporation, the CDC which today is 

called Great Neighborhoods! Development Corporation (GNDC). (For simplicity, 

on these pages the organization will be referred to by its current name.) They saw 

their mission as “empowering American Indian people and others through business 

development in distressed Minneapolis neighborhoods,” and their principal strategy 

was to reimagine and rebuild the Franklin Avenue commercial district.

With the help of corporate business executives on their board and dedicated 

community bankers, the group in 1983 built a strip mall—the first shopping center 

in the nation ever developed by a nonprofit organization. The two-block-long 

Franklin Circles Shopping Center, managed by the CDC, was greeted with great 

hope but over the years was unable to prosper amidst the durable open-air drug 

markets, disorderly bars, and porn establishments that surrounded it to the east 

and west along Franklin Avenue. Franklin Circles’ challenges were compounded 

by its inadequate design for safety and natural surveillance and by the developer’s 

inexperience with screening commercial tenants. Several of the shopping center’s 

stores and the parking lot became prime locations for drug dealing, prostitution, 

and assorted other commerce-suppressing problems. A $3.8 million small business 

incubator the CDC established in 1989 brought the area some much-needed jobs, 

but during the next 8 years these startups proved to have neither the staying power 

nor the scale to have a transformative impact on the community.

Beginning in 1997—and marked by the start of Theresa Carr’s tenure as CEO—the 

CDC began to make some real headway, animated by a broader vision for what 

Phillips could be. What others viewed simply as the poorest community in the city, 

Carr saw as a richly diverse set of cultures. If those cultures, as expressed through 

ethnic emporia and in other ways, were properly showcased, GNDC believed, Phillips 

would appeal to shoppers and diners from throughout Minneapolis and to tourists 

from around the globe. Among the benefits for neighborhood residents would 

be enhanced pride, jobs, income, quality of life, and empowerment.37 By August 

2000, the organization owned “200,000 square-feet of commercial real estate in 

the Phillips neighborhood—more than six city blocks” on East Franklin Avenue. 

Many of the CDC-developed businesses showed promise and were beginning to 

foster renewal in Phillips, but they were continually buffeted by Franklin Avenue’s 

seemingly irrepressible drug markets, prostitution, and disorder. The police did their 

best, but enforcement tactics were not making sustainable improvements. 
50 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

A Policymaker’s and Community Developer’s Priorities 

Coincide

Over breakfast one morning in that summer of 2000—at a popular restaurant that 

Carr and her colleagues had attracted to the CDC’s shopping plaza (now renamed 

Ancient Traders Market), Carr had intended to ask Minneapolis Mayor Sharon 

Sayles Belton for money for several projects. “But she turned the tables on me,” 

Carr said in 2008. As a news account put it, the mayor asked Carr to “help clean up 

the northwest corner of 11th Ave. S. and E. Franklin Ave.”38 That corner, diagonally 

across the intersection from where the mayor and Carr were breakfasting, was the 

site of the convenience store-gas station that was preoccupying police, demoralizing 

the neighborhood, and tamping down revenues for Ancient Traders Market and 

GNDC’s other commercial tenants. “When the mayor asks you to help, you help,” 

Carr said,39 plus she knew that the mayor had accurately identified one of the main 

properties that was holding back neighborhood revitalization. Another of these hot 

spots was a one-block stretch of 12th Avenue, which intersected Franklin and had 

long harbored a busy open-air drug market, whose effects rippled widely through 

the community. Drug unit prosecutors working for Hennepin County Attorney 

Amy Klobuchar cited as the facts of life in Phillips “kids who can’t go to playgrounds 

because of drug dealers” and “mothers getting harassed at bus stops.”40

Creating Fertile Ground for Development: Focused, 

Collaborative Crime Suppression

Carr convened a wide-ranging group of community leaders, business operators, 

and public agency representatives to figure out how together they might make 

greater headway against these founts of fear, crime, and disinvestment than 

any of them had been able to make acting alone. The GNDC had long cooperated 

with and communicated with the police, but now they hatched an idea to 

substantially increase the presence of police on these blocks and to promote a 

much more effective, trusting, problem-solving relationship among the public 

safety practitioners (city police, county prosecutors, and probation officers), 

the area’s businesses, and residents. Heightened police presence and positive 

community-police interaction, the group agreed, were important building blocks 

of revitalization, at least until an unstable area such as the Franklin corridor is 

stabilized. 
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 51

“It is a driving value in Minneapolis that economic 

development leads to crime reduction and crime 

reduction leads to economic development. The 

solutions to both objectives are intertwined and 

must work hand-in-hand. By harnessing the 

power of collaboration between our police and 

community developers, we have turned tough 

neighborhoods around. Areas once known for 

crime are now producing jobs, building housing, 

and attracting businesses large and small.

You’ve got to meet the tough challenges of 

crime with tough law enforcement, but know 

that you can’t arrest away crime. Attacking 

crime also means getting at its root causes, many of which are economic. We 

more effectively fight crime and more effectively grow local neighborhood 

economies when our police and our entrepreneurs work together as a united 

team to improve our neighborhoods. We have seen first hand the power of this 

strategy.” 

—R.T. Rybak, Jr., Mayor, City of Minneapolis (2009) (Photo: 2009/City of Minneapolis) 

Of great assistance to Carr and her development team in brainstorming and 

implementing a plan of action were Minneapolis Police Chief Bob Olson (who served 

as chief from 1995 through 2003—key years in the Phillips turnaround story), Third 

Precinct Commander Sharon Lubinski (who now runs the department day-to-day 

as the assistant chief, serving under the leadership of Chief Tim Dolan), Hennepin 

County Attorney (and now U.S. Senator from Minnesota) Amy Klobuchar, city 

council representatives, and other policymakers.

 “They find the place very useful, so they come there. If you don’t create 

something useful, you will beat your head against the wall complaining the 

police aren’t using it. We never let anyone call the place the ‘cop shop.’ It’s 

not. A cop shop is a little 10 by10-foot room, and cops are told they have 

to go sit in it. Nobody wants to. Elected officials can boast that they have 

a cop office in a neighborhood, but actually it’s not very useful to anyone. 

We wanted an office that really is used. It’s a high-tech location linked to 

the MPD’s [Minneapolis Police Department] computers, and that’s what 

makes it tremendously useful. Putting probation under the same roof has 

been very useful to both them and the police. With some of the cop shops in 

Minneapolis, the Police Department pays pretty high rent. Not so with our 

Safety Center, which remains rent-free to the MPD. We believe this type of 

safety center is an important new model.”41
52 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

The police department’s annual report hailed the facility: “The Safety Center has 

grown into a crossroads of police and community action. It provides meeting 

space for numerous community groups and gives the neighborhood cops a place to 

interview victims or suspects while remaining in the heart of the neighborhood.”42

The police department promptly moved the base of neighborhood operations into 

the Center. Prostitution and drug stings began to be routinely based out of the 

Safety Center rather than the Precinct Center, which is more than 2 miles away on 

Minnehaha Avenue. To the police, the Center’s informal, clean, and inviting facilities 

have proven an effective venue for doing paper work, gathering information from 

local residents and merchants, and making pit stops. To many who live or work in 

Phillips, the Center’s familiar, neighborhood-rooted feel is less intimidating than 

conventional police stations. The extensive foot traffic in and out of the Center 

magnifies the visible presence of safety work throughout the area.

