LANSING – Community-engaged environmental projects helped reduce crime in Flint, a new study found.

Researchers looked at Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design as strategies for combating crime in Flint’s central area – the University Avenue Corridor.

“Residents who collaboratively planned and implemented neighborhood improvements – for example, boarding abandoned homes and mowing vacant lots – reported feeling closer to neighbors and relying on each other to solve problems,” according to the study in the American Journal of Community Psychology.

It used crime data from 2015 to 2018.

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design strategies are physical, social and broad-ranging. They include installing cameras and motion detectors, removing trees that obstruct sightlines, parades, educational events and establishing neighborhood groups.

“We found that the streets that had the most intense Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design activity did better over time on both violent crime and gun violence,” said one of the authors of the study, Laney Rupp of the University of Michigan Prevention Research Collaborative.

“The takeaway seems to be that doing more of this, and in a more community-engaged fashion, seems to make a difference,” Rupp said.

Tom Wyatt is the executive director of the Neighborhood Engagement Hub in Flint and a co-author of the first-of-its-kind study.

“We had a 49% decrease in assaults, 53% decrease in robberies, 78% decrease in burglaries, 55% decrease in vandalism,” Wyatt said.

“We saw an increase in neighborhood satisfaction. We saw a decrease in negative perception of disorder, a decrease in mental health symptoms in some of the neighborhoods. We saw people were more likely to report crimes,” Wyatt said.

Even as the city was going through a crisis with lead contamination in its drinking water, Wyatt said people moved out but more investment came in as well.

Rupp said, “The community felt that stabilizing the central corridor was really vital to the city’s future stability and economic prosperity.”

Wyatt said one way to think about communities with challenges and disinvestment is to think of them like a farm.

“If you want to farm, you have to first cultivate the soil and stabilize it,” he said. “And then once it’s at that point, then you can put resources into it and then you can receive your crop or yield.”

In the long run, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design strategies could prove to be less expensive, according to the study.

Such tactics could be an “alternative” to expensive “individual-level” methods like policing, courts and corrections, which cost local and state governments nationwide $266 billion in 2020, it said..

“Changing the environments where people live is potentially a more efficient way to improve health and safety for large populations of people,” Rupp said.

“It’s a novel approach that doesn’t require blaming or criminalizing communities for the violence that they’re experiencing,” he said.