Keeping Students Safe: Positive Results from Chicago’s Safe Passage Program

In the effort to reduce violence in Chicago, one important focus area is keeping students safe on their way to school. In 2009, the city launched the Safe Passage program as a novel method of addressing this issue. Safe Passage hires civilian guards and places them around schools during the beginning and end of the school day. The program is now operating in more than 140 schools in Chicago. But does it prevent crime and keep students safe? A recent study by Daniel McMillen, Ignacio Sarmiento-Barbieri, and Ruchi Singh found positive results: Safe Passage led to decreases in both violent crime and student absenteeism.

Safe Passage has several advantages over traditional methods of crime control, such as increased police presence near schools. First, the program is relatively low-cost. Safe Passage guards are currently paid $10.50 per hour and in 2016 the entire program had a budget of $17.8 million. This is significantly lower than the cost of stationing additional police in the neighborhoods during the school day. Second, the Safe Passage guards are community members who typically have or know children attending the schools. They are familiar with the neighborhood and care about making it a safer place. This community support is important, as community involvement has been shown to play a role in crime reduction.

In their analysis, the authors compare crime in areas with a Safe Passage route to adjacent areas before and after Safe Passage was implemented. They create a geographic grid around Safe Passage routes, dividing the land into squares measuring 1/8-mile-by-1/8-mile (1/64 of a square mile). They then compare crime in squares that contain Safe Passage routes with crime in areas three squares away. This allows them to control for neighborhood characteristics that may have influenced crime aside from Safe Passage. The authors utilize data on crime incidents from the City of Chicago Data Portal, which is derived from the Chicago Police Department’s Citizen Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting (CLEAR) system. The data spans from January 2001 to August 2016. They also use data from the Data Portal on census block characteristics, school demographics, and locations of Safe Passage schools.

The authors find that squares with Safe Passage routes see a 14.3 percent decrease in violent crime after the program was implemented. They also identify a slight decrease in property crimes, but these results are less precise. When differentiating between types of schools, they find that the crime-reducing effect of the program is primarily driven by high schools, where violent crime decreases by 17 percent and property crimes decreases by 11 percent. Finally, they found that schools participating in Safe Passage experience a 1.68 percentage point increase in school attendance rates.

Several non-program-related factors may have influenced their results, and the authors took steps to address them. It is possible that the City of Chicago could have launched other initiatives to address crime during the study period, such as increased policing. However, the authors control for some of these factors and do not see any changes in their results. They also address a potential concern that crime may have simply been displaced from a Safe Passage area to an unguarded area nearby, instead of actually being eliminated. They include controls to account for areas that were one and two squares away from the Safe Passage route to measure changes in crime post-intervention. They find no significant relationship between crime in these cells and implementation of Safe Passage and therefore conclude that there is no relocation of violent crime.

These results suggest that Safe Passage is an incredibly cost-effective method of decreasing crime and promoting student attendance. It is inexpensive, promotes community involvement, and creates jobs, and it may be beneficial for Chicago to expand this program to other high-need areas. Other cities facing issues of urban violence could adopt Safe Passage as well, tailoring it to meet the unique needs of their neighborhoods. Safe Passage is an innovative strategy for keeping students and communities safe, and its success suggests that it could serve as a new model for violence-reduction efforts across the country.

Article source: McMillen, Daniel, Ignacio Sarmiento-Barbieri, and Ruci Singh, “Do More Eyes on the Street Reduce Crime? Evidence from Chicago’s Safe Passage Program,” Journal of Urban Economics 110 (2019): 1-25.

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