Mike Sandin, a Hennepin County juvenile probation officer, reported that not 

everyone loves this Community Safety Center: “Criminals hate it because we are 

tightening the net of information, and we are more effective in the neighborhood.”43

So besides improving police-community relations in a neighborhood which had longheld grievances on both sides, the Safety Center has facilitated sharing missioncritical information. Theresa Carr told us how the Safety Center fits into their overall 

game plan for neighborhood transformation:

“It’s a way of bringing police and community together, but it’s a second step 

after the bedrock piece: acquiring site control over problem properties so we 

can turn them into neighborhood assets. I don’t want to emphasize the Safety 

Center as a part of our strategy so much that it puts all the responsibility for 

our safety on the police. That would be like putting the responsibility for my 

health on the heart surgeon when I’ve been eating a high-fat diet. We need 

the police help in various ways, but the foundation if we’re going to build our 

way out of crime is that we must own the real estate. That way we become 

responsible for what goes on there.”

The Elements of a Commercial Corridor Turnaround 

Strategy

The GNDC’s core strategy consists of four basic elements:

1. Own and responsibly manage the real estate.

2. Do development that adds esthetic value, highly desired services and retail 

outlets, is pedestrian friendly, and fosters safe streets by making them busy 

during the day and evenings with healthy commerce and other attractions.

3. Use crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) techniques to 

design or redesign safer buildings and outdoor public spaces.

4. Create close partnerships between the community development organization, 

police, probation and other partners and stakeholders, facilitated by working 

under one roof in a community safety center.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 53

This is how GNDC implements its mission, which today is to “develop real estate to 

house businesses that provide jobs, goods and services to distressed neighborhoods, 

and, at the same time, reduce crime in surrounding areas” within the city. Like the 

two other community developers featured in Building Our Way Out of Crime, GNDC is 

notable for its explicit focus on reducing crime. The CDC thinks of its crime-busting 

role in language widely used by crime-control theorists and strategists: “Every crime 

has a perpetrator, victim, and place,” said Carr. “If you remove one of these elements, 

you don’t have a crime. We deal with place.” She adds: “Because we work in areas of 

concentrated poverty and crime, we put as much effort into crime and safety as we 

do into economic development. If a developer doesn’t do that, crime will erase all of 

your hard work.”

The results of teamwork to steadfastly implement their philosophy and strategy are 

measured in public safety improvements and a rejuvenation of Phillips’ commercial 

corridor, which in turn has fueled the rebirth of hope, job creation and retention, 

neighborhood livability, and civic engagement by community residents. The 

returns on investment and cost-savings for the criminal justice system have been 

appreciatively acknowledged by developers and their public safety partners alike.

By the time the mayor and Carr had their productive breakfast in the summer of 

2000, the city had already recovered from their homicide spike (Professor David 

Kennedy had been brought to town by the Police Executive Research Forum in 1995 

to help the city strategize a plan that proved successful). But by 2000, the mayor and 

Carr agreed, most of the daunting problems forestalling the further revitalization of 

Phillips sprang from the persistent open-air drug markets and the assorted problems 

those markets attracted and spawned. Thus, the developer-police partners took 

square aim at the Franklin corridor’s durable drug markets.

Key Interventions to Stabilize and Rejuvenate the 

Commercial Corridor

The book on which this Guide is based goes into considerable detail, but for present 

purposes only a few of the most important interventions made during an 18-month 

period are highlighted (these interventions are placed on a timeline in Figure 19 that 

will show the sequencing of activities and crime improvements).

The team opened the Franklin Avenue Community Safety Center, staffed it full-time 

with a crime-prevention specialist, and used it to bring police, probation officers, 

residents, and businesses into regular, productive problem-solving collaborations 

(such as a very successful court watch program that prosecutors credit with 

meaningful sentences for chronic neighborhood offenders). Next, after efforts to 

curtail the area’s crime by reducing the 24-hour convenience store-gas station’s 

hours of operation failed (the city council cut its hours but then promptly reversed 

course when lobbied by the multinational oil company that owned the facility), 

GNDC decided to just buy the property. In short order, bulldozers accomplished 

what endless hours of police response and nuisance abatement efforts had not.
54 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Heavy equipment carried the day, too, against the notorious drug market on 12th

Avenue. As part of a plan to reinvigorate Ancient Traders Market, GNDC worked 

with the city to close the problem block on 12th Avenue and convert it into an 

attractive brick pedestrian plaza, which created a campus feel for Ancient Traders by 

linking its original and newer buildings.

After city budget woes threatened the Safety Center’s loss of full-time staffing, 

heroics by GNDC and Chief Olson maintained the salary, and great fortune brought 

the Center an unusually creative, proactive crime-prevention specialist who helped 

fully realize the community organizing, police-community trust-building, and 

business support objectives of the Safety Center. “I really want to highlight the 

crime-prevention specialist’s importance to the success of a Safety Center,” Assistant 

Chief Lubinski told us: “That CPS is the face of the Safety Center and the constant 

there.... We learned we need that full-time presence so when cops come and go 

there is someone there who knows what the crime problems are and knows when 

meetings need to occur.” Developers and police tell us the full effects of having this 

full-time manager in the Safety Center began to be felt in the neighborhood starting 

in 2003.

The GNDC attracted one of Minneapolis’ successful wholesale and retail bakeries, 

Franklin Street Bakery, to the corner where they had bulldozed the convenience 

store. The bakery had a small wholesale operation several blocks away but was on the 

verge of fleeing the neighborhood entirely until the owner sensed the progress the 

developer-police team was making. With construction from the ground up of a $4.9 

million, 20,000 square-foot facility, featuring huge windows on Franklin Avenue 

in both the retail and production areas (for marketing and natural surveillance of 

both the street and the bakery’s interior), GNDC had accomplished a community 

developer’s dream: Franklin Street Bakery is a wholesome business that serves 

Phillips and draws customers to the neighborhood from throughout the region for 

its prize-winning cakes and pastries. Its wholesale bakery runs 24 hours a day; and 

by staying in the neighborhood the bakery saved dozens of jobs for local residents 

and, in fact, added 50 more. An article in a trade journal, Modern Baking, reported 

that many retail experts were skeptical that the venture could succeed in Phillips, 

saying, “If you build it, no one will come.”44 But as dough rolled out, the dough rolled 

in: In its first year at the new location, the bakery’s gross revenues nearly tripled, 

from $2.5 million to more than $7 million. The intersection of Franklin and 11th is 

now filled, day and night, with the aroma of baking and signs of productive work and 

commerce rather than junkies, dealers, drunks, and dismay.

Following these several steps, which knocked the crime down and enlivened 

the neighborhood, GNDC continued with a series of stabilizing and revitalizing 

developments along Franklin, one of which is especially notable: After 2 decades 

of one after another unsuccessful and crime-harboring grocery stores on the east 

end of Ancient Traders Market, GNDC brought an ALDI Foods to the property in 

2004, and for the past 5 years the neighborhood has enjoyed its first full-service 
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 55

supermarket. And ALDI has enjoyed its customers: reflecting the sometimes 

underestimated purchasing power of Phillips’ nearly 20,000 mostly low-income 

residents, they made this ALDI store, as Carr said, “the second highest grossing 

ALDI in Minnesota.”

Results

Figures 19 and 20 depict the dramatic fall-off in the drug-dealing problems in 

a 16-square-block area that police and developers agreed should be the most 

immediate impact area for their turnaround work. Figure 19 shows the reductions 

in arrests and calls for service; Figure 20 adds to that information a sequence of 

key interventions by the developers and police, showing how closely the huge 

improvements coincide with the partners’ building-away-crime activities.

