This Is What Thriving Communities Look Like: Insights from Residents of Four Boston Neighborhoods

The Roundtable on Racial Disparities in Massachusetts Criminal Courts has released a new report, This Is What Thriving Communities Look Like: Insights from Residents of Four Boston Neighborhoods.

In the summer of 2020, George Floyd’s video-graphed murder by Minneapolis police officers sparked a renewed public discourse about the role that police and policing play in the United States. Seared into the public’s consciousness, this event and its aftermath led to calls for an examination – or reimagining – of public safety, of what communities need to feel and be safe, to thrive, and to be healthy. Heeding these calls, we – the Program in Criminal Justice at Harvard Kennedy School – sought answers to these questions in our own backyard – Boston, Massachusetts – focusing our efforts on four Boston neighborhoods – Roxbury and Dorchester, East Boston, and South Boston – neighborhoods that share historically troubled relationships with law enforcement but that differ in their racial and class compositions. Our goal was to understand how residents of these communities conceptualize healthy, safe, and thriving communities and what role they saw for law enforcement in their communities.

During the summer of 2022, we invited residents from each of these neighborhoods to participate in focus groups organized separately into youth and young adults, parents of dependent children, elders, and formerly incarcerated residents to capture residents’ diverse perspectives. Each focus group met twice, with each meeting spaced one week apart. During the first focus group session, which was one hour long, on average, residents shared their views on healthy and thriving communities and on public safety. At the end of this session, focus group moderators introduced residents to the photovoice method, a form of visual ethnography and a participatory research method that combines photography and narrative to center the perspectives of marginalized people and communities with the goal of effecting social change. In this project, we used the photovoice method for two purposes: 1) to give participants the opportunity to reflect on their conditions and environment in a creative and accessible way before participating in the focus group; and 2) to promote dialogue, reflection, and the co-construction of perspectives amongst participants during the focus group. As residents left the first meeting, moderators invited them to respond to the following prompt using photographs: What does a healthy and thriving community look like or mean to you? One week later, during the second session, participants returned with photographs that responded to this prompt. The moderator then engaged residents in a conversation guided by and reflecting on their photographs.

A few of these photographs are reproduced in the report. Please click here to view more of the photographs shared by the focus group participants.

By summer’s end, the research team had completed 22 focus groups. These conversations revealed residents’ comprehensive ideas for what thriving communities look like, what impediments exist to creating and maintaining such communities and what types of investments would be needed to overcome these challenges, and, finally, where law enforcement fits into this picture.

Across neighborhoods, two elements were seen as key to creating and maintaining healthy, safe, and thriving communities. The first was community cohesion and collective efficacy. Residents’ responses highlighted a desire for the activities and institutions that facilitate the development of bonds between and across residents, shared expectations, and a sense that they could come together to solve their community’s problems. Their responses echo the main takeaways from sociological research – community cohesion and collective efficacy amplify safety (real and perceived), thriving, and healthfulness, benefits that accrue to the whole community.

Also foundational to creating and maintaining thriving communities is freedom from harm and violence. The expectation and fear of violence and crime inspire a pervasive distrust that causes residents to keep to themselves, to stay indoors, to avoid most others. Linking these core elements, residents emphasized how violence, endemic to some neighborhoods, erodes a community’s social fabric, puts in doubt shared expectations, and obliterates collective efficacy.

But to achieve the levels of cohesion needed to thrive, residents emphasized the need for significant investment in the built environment, in human capital, and in residents’ health and well-being. To thrive, they underscored, means having one’s basic needs met – safe and affordable housing, good quality education, and freedom from hunger; access to quality health care, broadly defined; opportunities for upward mobility; initiatives and programs for youth engagement; and a robust physical infrastructure and green space. Through investments in these key areas, residents asserted their communities would be able to thrive too.

Residents’ views on the role that police and policing can and should play, however, ranged considerably. While some perceive police as protectors who assist people during times of distress, others view police as seriously flawed but potentially salvageable with more and higher quality engagement with community members, and still others see the police as violence workers, a key source of harm in their communities that must be replaced by more efficient, effective, and caring actors, including and especially members of their own communities, who can better help address persistent problems.