Safety cannot rely solely on law enforcement: How economic opportunities reshape urban public safety

From Enforcement to Opportunity: Rethinking the Path to Urban Public Safety

In the United States, mayors, governors, and legislators have ranked public safety and the economy as top priorities in 2025. Yet a long-overlooked structural contradiction is that these two are often treated separately in policy practice. Crime is reduced to a policing and judicial issue, while economic prosperity is relegated to development departments. The latest research from the Brookings Institution reminds us that this separation not only fails to help solve violence, but may also cause us to miss a true opportunity for reform.

The Inherent Limits of "Law and Order"

In recent years, a wave of policy under the banner of "law and order" has swept across the United States. Some states have tried to take over local police departments, restrict the power of progressive prosecutors, and even reverse criminal justice reforms; some cities have resumed aggressive prosecution for minor offenses, controversial "stop-and-frisk" practices, and youth curfews. These measures appear to respond to the public's anxiety about safety, yet they reduce complex social ailments to behaviors that require punishment. In fact, the trauma, unemployment, and despair in poor communities will not disappear just because of more police officers or longer sentences. On the contrary, over-policing may further tear apart police-community trust and intensify the isolation of neglected communities.

What the Data Reveals: Missing Opportunity Drives Violence

A recent study by the Brookings Institution found that the surge in U.S. homicide rates during the COVID-19 pandemic was mainly driven by the loss of employment and educational opportunities in high-poverty communities, rather than by changes in policing or the justice system. This finding has profound implications: the lack of economic opportunity provides fertile ground for violence—when young people cannot see legal and dignified paths forward, they are more easily drawn to the illegal economy or gang culture. This is not an excuse for criminal behavior, but rather a pointer to an overlooked intervention point: to reduce crime in the long term, we must start by repairing the structure of opportunity.

Voices from the Frontline: Work and Belonging

Many people directly engaged in violence intervention have long understood this truth. When former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke with detainees at the Cook County Jail in Chicago, he found that what they repeatedly mentioned was "a job paying $12 or $13 an hour." Duncan said that if these people could gain employment opportunities, complete high school, and have the space to heal themselves, they would actively choose to stay away from guns. A police officer in Ohio also told Brookings researchers frankly that whether in urban gangs or rural trailer parks, the root of crime is tied to a "suppressed economy." Young people seek belonging when family is absent, and gangs often fill that vacuum. These frontline observations corroborate the macro-level data: safety is not just a matter of order, but also a matter of opportunity.

Reintegrating Safety and ProsperityThe good news is that some regions have already begun the transition from fragmentation to integration. Across the country, businesses, civic organizations, universities, governments, and public-interest groups are joining forces to advance regional innovation initiatives and invest in next-generation industries and jobs. These efforts have particularly benefited economically distressed areas, demonstrating that global competitiveness can be achieved through inclusive development in cities and small towns. If public safety strategies can be deeply aligned with these economic development plans, we can reduce violence while injecting real vitality into "forgotten communities." For example, embedding job training, youth mentoring programs, and community investment into policing strategies could not only lower crime rates but also save on the high costs of incarceration, delivering long-term benefits to government finances and taxpayers.

The Future of Urban Governance: Inclusive Safety Beyond Punishment

For cities in the United States and around the world, this lesson carries universal significance. From Chicago to Manchester, from Johannesburg to Mumbai, megacities and rural hinterlands alike face a similar structural fragmentation: central urban areas prosper, while peripheral zones are left forgotten by capital and opportunity. If "safety" is narrowly defined as law enforcement, or isolated from economic development, the result is only a fragile and expensive order. True public safety comes from community resilience, and that resilience is built on employment, education, housing, and public trust. Future urban strategies must redefine safety as a byproduct of opportunity—rather than something maintained solely by batons, handcuffs, and prisons. Only by enabling all communities to share in the possibility of economic participation can we lay a lasting foundation of stability for urban civilization.

This article is a re-creation based on original research published by the Brookings Institution on March 11, 2025, retaining the core facts and not representing the views of the original institution.