In reporting in connection with this and the other two case studies that developerpolice interventions and improving public safety coincided, the authors appreciate 

that, as social scientists caution, “correlation is not necessarily causation.” They 

welcome others bringing appropriate analytical methodologies to explore the impact 

of targeted community development-public safety interventions. For these case 

studies, however, they take encouragement from community residents, merchants, 

developers and criminal justice workers who believe, based on their experience 

and observations, that specific improvements are linked causally to the identified 

interventions.
56 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Figure 19: The focus area for which the Minneapolis Police Department pulled data 

on calls for service and arrests is approximately 15 square blocks centered on the 

intersection of East Franklin Avenue and 11th Avenue South. Calls for service data 

begin in 2002. Due to a database change, 2007 data are for 3/27/07 to 12/31/07. 

“Loitering for Drugs Arrests” are arrests made to attack open-air drug markets.

Arrests and Calls for Service, 

Phillips Neighborhood Focus Area, 2001–2007
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 57

The decline from 2002 through 2007 in calls for service complaining of narcotics 

crimes in this vicinity was a whopping 98 percent (from 291 to 5 calls). Assistant 

Chief Sharon Lubinski reported: “The reduction of 911 calls for service means that 

citizens were not seeing narcotics dealing, and thus the area was fairly clear of 

dealers. This neighborhood is a very savvy area, and if they saw dealing, they would 

certainly call.”

Robberies (those against businesses and persons, including robberies in which a gun 

was used or which resulted in demonstrable bodily harm) by 2001 happily were not 

very prevalent in the area around 11th Avenue and Franklin Avenue, but they, too, 

declined—by 18 percent from 2001 to 2007. This reduction was not as dramatic, of 

course, as the declines in narcotics-related calls and arrests; yet, the 18 percent falloff in robberies stands against increases in robberies during the same period in the 

entire Phillips neighborhood (which had an 8 percent rise) and in the Third Precinct 

(which had a 12 percent increase).

Figure 20 shows the time frame during which these crime indicators changed 

suddenly—and durably—and plots against these improvements the sequence of 

several key community development-public safety interventions described earlier.
58 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Arrests, Calls for Service and Interventions, Phillips 

Neighborhood Focus Area, 2001-2007

Figure 20: In a focus area in Minneapolis’ Phillips Neighborhood, enormous, rapid 

declines occurred in narcotics activity (measured by three indicators) following the 

indicated community development and public safety interventions in 2002 and 2003. 

Strong-arm and armed robberies also declined 18 percent. After pushing crime down, 

it was kept down during the ensuing years—and Phillips was further reinvigorated—by 

several more development projects along the neighborhood’s main commercial 

corridor, Franklin Avenue.

The calls for service are calls from the pubic to police about narcotics offenses. The 

arrests are felony narcotics arrests and arrests for loitering related to open-air drug 

markets.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 59

Figure 21 shows run-down buildings that were replaced or completely renovated 

in the Phillips Neighborhood development project. The Franklin Street Bakery 

and a portion of the reinvigorated Ancient Traders Market are depicted in Figure 

22. In addition, in early 2009, after 4 decades without a real commercial bank, 

Minnesota’s largest neighborhood welcomed to GNDC’s Ancient Traders Market the 

Woodlands National Bank—the sixth branch in the state of this Native Americanowned financial institution. Over the years, developers tried unsuccessfully to get 

Woodlands and two other banks to come to Phillips, but today, as GNDC’s Theresa 

Carr said, “The Woodlands’ analysis showed there are enough viable businesses in 

the area to make the deposits the bank needs to function. Our development helped 

jump start things, but now the neighborhood’s economy is working on its own. And 

that’s exactly the way revitalization is supposed to work.”

Figure 21: During 1999, a convenience store/gas station (left) at the intersection of East Franklin 

Avenue and 11th AvenueSouth accounted for 517 calls for service to the police. One block away 

(right), an uncontrollable street market flourished on 12th Avenue South at Franklin Avenue. 
60 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Figure 22: Great Neighborhoods! Development Corporation worked closely with the police to build 

their way out of this commercial corridor’s disinvestment and safety challenges. Buying and 

transforming seven blocks along East Franklin Avenue, GNDC turned the street into an engine 

of neighborhood employment, commerce, safety, and pride. The convenience store gave way to 

the Franklin Street Bakery, a 24-hour wholesale bakery with an award-winning retail store; 12th 

Avenue was closed, converted into a pedestrian plaza in the GNDC-developed Ancient Traders 

Market shopping center, and became a popular spot for relaxation and ethnic celebrations.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 61

Figure 23: In early 2009, after four decades without a real commercial bank, Minnesota’s 

largest neighborhood welcomed to GNDC’s Ancient Traders Market the Woodlands National 

Bank—the sixth branch in the state of this Native American-owned financial institution. Over 

the years, developers tried unsuccessfully to get Woodlands and two other banks to come to 

Phillips, but today, as GNDC’s Theresa Carr told us, “The Woodlands’ analysis showed there 

are enough viable businesses in the area to make the deposits the bank needs to function. 

Our development helped jump start things, but now the neighborhood’s economy is working 

on its own. And that’s exactly the way revitalization is supposed to work.” (Photos: 5/09/Margo 

Geffen for GNDC)
62 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

By 2006, Great Neighborhoods! Development Corporation had developed seven 

blocks of commercial real estate, encompassing almost 50 businesses: a grocery 

store, pharmacy, restaurant, bakery, florist, American Indian gift store, American 

Indian medical clinic, and many others. As of August 2008, more than 500 people 

are employed in the enterprises GNDC developed. See Figure 23.

Would You Do It Again?

Actions speak louder than words. They are doing it again—launching the most 

ambitious commercial corridor turnaround development project in GNDC’s history. 

This time they are working on the north side of Minneapolis, with police leadership 

support and active collaboration with one of their long-time and favorite police 

partners from Phillips, Mike Martin, who was promoted from lieutenant in a south 

side precinct to commanding officer of a north side precinct.

Once again, GNDC is marching into a forbidding challenge—a community with a 

well-deserved reputation for violence and disinvestment. A Minneapolis journal 

called the area “an economic wasteland—few jobs, little private investment, and 

only a handful of promising businesses.”45 Yet, in conducting her needs assessment 

of the neighborhood, Theresa Carr also saw what many for-profit developers don’t 

know how to perceive: A community whose potential is waiting to be tapped. From 

a financial point of view, she found “a population with significant purchasing power 

(some $191 million annually, according to city estimates) and sufficient density to 

support a large commercial district....”46 “Northway Community Trust, a nonprofit 

devoted to creating wealth and reducing poverty in north Minneapolis, estimates 

that roughly 75 percent of disposable income on the North Side is currently spent 

outside the community.”47

GNDC is eager to replicate its close partnership with police and other public safety 

organizations, confident that it now knows what the cornerstone of this partnership 

must be: “We simply could not have accomplished a fraction of what we have with 

our many, valued partners if we had not brought to the table our ownership of the 

property.” The partners’ pioneering work in Phillips leaves them sharing optimism 

about addressing neighborhood challenges. GNDC’s pitch to investors and possible 

commercial tenants is grounded in their insight into the latent capacity of forgotten 

neighborhoods. As Carr told a reporter, “We don’t say, ‘Come here because it’s the 

right thing to do.’ ... We say, ‘Come ... because it’s a great business opportunity.’”48

Echoing the perspective of her police collaborators about their commercial corridor 

turnaround strategy, Carr says simply: “We have figured something out that’s really 

effective. Neighborhoods don’t have to stay down—they can do this.”
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 63

Taking Stock of the Phillips Renewal

The pride of Phillips is nourished by what its residents and visitors see in every 

direction today when they stand at Franklin and 11th Avenues: the popular and 

prosperous Franklin Street Bakery, the bustling Ancient Traders Market, a great 

florist, a respected housing developer, an arts center in place of a porn theatre, 

dining alfresco, and cultural festivals on the pedestrian plaza that used to be a 

brazen street drug market, and a host of other busy, safe, family-friendly, jobcreating and profitable businesses, services, and cultural attractions.

