Understanding Crime and Perceptions of Safety in Providence's Parks
Miriam Pfisterer
Bachelor's of Arts in Environmental Studies
May 2002
Working under the assumption that parks are significant and necessary components of urban communities, my thesis sought to satisfy my curiosity on how the challenges of city environments affect the role that parks are expected to play. I was interested in how parks withstand the pressures of neglect, misuse, and crime, and remain positive assets to neighborhoods, and more importantly, how public perceptions play into this dynamic.
My study focuses on the urban parks
in Providence, Rhode Island, and explores the following questions:
I centered my research on six case study parks - Billy Taylor Park, Dexter Training Ground, Donigian Park, Fargnoli Park, Merino Park, and Sackett Street Park. First, I conducted intercept interviews of park users. The interview included questions on general opinions of the park, questions designed to gauge perceptions of the park's safety, questions designed to gauge perceptions of the park's criminal activity, and a question asking whether or not they felt that the park had improved from the past. I also interviewed people associated with my case study parks to enhance my understanding of the salient issues there. The second avenue of my research was using GIS Arcview to map a database of crime reports for the entire city. I generated a city-wide crime density map to show the major trends of crime in Providence, observed how my case study parks fit into these crime patterns, and identified which parks in the city might be most vulnerable to criminal intrusion due to their location in a crime 'hotspot'. In addition, I produced crime density maps for the 2000 sq. ft. region around each case study park in order to understand the specific crime dynamics there. Lastly, I compared the results from the perception interviews with those from the crime mapping to see how the actual context of crime for an area relates to the ways in which users perceive the safety and criminal conditions in the park.
The interview results show that the vast majority of park users interviewed, perceived their parks to be safe places, and conversely, very few expressed any doubts about safety in the park setting. Perceptions did vary across the different parks - some parks had much more positive perceptions associated with them than others. Other findings showed that it seems that many people have a pragmatic, common sense attitude towards crime and safety issues in their parks; to some extent, people expect a certain level of crime or disagreeable conduct in the park setting, and thus have quite a casual attitude towards its presence. Furthermore, the vast majority of respondents expressed a strong sense that the parks have improved from the past.
The city-wide crime map demonstrates that none of my case study parks are positioned within the major crime 'hotspots' in the city, and that parks in the Downtown and Olneyville neighborhoods, as well as smaller regions in other neighborhoods, might be most at risk due to their location in high crime sites. As for crime patterns around the case study parks, the density maps indicated that aside from Merino Park and Sackett St. Park, crime hotspot areas were primarily situated well away from park perimeters. Also, the maps did not exhibit any generalizable trends across all parks in terms of which types of crime (e.g. drug violations, violent crime) were most prevalent on the park perimeter.
Finally, when linking the perceptions results with the crime information, I found that: There is an incongruence between a park's crime context and park users' perceptions of safety, and simultaneously, there is an incongruence between a park's crime context and the users' perceptions of crime. By comparing the features and circumstances of the various parks, and how they ranked with other parks in terms of crime and perceptions, I determined that certain aspects of park layout might be affecting the magnitude of crime and safety issues, as well as perceptions. The users at Dexter Training Ground which has an open, accessible perimeter, and is bounded by city streets on all sides, had comparatively high perceptions of safety as well as very positive feelings about the park in general. In contrast, users at Billy Taylor Park and Donigian Park, which have vegetated, closed off or concealed back corners, had the worst perceptions of safety and were both cited as areas of drug use and other criminal activity.
The full thesis is available
on the web at:
http://envstudies.brown.edu/thesis/2002/pfisterer