Reducing Crime Along Routes to School: The Impact of the Safe Passage Program in Chicago

Introduction: Chicago Public Schools (CPS) initiated the Safe Passage program in response to a high-profile incident in which a CPS student was beaten to death while walking home from school (Corley, 2013). The Safe Passage program aims to keep children who live in high-risk neighborhoods safe while commuting to and from school by hiring community members tasked with monitoring designated Safe Passage routes and reporting suspicious activities to authorities. SAFE Passage now serves approximately 75,000 students from 142 participating schools. The purpose of the present analyses is to assess the impact of Safe Passage on crime along the staffed routes.

Methods: For each route, we defined 1-block buffers around the route as the “intervention” area. “Comparison” areas were defined as 1-block buffers that are (a) between 2 and 3 blocks from the target areas and (b) not a within 2 blocks of another active Safe Passage route. Monthly crime densities (incidents per quarter square mile) were calculated for each area using publicly available crime incident data for shootings, aggravated assaults, robberies, and property crimes. A discontinuous growth model was used in which the point of discontinuity was the time at which Safe Passage went into effect for a given school. Therefore, a significant condition (intervention vs comparison) x discontinuity effect was used to test the hypothesis that Safe Passage impacted crime along the target routes. These analyses used crime data from September 2012, through June 2016, and included only data from September through June, months when schools are generally in session. Separate analyses were conducted for school days (6 am – 6 pm), school nights (6 pm – 6 am), and weekends.

Results: For school days, there were significant Safe Passage effects for robberies (p=.019) and property crimes (p=.005) such that the intervention areas had significant reductions in monthly crime relative to the comparison areas. A trend (p=.07) was found for shootings. For school nights there was a significant effect for aggravated assaults such that there were increases in the intervention areas relative to decreases in the comparison areas. For weekends, there were no significant effects.

Conclusions: These results demonstrate the positive effects of the Safe Passage routes in terms of reducing crime during school days. Further, there was no evidence of impact during times when Safe Passage was not in effect. This pattern of results suggests a meaningful benefit when the Safe Passage zones are being staffed.