The revitalization and stabilization of Phillips remains a dynamic and continuous 

process, and the troubled national economy certainly challenges this community 

as it does so many others. But in the quest to make this a sustainable, great 

neighborhood, the restoration of East Franklin Avenue as a vibrant commercial 

corridor has been a real game-changer. Important, rather than build away the rich 

historical cultures of Phillips, the community’s restoration draws heavily on its 

nourishing, multicultural roots. As French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville 

remarked, “When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in 

darkness.” But, thanks to a remarkable team of community builders, the past does 

indeed help light the path forward for Phillips. Wherever that path may lead, one 

thing seems clear, and it was best expressed by that great American philosopher, 

Yogi Berra: For the community of Phillips in 2009, in the happiest way, “the future 

ain’t what it used to be.”

How Police Fit into this Strategy

In each of the preceding highlights of these case studies, the authors touched briefly 

on some of the roles police played in converting places that generated or attracted 

crime and blight into neighborhood assets—highly desired commerce, places for 

leisure activities, and/or quality, affordable housing. The case summaries showed, 

too, how those new assets helped reduce crime and disorder, thereby fostering 

sustainable revitalization. The police were a key element in interrupting a cycle of 

crime and blight and setting in motion a new powerful cycle of viability.

While details about how this strategy works operationally and can be implemented 

are discussed at length in the Building Our Way Out of Crime book, policymakers 

should understand that when this approach is used, valuable police resources are 

deployed in a more laser-like way against specific elements of problem locations. 

Police, of course, will always retain general “serve-and-protect” responsibilities 

for all areas in their jurisdiction, but their roles in trying to break the cycle of 

crime and decline at hot spots are determined by the strategic importance of 

catalyzing community developers and community members to produce sustainable 

neighborhood improvements. Figure 24 highlights the general difference between 

conventional, law enforcement-only strategies for stemming crime at a hot spot (the 

example used is a convenience store) and the building-away-crime model.
64 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

In the kinds of commercial and housing transformations summarized above, the 

police played various roles—some labor-intensive, some not. In all cases, the police 

were willing and able to come to and stay at the table because they took the time 

to understand what community developers can do and how that work can facilitate 

police mission success. And the police made the effort to form trusting, collaborative 

relationships with the developers. In all of these jurisdictions, it was easier for the 

police and community developers to explore how to work together efficiently for 

mutual advantage because a number of policymakers supported these innovations.

Sequencing of Safety and Development Interventions

When police resources are viewed as integral components of a multifunctional 

neighborhood turnaround strategy, the sequencing of interventions by each 

partner organization becomes an important operational consideration. While the 

whole team should be represented in planning how best to implement policy and 

strategy, the question remains whether the community development and public 

safety operational pieces should be launched simultaneously at the target location 

and its problems. In other words, which comes first—crime control or physical 

redevelopment? The short answer for policymakers is that it depends. In the 

Manage Behavior at 

location

« Police deterrence, arrest, 

prosecution

« Property managers control 

people, products, and 

services

CRIME HOT SPOT

(A convenience store)

Renovate the structure

(CPTED design— façade 

changes, signage, sight lines, 

etc.)

Replace the structure

(change land use from 

liability to asset)

Law enforcement and property 

manager controls can be very laborintensive and will need to continue 

as long as the location continues 

attracting additional offenders.

Physical transformations of the hot 

spot into a community asset can 

“structure” or “build” away crime 

problems and will require active 

law enforcement involvement only 

until the land use is changed. Figure 24: Strategies for controlling crime at a commercial hot spot.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 65

dynamic interaction between restoring order and cutting crime, on the one hand, 

and physical redevelopment of crime hot spots, sometimes crime doesn’t decline 

significantly until a physical transformation or repurposing of a property occurs. In 

many situations, the physical redevelopment cannot occur (because financing can’t 

be secured or owners or renters can’t be identified) until after demonstrable progress 

in tamping down crime. Sometimes physical redevelopment is the point of the spear 

in puncturing a persistent crime problem; in other cases concerted law enforcement 

must be done first, after which redevelopment can sustain the progress.

Whatever the proper sequencing in any given project, the core strategic idea is 

the same: a mutual reinforcement between police and developer activities and 

between the resulting crime reduction and community revitalization. Those whom 

policymakers task with implementing the strategy should find helpful the case 

studies in the Building Our Way Out of Crime book, which detail how progress was 

made, the roles police and developers played, and the sequencing of specific physical 

development and other interventions to safeguard the area.

The Type of Community Developers Involved 

in these Strategic Partnerships

A threshold question for many policymakers will be whether they have—or can help 

communities create—in specific neighborhoods of interest the kind of community 

development capacity it takes to build our way out of crime. To clarify what is 

meant by some key terms in this Guide, the terms “community developers” and 

“community development corporations” are used in conventional ways. That is, 

they are resident-led, locally accountable, politically influential nonprofit agencies 

that work during prolonged periods to transform distressed communities and 

neighborhoods into healthy ones—good places to live, do business, work, and raise 

families. They do so by organizing residents, accessing mainstream capital markets, 

rebuilding infrastructure, developing residential, recreational, commercial, and 

industrial space, working to attract investors, businesses, and jobs, and reknitting 

the fundamental social networks that characterize healthy neighborhoods. 

But, as one could surmise from the chosen case study sites, the focus is not on 

all 5,000 of the CDCs that work in various useful ways in cities and rural areas 

throughout the United States.49 Rather, for public safety turnarounds, the 

community developers who matter the most are those who do physical development. 

These are the developers who have the capacity to acquire a neighborhood’s key 

blighted, crime-generating properties and transform them into brand new or 

renovated residential, commercial, and other community assets. Such developers, 

with vital support from policymakers at all levels of government and in the private 

sector, operate on a scale sufficient to create a critical mass of neighborhood 

revitalization. When police work closely with such developers, each party typically 

finds that it achieves its own missions more effectively, efficiently, and enduringly. 

As they adopt new roles, their collective capacity to change places grows.
66 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Grassroots Community Developers Are Not in the Business 

of Gentrification

The kind of community developers who are commended in Building Our Way Out of 

Crime as partners to public safety organizations are not in the gentrification business.

Community developers exist, to be sure, to change the physical and economic 

structure and nature of places—but not to displace a neighborhood’s hardworking 

poor. Upward mobility is a desirable goal—but upward mobility that includes existing

residents and their families. By reinvigorating both the face and functionality of 

individual communities, community developers create opportunity for low-income 

populations where little has existed before. 

