Translational Criminology

Community Building in Hot Spots: Seattle
Neighborhood Group’s Non-Police-Led Crime
Prevention Approach
BY CODY W. TELEP, TARI NELSON-ZAGAR,
AND JULIE HIBDON
Cody W. Telep is an assistant professor in the School of Criminology and
Criminal Justice at Arizona State University.
Tari Nelson-Zagar is a senior program manager at Seattle Neighborhood
Group.
Julie Hibdon is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology
and Criminal Justice at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Cody W. Telep Tari Nelson-Zagar Julie Hibdon
There is strong empirical evidence that crime is highly
concentrated at small units of geography, commonly referred
to as hot spots. Prior studies have found that a relatively
small number of micro places are responsible for a significant amount
of total crime in a city (Weisburd, 2015) and that what police do in
these places can have an impact on reported crime and disorder
(Braga, Papachristos, & Hureau, 2014). However, less attention has
been focused on attempts to address high crime locations with
non-police-led interventions. 1
Seattle Neighborhood Group (SNG), 2 a community-based,
nonprofit organization in Seattle, Washington, has recently worked
on a practitioner-led approach to crime prevention in hot spots. For
many years SNG used a community organizing approach focused on
two objectives: engagement between the Seattle Police Department
(SPD) and affected communities, and development of communitybased
responses to improve high crime neighborhoods. SNG’s efforts
developed into an early community policing model, and a National
Institute of Justice-funded evaluation deemed the program “a model
partnership” (NIJ, 1992).
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, SNG developed a number
of projects and programs to fill gaps in service. These included
coordinating and supporting neighborhood-based “crime councils,”
providing trainings for residents on personal safety and using 9-1-1,
helping landlords maintain crime-free property through education,
coordinating neighborhood cleanups and events, organizing graffiti
paint-outs, facilitating relationships between immigrant communities
and law enforcement, and working with neighbors affected by
chronic nuisance activities.
SNG staff developed approaches to crime prevention that it felt
worked well. But while there was strong anecdotal evidence from
partners and the community that these multifaceted activities had
made a difference, the organization was not able to say for sure that
specific elements had been effective. In part, this was because there
were often many variables that affected the outcome of their actions,
and while partnering with SPD had been incredibly useful in
community policing projects, it made it difficult to disentangle the
specific effects of SNG’s efforts.
Additionally, for many years SNG staff had a strong sense that
some small places generated much of the crime and disorder in the
neighborhoods and large geographic areas they focused on. A series
of studies on the criminology of place, a number of which focused
specifically on Seattle, strongly supported these beliefs (Weisburd,
Groff, & Yang, 2012). The evidence that geographically constrained
hot spots were responsible for much of the city’s crime problem
clearly echoed the ongoing experiences of SNG staff in the field.
1
The Bureau of Justice Assistance Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) Project recently began supporting a number of collaborative multi-agency effort
focused on small units of geography (Griffith, 2014), including a project in Rainier Beach in Seattle that SNG has partnered on. That project is separate from
this intervention.
2
See sngi.org
Spring 2016 | TRANSLATIONAL CRIMINOLOGY 5