Community Safety Needs and Resources and Their Alignment: A Case Study

Our study objective was to describe the match between community safety needs and resources in Cleveland, Ohio from 2015-2019. We conducted an extensive review of online sources, agency websites, and implementation documents to identify violence prevention and community safety activities. We coded each census tract based on the presence or absence of each specific activity type and explored cross-sectional associations with crime frequency and type, including violent, property, and firearm crime, using Besag-York-Mollie (BYM) spatial autoregressive models. We identified 1,147 activities taking place in 1,625 locations. Efforts to improve the physical environment and after-school and out-of-school programs were the most common activity types. The total number of activities per population was positively associated with crime frequency (Relative Risk (RR) = 1.14; 95% Credible Interval (CI) = 1.102, 1.176), the property crime rate (RR = 1.17; 95% CI = 1.123, 1.226), the violent crime rate (RR = 1.62; 95% CI = 1.449, 1.806), and the rate of firearm-involved violent crime (RR = 4.79; 95% CI = 2.965, 7.745). There is a strong foundation for coordinated violence prevention in Cleveland, Ohio, targeted on average, though imperfectly, to the areas with more violence.