As many policymakers understand, rising property values in a poor community 

need not lead to pushing residents out of the community nor to the elimination 

of affordable housing options for new low-income residents. A range of strategies 

can help develop and maintain a stock of affordable homes, among them several 

identified by an Urban Institute report: housing trust funds, inclusionary zoning, 

low-income housing tax credits, split-rate taxes, tax increment financing, code 

enforcement, rent control, affordable housing subsidies, tax relief and assistance.50

Policymakers Need to Help Police Leaders Differentiate CDCs 

from Other Types of Important Community Organizations

Among other things the police need to understand about nonprofit community 

development corporations is that they are not community-based advocacy 

organizations responsible for addressing the entire range of community issues as 

they come and go. CDCs focus on gathering capital and making financial and other 

investments in neighborhood improvement. As such, they are businesses and can be 

courted by police in a business-like way. 

As a local institution with staff and board members drawn primarily from the 

neighborhood, a CDC may well have strong opinions about police-community 

relationships and events that drove wedges and/or forged bonds between police 

and the neighborhood’s residents and workers. CDC staff may publicly express their 

opinions from time to time, both lauding and lambasting the cops. But the brass 

ring for which a CDC reaches is not police reform; it is community improvement. To be 

sure, police improvements—in how they treat people and the strategies they use to 

fight crime—may be seen by a CDC, rightly, as instrumental in pursuit of successful 

neighborhood revitalization. Any nonprofit businesses or homeowners seeking to 

safeguard their investments in distressed neighborhoods understand how much 

they need the help of the police because crime is one of the greatest threats to the 

sustainability of community revitalization.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 67

A Kennedy School of Government analytic paper on police-CDC partnerships being 

supported by LISC’s Community Safety Initiative in the 1990s noted that police-CDC 

partnerships offered advantages different from those police found in working with 

other kinds of community based organizations:

“Police-CDC partnerships are not simply another version of the police-resident 

partnerships that have become popular in community policing. They are 

a specific type of relationship that commands the distinct resources of an 

important institution... It seems especially important to recognize the breadth 

of strategies that police and CDCs can pursue together.”51

Because of the significant, tangible assets that high-capacity community developers 

can contribute to strategic alliances with police, long-time advocates of community 

policing see a golden opportunity for building-our-way-out-of-crime partnerships 

to reinvigorate community policing. People who have been dismissive of community 

policing as feel good but ineffectual against crime will have to reconsider their 

criticisms when they see the kind of results that community focused, problemsolving police officers have achieved in concert with community developers. 

Some Ways Police Can Capture and Support the 

Power of Community Development

The book from which this Guide draws delineates in detail the many ways police can 

support, harness, and focus the significant neighborhood credibility and physical 

development capacity of community developers to address complex public safety 

challenges. The following are a few key recommendations to help policymakers guide 

the implementation of this collaborative strategy:

« Think about what it might take for local police (and community developers) 

to usefully contribute to—and, therefore, help a city leverage—meaningful 

turnaround. Finding the right people for the job is critical—creative, 

partnership-minded, hard-working, critical thinkers who will be consistent 

collaborators.

« The good news is that there need not be a large contingent of police participants 

who fit this description. Success in these partnerships will neither require 

a wholesale transformation of police agency approaches or employees nor 

necessitate the enlargement of police forces.

« Acknowledge that the conversion of challenged neighborhoods does not 

happen overnight, but with the right problem solvers in the right roles, these 

turnarounds can come within just a few years—frequently within the election 

cycles of the public officials whose support will be needed in various ways. 

Understand that this pace may be anathema to traditionalist police practitioners 

more accustomed to a work ethic dedicated to “the need for speed,” even if 

solutions are fleeting.
68 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

For police departments willing to diversify some of their employees’ roles in pursuit 

of less-fleeting solutions, Figure 25 touches on many of the roles police and 

community developers perform to catalyze and support one another. The graphic 

arrays these roles in a way that will be much more familiar to developers than to the 

police: according to the stages in a typical multiyear physical development project.

Figure 25: Police-community developer collaboration during the phases of a 

construction project.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 69

Increasing the Amount of Police–Community 

Developer Collaboration

As noted earlier, the more robust types of police-community developer cooperation 

and collaboration are not yet common practice in the United States. Indeed, the 

idea of strategic engagement between police and developers is not even on the 

radar screen of many police and community development leaders, notwithstanding 

diligent work done during the past 15-plus years by some of the leading community 

development umbrella organizations (Local Iniatives Support Corporation [LISC]) 

and Enterprise Community Partners leading the pack) and by individuals with both 

urban planning and policing expertise. The principal organized, national effort 

to promote police-community developer partnerships is the Community Safety 

Initiative (CSI) of the LISC. CSI was founded in 1994 by LISC with advice from the 

Police Executive Research Forum and analytic support from the Kennedy School of 

Government’s Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management.

Paul Grogan, who was president of LISC at the time the CSI program was established, 

wrote that the early demonstration sites (East New York in Brooklyn, Seattle’s 

Chinatown-International District, and Kansas City’s disenfranchised east side) 

provided settings in which “the community and the police worked out a set of 

mutual responsibilities that reflected a strong perceived link between physical and 

social disorder and crime.”52 Positive examples have emerged in other cities. But 

much remains to be done if these productive partnerships are to become prevalent 

throughout urban America. The strong leadership of policymakers in many quarters 

will be required to move in that direction. “Based on our work over the years with 

dozens of dedicated community developer-police partnerships in cities large, 

medium, and small,” CSI Program Director Julia Ryan said recently, “I can say with 

confidence that there is far too much to be gained for policymakers to ignore this 

powerful and efficient revitalization and public safety strategy.”53

Since the terms of engagement of police and community developers can be complex 

and delicate, especially for practitioners unaccustomed to each others’ worlds and 

ways, it is understandable why robust community developer-police partnerships 

are not yet evident in all urban areas. There is an essential quid pro quo among 

the parties to high-output police-community developer collaborations that needs 

the guidance of policymakers. One issue will be what police need to invest of 

their authority, reputation, and resources to persuade a capable CDC to aim its 

development talents at local crime attractors/generators. Strategic guidance is also 

needed on the kind of investments a CDC needs to make to attract appropriate police 

attention to the problems that can undermine community revitalization.
70 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

But now there is enough experience on these and other crucial topics—what does 

and does not work, under what circumstances—to be able to help a great many 

police and community developers come together in a way that advances the core 

goals of both organizations. Drawing on lessons learned over the years and on 

research conducted for Building Our Way Out of Crime, our goal in presenting these 

findings and recommendations is straightforward: to kick into a higher gear public 

policymakers’ and policy influencers’ understanding that it is possible and important 

for cops and community developers to forge strategic alliances that will benefit their 

communities.

Broadening the Impact and Opportunities to Hone the 

Strategy

In sharing lessons learned and urging wider adoption of these partnerships, the 

authors wish to emphasize that they do so based on a smaller-than-desirable set 

of cases and useful program evaluations. A lot more needs to be learned about 

whether the practices the authors describe will work over time and in a large variety 

of settings, at the hands of different kinds of people and organizations than those 

portrayed.

But there is good reason today to commend the existing experiences and insights of 

public safety and community development practitioners to their colleagues and to 

policymakers, for the learning process will be advanced by having more practitioners 

thoughtfully do the work recommended in this Guide, thereby adding a broader set of 

experiences from which to learn. It is important, as police and developers experiment 

with this work, that policymakers ensure that the practitioners and others rigorously 

assess what they do, how they do it, why they do it, what their return on investment 

is, and how they might proceed even more efficiently and effectively in future 

building-away-crime collaborations.

