Yeah but on the flip side having police show up everytime I leave the house doesn't make me feel comfortable it makes me feel like the police cant do their jobs properly. Or worse I am in some kind of warzone, which is disappointing since my family fled their home country to get away from war.
How about we pay people enough so they don't have to steal and gut the police.
The problem isn’t the police but the judicial system that doesn’t segregate criminals from society and when it does the penal system has no rehabilitation.
Is this /s? I didn't read anything about a crime or kids with criminal intent, just a dad being told that the park was for <5 year olds to play in (which is ridiculous but a different issue).
That's a weird article. It's weird how one-sided the story is: because clearly law enforcement would tell a different narrative if they had been asked for comment. It is strange how the father claims that the issue was the football.
But it is strange that, if the park rules say that only children up to Age Five are allowed, why the father thinks this is so unjust and so horrible. It certainly makes sense to me, that keeping small children safe could involve restricting the age group. So many things are restricted to narrow age-groups for children. Because of different maturity and physique and needs.
If these parents deliberately chose an Age Five park to go play in [and they knew exactly what its name is before they even arrived], then they should've made themselves aware of the Park Rules (which are not too far away to read if you walk up to the sign. Park Rules are usually posted near every entrance and every main walkway!) And they have no right to be angry that the police intervened and had a chat with them, even if the "football toss" was an extreme red herring.
I don't see anything wrong in a community wanting parents to know and abide by those rules. They aren't difficult or obscure or unjust.
No, the children are not criminals. A minor is subject to their parents' responsibility, and the parents are the ones who placed their children into the park, and they are responsible for their children being there. Any liability or criminality is going to fall on the responsible adults.
Calling on the cops because one person in an undercrowded park, toss a ball? The cops actually acting on that report?
Maybe if the police had different narrative, they would have answered; from the article mentioned: "I reached out to the township and the superintendent of the Lower Merion Police Department on Monday and heard back from neither."
So it was likely a ludicrous report, and a ludicrous reaction for the local police department, that doesn't stand the light of a local newspaper.
If the only response to crime is repressive without managing/anticipating things way ahead, that do favour crime, it's not going to foster peace, neither a family/youth-friendly environment.
As the article series suggests, architecture alone _does_ influence individuals and groups experiences and behaviours. It's been studied and worked on for a long time [1] and it's worth studying further, reporting and repeating as the OP does very well.
1: see Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), Oscar Newman (Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space), C. Ray Jeffery (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design), Alice Coleman, among others.
Good point and links on architecture. I am so grateful to the architecture student who told me about Jane Jacobs around 1990 and opened my eyes to how much urban architecture design (things like height restrictions as in Philadelphia, unsafe edge effects of big special-purpose areas, sidewalks & porches, and mixed-use zoning) can affect human behavior and "eyes on the street" safety. I also liked the point that new ideas require old buildings (for cheap rents).
This article and your comment makes me think of Lawrence Lessig's "Code 2.0" book where he writes that (at least) four things can shape human behavior:
* rules
* norms
* prices
* architecture
All are important -- but they influence people in different ways at different times. If we want to have healthy cities, all are worth considering.
Hopefully we could do so in a "Kaizen" approach of incremental improvement and usually small steps within existing cities? But we likely need a lot of new cities too with more housing (perhaps by upgrading towns on existing transit lines).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
Ignore that crime dropped ~50% globally since the 1990s [1], then.
The real issue is that the Right campaigned mostly on security since the 1980s and successfully convinced everyone that hordes of migrant criminals are patrolling the streets to mug you, in spite of the data clearly showing that crime levels are at their lowest.
Ironically, Republicans are also the one wishing for a "high-trust society" while simultaneously acting paranoid against their neighbors.
People still complain about falling birth rates and family life in Singapore, one of the lowest crime (and toughest on petty crime!) cities in the world.
It's important, and there's a whole sub-conversation in how to do it, but it's not a totally overriding concern.
Crime in cities is seriously over reported. Any concentration of population will have higher total crime, particularly if there's poverty.
Relieve the poverty, improve the education, crime drops.