4. Improving Community Governance to Reduce Crime: The Case of the Philadelphia’s Mantua BCJI Program

This chapter reports on the Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) program in Philadelphia. The research locale, the Mantua neighborhood located in West Philadelphia, received a BCJI grant in 2012 that ran until 2016. This work is focused on new governance organization that emerged from a set of federal grant programs known as the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative pursued under the Obama Administration. The stated aims of the BCJI program involved building the organizational capacity of the community to be effective planning and problem-solving agents. Increased community capacity would then be leveraged to reduce the number of criminogenic places in Mantua by first determining – through a geographically focused, data-driven effort – the nature of crime, violence, and disorder in the community. Programs developed in the planning process included crime prevention through environmental design efforts, police-led hot spot interventions, a block leadership program, and youth-focused safety and engagement programming. Reporting on both process and selected outcome results, this chapter reports on the problems and prospects of a community organizational effort around the policy issue of crime. Research utilized a mixed-method approach, including systematic observation, focus groups, GIS analysis of crime, and personal interviews.