Policy Leadership in Institutionalizing Police-Community 

Developer Collaboration

When policymakers decide—as their counterparts in these case study sites have—

that mutually reinforcing community development and public safety is a strategy 

worth strongly supporting, a policy challenge becomes how to institutionalize 

this approach as part of the core operating strategies of police and development 

organizations. Without going into the detail contained in the book, suffice it to say 

here that priority steps toward institutionalization include clear and convincing 

accounts which show that community development works to cut crime, coupled 

with modified systems and processes that create expectations, incentives, and user-
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 71

friendly procedures for police to work with community developers on appropriate 

types of crime problems. At bottom, employee performance management systems 

of the sort being developed in a number of cities, such as CompStat and CitiStat,54

must be adapted or invented to support these collaborations. That support includes 

developing systems for data collection and analysis that alert practitioners in userfriendly ways to emerging problems and problem-solving opportunities. Such 

information systems should also provide on-demand block-level crime statistics and 

other data to allow convincing before-after comparisons when interventions seem to 

have produced meaningful results. 

Many police agencies today do not have data retrieval and analysis systems adequate 

to the task, leaving crime analysts, operational leaders, and policymakers with mostly 

anecdotes to rely on as they work to continually improve public safety methods. As 

an option to building substantial data analysis capabilities within budget-strapped 

police organizations, policymakers should look to the sort of “data intermediaries” 

affiliated with the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (a project 

coordinated by the Urban Institute).55

In the absence of various organizational changes to institutionalize a public safetycommunity development strategy—many of which will not occur without strong 

encouragement from policymakers—the future of police-developer collaboration will 

remain ad hoc and dependent on the personalities and interests of individual leaders. 

Since this strategy employs physical neighborhood transformations that take several 

years to hit pay dirt, unless it becomes institutionalized, this strategy is unlikely to 

have the range and depth of impact that many communities need.

The photos of the award ceremonies in Figures 26 and 27 show government officials 

and policymakers who support emerging community development-public safety 

strategies and solutions.
72 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Figure 26: Providence Police Chief Dean Esserman 

speaks at the MetLife Foundation CommunityPolice Partnership Award ceremony in Olneyville in 

November 2007, backed by police and community 

developers and the affordable homes and other 

improvements they made possible. Seated facing 

the camera (L-R) are Providence Mayor David 

Cicilline, U.S. Senator and former Rhode Island 

Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and 

Rhode Island LISC Executive Director Barbara 

Fields. Seated with his back to camera in the front 

center of photo is police scholar—and problemoriented policing architect—Herman Goldstein. 

(Photo: Rhode Island LISC)

Figure 27: Also celebrating a MetLife Foundation 

first-place award (in September 2007) for their 

revitalizing work in Druid Hills, are public officials 

and community leaders in Charlotte. Holding award 

certificates are The Housing Partnership’s President 

Pat Garrett and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief 

Darrel Stephens. Council Member Patsy Kinsey is 

in the front row in the tan suit, and Charlotte Mayor 

Pat McGrory is in the far right of the photo. 

(Photo: The Housing Partnership)
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 73

 A golden opportunity to advance adoption of the community development-public 

safety approach presented by the challenges facing the nation and the solutions to 

these problems is being devised by policymakers at the federal level. Indeed, during 

the past several years this strategy has attracted growing numbers of powerful 

advocates on both sides of the political aisle in Congress. Thought leaders on 

urban, metropolitan, and crime-control policy echo the enthusiasm that Bratton 

and Grogan express in their Foreword for what police and other components of 

government can do to stimulate community developers’ and grassroots community 

involvement in rebuilding challenged neighborhoods. In this way, the proposed 

police role in forging safe neighborhoods exemplifies the “catalytic,” “enabling” 

function that the current administration sees as a productive role for government 

in helping people improve their communities and their lives. 

Emerging crime-control policy must synchronize with broad-based solutions to a 

variety of complex urban challenges. As we noted earlier in this Guide, Attorney 

General Eric Holder, for one, has long insisted that “we cannot arrest our way out 

of the [crime] problem” as it exists in many cities. One of the ways that he put 

his commitment to active government-community engagement into operation 

was by organizing an admired and replicated community prosecution program 

when he was U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.56 Prosecutors who have 

worked around the country in the kind of programs that Holder established as 

U.S. Attorney strongly concur that by engaging actively and flexibly in problemsolving partnerships they can accomplish results that conventional criminal justice 

processes usually do not (see, for example, the sidebar reporting the perspectives 

of a Los Angeles community prosecutor). Such perspectives and time-tested 

lessons about what works, we hope and expect, will shape not only strategies for 

collaborative work by federal and local prosecutors nationwide but also strategies 

for Department of Justice support of state and local crime-control initiatives.
74 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Why a City of Los Angeles Neighborhood Prosecutor Actively Supports and 

Works with a Community Developer-Police Partnerships

Former Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office Neighborhood Prosecutor Anne Tremblay worked 

closely for several years with the LAPD and two community development corporations in South 

Los Angeles (previously known as South Central LA, one of the most troubled parts of the city). 

In 2005, the authors interviewed her for an LISC Community Safety Initiative newsletter, when 

she reflected on why she does what she does:

“I work with CDCs to improve the quality of life of this area. Instead of just dealing with 

something after it’s happened we’re looking for a proactive way to solve problems. For instance, 

we often deal with location-based issues, such as a problem liquor store or bar or a problem 

property—a park or a vacant or occupied apartment or single family home. My office and the 

LAPD have worked together for some time to remove such problems. We have boarded and 

secured vacant properties, evicted narcotics offenders, etc. But then we have another empty 

place which could become a problem. By including the community development component 

in our strategy, we’re trying to go beyond abating the nuisance and replace the problem with 

something good. Our goal is to make a lasting change by putting problem properties back into 

productive use.

Even though the City’s Community Redevelopment Agency addresses a lot of problem 

properties, they can’t possibly take over the number of properties that need attention. So 

community development groups with good track records bring additional capacity to come up 

with plans and the financing required to put good things in place of the problem properties.

The police and I give our input on how we think a property could be made safer and more 

productive for the community. For instance, there’s a gang-dominated apartment building in 

South LA which the police and I recommended converting from rental to owner-occupied spaces. 

Bringing the benefits of home ownership to this location will require a substantial renovation 

since the apartments are too small and run-down now to attract owner-occupants. The expertise 

of developers is required to produce the necessary property transformations.

Generally, neighborhood prosecutors try to think outside the box, to use that cheesy term. The 

criminal law has not been a useful tool against many types of low-level offenses, which produce 

real harm to the community. The jails are full, so if we get a misdemeanor conviction the person 

is going to be put on probation or at most serve 10 days of a 90-day sentence, so we can’t 

incarcerate our way out of the problem. I find I usually can do more for the community by using 

non-litigation tactics to achieve compliance with the Municipal Code, say in the case of a problem 

property owned by an absentee landlord. In about 90 percent of our abatement cases, the City 

Attorney’s office is able to get voluntary compliance from the property owners (such as providing 

better lighting or security guards) by showing them evidence of the crimes occurring on their 

premises and explaining their obligations and their legal jeopardy if they don’t cooperate.

A large role I play is as a ‘professional nudge’ to get everyone in our partnership to follow 

through on agreed problem-solving tactics and not be distracted by the crisis of the week. 

