Overview
People who have experienced violence and abuse from police and within their communities have ad- opted creative ways of addressing their needs for safety. Movements for community safety address violence without relying upon police or prisons.
Individuals and groups experiencing systemic oppression on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other factors are often the most vulnerable to violence. Many of the systems and institutions that promise safety and security contribute to racial and sexual violence, as well as other forms of domination and abuse. As an alternative to relying on these institutions, people are creating community safety efforts grounded in their own neighborhoods and networks of people they know to help protect and heal from harm.
Around the world, women of color, particularly those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, have been at the forefront of creating groups and movements to protect their communities from violence, including the violence of police and other government institutions. A growing network has been forming to share experiences and techniques for community safety. Within the United States, the Oakland-based group Creative Interventions collected stories of how people intervened to prevent or stop family violence in their everyday lives. They also supported interventions by friends and family members of immigrant women experiencing domestic abuse, and produced a handbook of resources for anyone to use, informed by what they learned. In New York City, the Audre Lorde Project’s Safe OUTside the System Collective, meanwhile, created strategies based on community building and organizing to prevent racist and homophobic assaults on LGBTQ+ people of color in their Brooklyn neighborhood.
Their efforts often begin with developing ways to respond to interpersonal violence, which expand to strategies for preventing violence, intervening when harm occurs, and transforming the beliefs, patterns, and social and economic conditions that serve as root causes of violence. Some call this approach “transformative justice”—the work of not just addressing a specific instance of harm but also uprooting the underlying causes. Taken together, approaches for responding to interpersonal and state violence have become the basis of comprehensive visions for what it would mean to have truly safe communities.
Efforts to cultivate community safety often emphasize four goals: safety, healing, accountability, and transformation. To pursue these goals, practitioners start from the recognition that people experiencing harm tend to turn first to the people who are closest to them. Community safety can begin with those in relationship with each other, rather than by turning to the police or other government institutions such as the child welfare system. To make this possible, practitioners build their knowledge and capacity to pursue safety outside of state systems using storytelling, collective organizing, and skills trainings, among other methods. Some communities create new structures and cultures for safety by ensuring that they have resources and skills to meet their own needs. In Nairobi, Kenya, young people connected with St. Johns Ambulance have undergone first aid training so that they can administer help in emergency medical situations. This strategy has been especially important for groups in places where calls for medical assistance, including mental health support, could also bring armed police officers.
In addition to developing short-term responses and strategies, fostering safer communities entails a long-term commitment to challenging systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia that fuel abuse and violence. It involves cultivating value systems and ways of being that affirm the worth and dignity of all people. A community accountability process, for instance, might not only result in protection and support for a survivor of intimate partner violence, but also social, economic and mental health support for the person responsible for the abuse. Community safety is intimately connected to a vision of a world in which freedom from harm does not involve violent institutions like prisons, jails, and detention centers. Grassroots efforts to establish community safety facilitate the building of knowledge and skills so that people have the confidence to participate in liberatory violence prevention, intervention, and response.
Many groups of people who share the same apartment building, place of worship, or workplace have not established values, principles, and commitments to support the safety of their most vulnerable members. But that does not mean it is too late to start. All communities have the capacity to help the people in them experience safety.
