This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Non-police community guardians can effectively reduce crime by building relationships in urban disorder hotspots, according to a study. The study will be published in PNAS Nexus.
Forrest Stuart and colleagues evaluated the success of Urban Alchemy, San Francisco's civilian public safety practitioner program, at reducing crime. Public safety practitioners are not police officers and are unarmed. Rather, they are individuals with experience with poverty, homelessness, substance use and the criminal legal system who seek to defuse tensions, help those in the throes of behavioral health crises and curb disorder.
The goal is to intervene early through informal means and prevent circumstances from escalating to the point of warranting a call to police. The authors compared crime rates in San Francisco's Tenderloin, Mid-Market and South of Market (SOMA) neighborhoods when safety practitioners were present and absent. They compared rates before and after the program began and during and after practitioner work hours, controlling for time-of-day effects.
The authors also compared intersections where practitioners were posted with intersections without practitioners. Overall, the authors found significant reductions in behavioral health-related and total crime in areas with practitioners compared with areas without practitioners. Reductions in drug crime in areas with practitioners were modest, but reductions in behavioral health-related incidents were strong and consistent.
There was a slight reduction in violent crime and no change in property crime. According to the authors, civilian public safety interventions reduce crime and help tackle the root causes of disorder by providing consistent relationships and referrals to services, accomplishing with care what society more often seeks to achieve through enforcement. Civilianized safety practitioners reduce crime and disorder: Evidence from a quasiexperimental evaluation in San Francisco, PNAS Nexus (2026). academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/art … 93/pnasnexus/pgag275 Swati Mestri holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019.
She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space. Full profile → Master's in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast.
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