Despite what a bad rap lawyers get, I find that many people in the neighborhood are more 

comfortable with me than with people in police uniforms and also show me more deference or 

respect than they show cops, so that helps me be an intermediary to get police-community trust 

going. I’ve also been able to help police become more confident that it’s useful to work with 

some community-based organizations. Together, we’re starting to build our way out of problems.”
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 75

Beyond public backing at the federal level, cost-conscious, results-oriented state 

and municipal officials should invest in police-community developer partnerships. 

They should also support the establishment of information intermediaries such 

as The Providence Plan as vital parts of the infrastructure for building-away-crime 

partnerships. Any such investments are hard to swallow in disastrous economic 

times, but they should loom as a high priority in maintaining domestic tranquility 

as economically as possible. Such approaches deserve serious consideration as 

components of a much-needed new investment strategy for crime control.

Policymakers are increasingly realizing that the singular voice of historically 

unnatural allies—high-impact police officials and leading community developers—is 

a powerful yet not fully tapped tool. More must be done to raise the volume of this 

collective voice—and to carry its message to elected officials. And more should be 

done by community development leadership to advocate for their brethren across 

the partnership table. The community developer perspective would offer a fresh take 

on the implications of improving and funding police-driven public safety efforts, and 

much more action on this front is warranted.

Additionally, opportunities to institutionalize the building-our-way-out-of-crime 

strategy are presented by several types of federal legislation that cry out for the 

collective voice of both developers and police. Recent examples are the Second 

Chance Act and the housing relief bill that passed in 2008. The public safety 

implications of the prisoner reentry and property foreclosure issues addressed by 

these legislative initiatives are profoundly interwoven with the direct interests 

and fundamental capacity of both community developers and police, but these 

public safety implications have been marginalized in the industries’ debates. Public 

safety must find a place at this table. Indeed, we need to imagine the myriad future 

legislation—both progressive and regressive—that will call out for collective input 

and advocacy by police and community developers.

Approached thoughtfully and with the combined wisdom and support of public 

safety and community development experts, the opportunities to marshal untapped 

resources to turn around crime-ridden and disinvested communities are enormous. 

Synergies between government and communities can create capacity that neither 

has acting alone. Just as government can catalyze dormant community capacity, 

an energized community—robust civic engagement—can reinvigorate community 

policing and other vital functions of local government. High-performing local 

government and high-performing communities can produce a spectacular spiral of 

ever safer, more desirable neighborhoods throughout America.
76 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

The Economic Environment—Still More Impetus for 

Collaborative Action

With the real estate boom of the mid-‘90s growing unchecked until the recent 

mortgage crisis and the ensuing recession, many began to believe that the era 

of community development productivity and value was fading—that private

development (with its greater efficiencies of scale and relative independence from 

subsidy needs) would become the hallmark of urban revitalization. Indeed, CDCs 

were finding it harder and harder to realize their land acquisition ambitions (let 

alone build) as property values rose exponentially. But the collapse in mortgage 

lending—fed by laxity in regulation, deepening of corporate greed, and growing 

debt-frenzy—has reopened the door for nonprofit developers. Indeed, it underscores 

their long-term importance.

The rampant rates of foreclosure—and the pace at which even less at-risk 

homeowners are facing default—offer an opportunity for nonprofit community 

development as both a viable and locally controlled answer to housing recapture 

and resale, and, perhaps more important, a chance to meaningfully address the 

inevitable public safety challenges that have accompanied the increasing vacancies 

and abandonment. Vagrants, drug users and dealers, prostitutes, and the like 

are drawn almost magnetically to this growing supply of hideaways and bases 

of operation. And police are increasingly feeling the pain of this new resident 

population.

According to a Chicago-based study that has been widely cited in the past few years, 

there is evidence of a causal link between foreclosures and violent crime: “A onepercentage-point ... increase in foreclosure rate,” the researchers wrote, “is expected 

to increase the number of violent crimes in a tract by 2.33 percent, other things 

being equal.”57 This looming devastating impact on the still somewhat fragile gains 

that many low-income, formerly high-crime communities across the U.S. have 

enjoyed should be powerful impetus for policymakers to widely adopt a community 

development-public safety strategy.

With new housing subsidy and mortgage relief opportunities, the time is ripe to 

test (once again) how community developer-driven revitalization—undertaken in 

the context of police-developer partnerships—efficiently and sustainably advances 

vital goals: rebuilding and repopulating in responsible, defensible, crime-cutting 

ways. Through the wisdom and collective action of community developers and police, 

hot spots—crime attractors/generators—can be transformed into real assets—

places that attract and generate the kind of positive behavior that marks healthy 

neighborhoods.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 77

A Final Note 

Stepping back from the productive collaborations in the three case study sites and 

other places, it seems very clear that community development and policing are 

two industries that need each other and can work compatibly and compellingly if 

sensible incentives, staff preparation, and collaborative processes are devised and 

used. This Policymaker’s Guide has built on this mutual need and opportunity and 

proposed that the prevailing current pattern—parallel but uncoordinated action 

by public safety workers and developers—is not enough. In these times when 

municipalities face growing agendas and shrinking resources, the public safety and 

community development industries’ natural overlaps cannot go unnoticed, and 

their complementary tools must be purposefully and efficiently linked. Doing so 

is a matter of governing competence, sound public policy, and fiscal responsibility. 

And, as seen through the broken windows and shattered dreams of destitute and 

dangerous neighborhoods, doing so is a moral imperative.
78 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Endnotes

1

 Booker, 2008.

2 Scott and Goldstein, 2005.

3

 President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 1967, pp. 

98–99; see also Wald, 1967.

4

 Shapiro, 2009.

5

 Weisbourd, 2009.

6

 Polikoff, 2006, p. 376.

7

 See St. Jean, 2007.

8

 Buntin, 1999(a), 1999(b), 1999(c), 1999(d); Thacher, 2000.

9

 Thacher, 2000, quoting a Kennedy School case study.

10 Providence Plan web site, “Olneyville Neighborhood Profile.”

11 Smith, 2007(b).

12 Smith, 2007(a)

13 Davis, 2006.

14 Vega, 2008.

15 Feins et al., 1997.

16 Wright, 1995; Morrell, 1992.

17 Vaughan, 1992.

18 Feins et al., 1997, pp.6–7.

19 DeParle, 1006.

20 Flono, 1994.

21 DeParle, 1996

22 Rhee, 1991.

23 Geller, 2002.

24 Roberts, 2008.

25 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, 2008.

26 Miller, 2008.

27 Roberts, 2008, p. 39.

28 Roberts, 2008.

29 Dempsey, 1993.

30 Blair, 1992.

31 Taylor, 1999; Kersten, 2008(a); Kersten, 2008(b).

32 St. Anthony, 2003.

33 Brandt, 2003.

34 St. Anthony, 2003.

35 DePass, 1993(a).

36 Inskip, 1990.

37 Taylor, 1999.

38 Her, 2003.

39 Her, 2003.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 79

40 Chanen, 2002.

41 See also Chanen, 2002.

42 Minneapolis Police Department, 2003.

43 American Indian Neighborhood Development Corporation, 2007.

44 Odesser-Torpay, 2005.

45 Minneapolis Observer Quarterly, 2006.

46 Minneapolis Observer Quarterly, 2006.

47 Kersen, 2008(b).

48 Kersten, 2008(b)

49 National Congress for Community Economic Development, 2005.

50 Levy et al., 2006(b); see also Levy et al., 2005(a), and Kennedy and Leonard, 2001.

51 Thacher, 2000.

52 Grogan and Proscio, 2000.

53 Ryan, 2009.

54 See Behn, 2007.

55 Kingsley, 1998; Kingsley and Pettit, 2007; see also Brookings Institution and RW 

Ventures, 2003, and Weissbourd, 2006.

