barbara holtmann presentation washington may 3 2011

© CSIR 2006 www.csir.co.za

CHOOSING SAFETYBarbara Holtmann Washington 03 May 2011

An Approach to Safety

• Security: defence or protection against a known or perceived threat.

• Safety: the need for less security.

• Reduction of crime and violence is a by-product of improved

resilience, health, community development, etc

• Local safety approaches require integrative approaches

• Safety strategies must trnsform fragile social

• Unsafety requires a systemic approach that embraces the complexity of the

problem

• Unsafety is experienced and should be addressed at local level

• The Safe Communities of Opportunity model reflects many common

answers to “what does it look like when its fixed?”

• It elaborates the complex relationships amongst elements of safety elicited

through community and expert consultation, review of literature and

analysis of policy and strategic objectives.

© CSIR 2006

www.csir.co.za

Evidence Based or Evidence Led?• In theory, we know a lot about

unsafety, crime, violence, risk, vulnerability, resilience, safety. Yet in many places, this body of knowledge doesn’t translate into sustainable or sustained safety

• The bulk of spending aimed at safety is spent on security; in South Africa for instance, we spend more annually on private security than we earn from tourism; surveillance, target-hardening, guarding… these things are infinitely easier to fund than programmes that seek to encourage pro-social behaviour or to empower local people to live their best lives

• Arguments against investment in prevention are often based on spurious claims that these take too long to deliver; this is not so for the most vulnerable or those most at risk of offending

• Arguments for prevention often unwittingly support these claims; for instance that we should invest in today’s children because they are tomorrow’s leaders rather than because they are children

• Despite all our best efforts it seems there is not enough or compelling enough evidence to ensure appropriate investment in prevention, yet we continue to demand evidence based interventions

• We know for certain what does not work – the evidence is all around us

• We should use our impressive body of knowledge and community of practitioners to generate evidence led innovation on a grand scale

© CSIR 2006

www.csir.co.za

When is information information?

• The need to collect data often confounds action and prevents appropriate investment

• In many places, viable official data is cumbersome and impossible to verify

• SCOP asks people to draw what it looks like when its fixed• Even the poorest people know the difference between reality

and fantasy• They are right; the elements they draw are required for

safety• What they don’t draw is security• They draw places where people move freely, where children

play in the streets and neighbours chat over picket fences, where the sun shines on old people sitting in the park, where the moon shines on women walking home from work at night

From vision to knowing what to do to get there

• Elements of the “fixed” can be scored by Rapid Assessment by the people in the room

• Consultation is flawed; this methodology of consensus building through collective design thinking is only as good as the people in the room

• Data is flawed; this methodology of rapid assessment will throw up anomalies but for the most part, it seems to be quite accurate and gives us a good-enough place to start

• Action plans focus on interventions where the elements score the lowest, the highest and where there is the greatest commitment to intervention

• The second question is: if this is what it looks like when its fixed, how much do you value fixed?

• Third: What will you sacrifice to get it and how much will you defend it if you do?• The methodology delivers a social contract with actions bound to achieving the

elements• Where is the risk in this approach? It is in our perception of which information we

can trust and when.• The model is not a strategic plan, it is a picture. Its complexity is made less

daunting by the number of role players who must contribute• Everyone has a role to play, everyone is useful• Nobody should tell anyone else what to do

Choosing Safety• Sustainable safety should be our objective, not reducing crime and violence

• Since the benefits are greatest for the most vulnerable, their voices should have the greatest resonance in designing the outcomes, measuring the need, planning the actions and being useful in the transformation process

• We should care less about our individualized terms of reference and more about our collective impact

• We should base our work on a social contract that defines the value of our outcomes for everyone at the outset

• We need to measure social impact as a collective; does what we do have social impact?

• We should learn to trust the knowledge of people in the room; if they say we shifted things we should believe them, if they say we didn’t we should change what we do

• We should ask ourselves the hard philosophical questions: If we have a million dollars in the centre of the room, is a surveillance system the best we can offer?

• We should trust ourselves to lead towards sustainable safety through innovation.

Thank You

barbara holtmann presentation washington may 3 2011

Health & Medicine