Citizen Security

After hearing about the problems of neighborhood crime and violence in San Salvador for many years, experiencing a sense of insecurity firsthand, grieving with friends victimized by violence, and then witnessing prevention efforts like El Paseo, I became more interested in the community life of Salvadoran neighborhoods. I started to ask myself: How do residents use public spaces? How do they come together in places without secure spaces? How do they participate in decisionmaking processes? Are there differences in community and social life between communities with different physical appearances? And, what does this all have to do with whether or not a neighborhood is a "zona segura" or "zona peligrosa"? I wanted to know if community and social life is really any different in neighborhoods with and without attempted "fixes" to the social or physical order.

I also wanted to know more about the theories and hypotheses about life in these neighborhoods that undergird the popular concept of "citizen security." Citizen security is a prevalent policy approach to crime and violence prevention in Central America that emphasizes physical order, strong social cohesion, participation, and expectations for action on the part of neighbors and civil society. I quickly learned that the idea behind the El Paseo citizen security approach is nothing new. Fixing up rundown areas to make people feel and act better was an approach attempted by urban social reformers in nineteenth-century Europe. It became established by the mid–twentieth century in the United States. Many of the prescriptions offered in the literature on citizen security in Central America draw on "social disorganization theory" or the "disorganization hypothesis" from the United States. Basically, theorists who ascribe to this hypothesis see two sides to the disorganization of a neighborhood. One is social, where there is little engagement by neighbors, a lack of community life, and problems maintaining order that is evinced by crime and violence. The other is physical, where one can observe deteriorated buildings, disrepair in streets and sidewalks, and a lot of people crowded into small areas. Both the social and physical sides are assumed to be related in the hypothesis. Where there is physical disorder, we should expect to find social disorder. When the physical disorder is fixed, one should expect to see improvements on the social side, including a reduction in crime.

From the outside, this seemed to be the case in Santa Tecla. Physical order was created, improving the social order such that a crowd could gather to enjoy a night out in the middle of one of the most violent cities in the world. Similar to what I witnessed, proponents of the disorganization hypothesis suggested that physical things such as deterioration and population density correspond to social things such as a lack of strong social ties and high levels of crime (Greenberg, Rohe, & Williams, 1982; Jacobs, 1961; Kelling & Wilson, 1982; Newman, 1972; Park, 1915; Park & Burgess, 1925; Shaw & McKay, 1942). European social reformers leaned on this hypothesis as a way to fix early urban problems of poverty and crime. They assumed that the rise in crime in late-nineteenth-century cities was attributable to rapid, disorderly urbanization.

This hypothesis was criticized at the time by European social ecologists André-Michel Guerry (1833) and R. W. Rawson (1839). Guerry and Rawson were among the first to determine that there was significant variation in crime even within urban areas. They found that, contrary to anti-urban narratives, it was not the trend in industrialization and the unpleasant aesthetics of early urbanization that increased crime, but spatially differentiated social order within those urban areas. Tight, shared spaces and the way streets were organized mattered less than what people did in those spaces. For instance, Guerry found that crime was concentrated in industrial areas in France, while Rawson found that non-industrial areas in England had the most crime. It was not the ugly and dirty urban industrial area itself that invited crime, as people had thought previously. There was something different going on.

In the United States, however, the idea that living closer together in an urban area increased crime and violence was accepted well into the twentieth century. The concentration of unemployment, family disintegration, poverty, and crime was believed to make these problems worse than in rural areas (Hall, 2002). After the turn of the century, it was the Chicago School sociologists who looked at these issues most closely. They advanced what would become "social disorganization theory" in urban areas. While European predecessors and Chicago contemporaries set the stage, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (1942) are credited with the theory that crime is perpetuated depending on the amount of disorganization of a particular neighborhood. The definition of social disorganization used by Shaw and McKay is summarized well by Sampson (2012) as "The inability of a community to realize the common values of its residents and maintain effective social controls" (p. 37). This inability to realize common values in disorganized communities was a result of some of the same "urban problems" identified by earlier theorists. In particular, Shaw and McKay pointed to heterogeneous populations, migration, and weak interpersonal relationships as the source of disorganization. Greater varieties of people and more of them meant that they would not share the same idea of what was important. Without a basic, if implicit, agreement among these peoples about the maintenance of private property and public spaces, how to interact or work together, there could be no effective way to maintain order.

Social and physical reform programs in the United States picked up on these ideas in an effort to combat rising crime and violence in cities. For example, the Chicago Area Projects, started by Shaw in the 1930s, instituted community committees and promoted youth participation in decision making. The Mobilization for Youth program in New York, begun in the 1960s, promoted physical and social order through neighborhood councils, the beautification of public spaces, and greater public participation in policy discussions.

While evaluation methodology was poor during the early days of the Chicago Area Projects, by the time of Mobilization for Youth evaluations were calling into question programs that relied primarily on social cohesion and participation (Klein, 1995, p. 141). After decades of proliferation, regard for the disorganization hypothesis began to recede toward the end of the twentieth century in the United States. It drew fire from both researchers and practitioners as the epidemic of crime and violence continued to spread across the country after a half-century of prevention efforts tried to fix physically and socially disordered neighborhoods (Klein, 1995; Lees, 1991; Monti, 1994; Spergel,...