Leveraging Code Enforcement for Neighborhood Safety

Simon Goldstein with the Business and Professional People for the Public Interest shared a great resource with me. It’s a brochure that deals with police-code-community partnerships and it discusses the relationship between code enforcement and neighborhoods. Its opening paragraph is as follows:

Effective enforcement of building and housing codes is a key ingredient in many neighborhood revitalization efforts. Community developers have found that the long term success of their revitalization work often hinges on cleaning up or redeveloping problem properties that deter investors, frustrate existing residents and generally contribute to an environment of fear, disorder and crime. Law enforcement also understands the important relationships of crime, blight, and code enforcement. Under the rubric of the “broken window theory”, social scientists have documented the opportunistic nature of crime, showing that vacant properties and dilapidated buildings become magnets for crime. Applying the techniques of problem-oriented policing, more law enforcement agencies today use a place-based approach to tackle these neighborhood hot spots deploying special nuisance abatement teams with assistance from their code enforcement partners.

You can download the entire brochure at http://www.lisc.org/content/publications/detail/5648