56 Shapiro, 2009.

57 Immergluck and Smith, 2005, p. 15; see also Spence, 2008.
80 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

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A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 83

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A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 85

About the Authors

Bill Geller and Lisa Belsky cofounded the Community Safety Initiative (CSI) of the 

Local Initiatives Support Corporation in 1994. Since then, Geller has served as CSI’s 

senior public safety consultant and technical assistance provider. During the past 

3 decades, he has also served as the research and executive director of the Chicago 

Law Enforcement Study Group; project director at the American Bar Foundation; 

associate director of the Police Executive Research Forum; special counsel for public 

safety and internal security to the Chicago Park District in the administration of 

Chicago Mayor Harold Washington; Law clerk to Justice Walter V. Schaefer of the 

Illinois Supreme Court; search manager in the White House Office of Presidential 

Personnel; and, currently, director of the Geller & Associates consulting firm. 

The books that he has been the editor or coauthor of include Building Our Way 

Out of Crime: The Transformative Power of Police-Community Developer Partnerships 

(forthcoming, with Lisa Belsky); Deadly Force: What We Know—A Practitioner’s Desk 

Reference on Police-Involved Shootings in the United States (with Michael S. Scott); 

Police Leadership in America: Crisis & Opportunity; the International City-County 

Management Association’s Local Government Police Management (1991 edition and, 

with Chief Darrel Stephens, the 2003 edition); Managing Innovation in Policing: The 

Untapped Potential of the Middle Manager; Split-Second Decisions: Shootings of and 

by Chicago Police; and Police Violence: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of 

Force (with Hans Toch). In the 1980s, for the U.S. Department of Justice, Geller 

conducted the first national study of videotaping to document interrogations and 

confessions and recommended the technique to foster more effective, efficient, 

and legitimate police stationhouse interrogations. With his mentor, the late 

University of Chicago Law Professor Norval Morris, Geller was coauthor of a policy 

examination of sensible role divisions between federal and local police, published in 

the University of Chicago Press volume Modern Policing. During the past 30 years, 

Geller has served as consultant to police agencies spanning the nation, from the New 

York Police Department to the Los Angeles Police Department, and to community 

organizations, civil rights groups, the U.S. Department of Justice, mayors, city 

managers, think tanks, universities, and the news media. He assists clients with 

strategic, policy, communications, program implementation, and leadership and 

management challenges. His leadership work has ranged from devising a strategic 

plan for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Police Leadership Academy to 

conducting executive searches for major city police departments. Geller holds a J.D. 

from the University of Chicago Law School. He was awarded the Richard J. Daley 

Police Medal of Honor, the highest award given to a civilian by the City of Chicago 

for work in support of policing.
86 A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime

Lisa Belsky has been active in community development for the past 20 years, 

launching her career as special assistant to the president of Local Initiatives Support 

Corporation (LISC), the country’s largest community development intermediary, 

in 1989. She went on to become LISC’s first national program officer (1990); and, 

in 1992, cofounded the Community Safety Initiative (CSI), a program that she 

launched in East New York during New York Police Department Commissioner Bill 

Bratton’s tenure and ran nationally until 2007. During her tenure as director of 

the CSI, she raised more than $15 million to support innovative linkages between 

police departments and community development corporations (grassroots nonprofit 

development agencies that are LISC’s core constituents). She continues to support 

LISC’s efforts in this endeavor as a senior consultant to the program, now active in 

more than a dozen cities throughout the country. Belsky serves as the lead technical 

assistance provider to three Rhode Island-based, award-winning police–CDC 

partnerships, among them the Providence Police Department–Olneyville Housing 

Corporation collaboration profiled in the Building Our Way Out of Crime book. She 

has also teamed with Bill Geller in providing technical assistance to celebrated 

police–CDC partnerships in Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Seattle. Belsky has 

worked with police officials across the United States through a range of other 

forums, including the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing 

Board and the board of directors of the Institute for the Development of Police 

Leadership, spearheaded by Nancy McPherson. Most recently, she has developed 

various programming and new curricula to address the challenges of prisoner 

reentry (beginning with a pilot project in Boston’s Dorchester Bay neighborhood). 

Belsky is author of an in-depth case study, to be published by LISC’s CSI, on 

community liability and asset mapping that has guided the work of the Providence 

Police Department’s partnership with CommunityWorks Rhode Island. In 2007, she 

was coauthor with Paul Grogan of an analysis of the contributing factors behind 

New York City’s dramatic progress in reducing crime and enhancing neighborhood 

livability, New York: Public Safety Outlier. Previously, she and Grogan co-wrote a 

chapter on “The Promise of Community Development Corporations” in a Police 

Executive Research Forum-published book, Community Policing: The Past, Present and 

Future, edited by Lorie Fridell and Mary Ann Wycoff. From 1986 to 1988, Belsky 

worked as a case writer with the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. 

Kennedy School of Government, where she provided research support to a variety 

of national and international public policy analyses, focusing, for example, on the 

effect of the press on federal policymaking and the role of politics on the passage of 

international treaties. Belsky helped develop programming for the Kennedy School’s 

New Members of Congress Conference and New Mayors Conference and assisted 

in orchestrating programs and enlisting speakers for Harvard’s John F. Kennedy, 

Jr., Forum, one of the world’s premiere arenas for political speech, discussion, and 

debate. Belsky holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University.
A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime 87

Summary Contents of Building Our Way Out 

of Crime: The Transformative Power of PoliceCommunity Developer Partnerships

Foreword by Bill Bratton and Paul Grogan

Chapter 1. Introduction and Overview

Chapter 2. The Roots of Today’s Community Development and Policing Strategies

A Prefatory Note about the Case Studies in Chapters 3 through 5

Chapter 3. Providence, Rhode Island: Olneyville Housing Corporation and 

Providence Police Department

Chapter 4. Charlotte, North Carolina: The Housing Partnership and CharlotteMecklenburg Police Department

Chapter 5. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Great Neighborhoods! Development 

Corporation and Minneapolis Police Department

Chapter 6. Police-Community Developer Collaboration: Getting Started and Terms 

of Engagement

Chapter 7. Sustaining and Growing Police-Community Developer Partnerships

About the Authors
For More Information:

U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Community Oriented Policing Services

1100 Vermont Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20530

To obtain details on COPS programs, please call the COPS Office 

Response Center at 800.421.6770

Visit COPS Online at www.cops.usdoj.gov.

A Policymaker’s Guide to Building Our Way Out of Crime: The Transformative 

Power of Police-Community Developer Partnerships describes and analyzes 

innovative efforts in communities across the United States to reduce crime 

in and improve the economic vitality of blighted neighborhoods. By working 

together, local police, nonprofit community developers, elected and appointed 

officials, financial strategists, and community leaders can do more with less, 

converting crime hot spots that ruin entire neighborhoods and consume 

considerable police services into safety-generating community assets. Case 

studies, photographs, charts, and lessons learned demonstrate the power these 

partnerships have for transforming troubled neighborhoods in cost-effective 

ways into stable, healthy, and sustainable communities.