Mapping (Un)Safe Routes to School: Using Community-Engaged Mapping to Inform Safe Passages Program Planning

A neighborhood dominated by the presence of violence can critically affect the health of a community and prevent children from fulfilling their highest potential. In Los Angeles' Belmont/Rampart neighborhood, students face pervasive fear, unable to get to and from school safely because of 27 different gangs that consider it their “territory.” This session will demonstrate how Community Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) and Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) approaches were used to conduct Community-Engaged Mapping with 53 students and parents to identify the areas and routes where they felt most unsafe. This session will also describe how online mapping technology can be used to engage community members in a participatory mapping process. Parents and students from the local middle and high school identified the major factors they perceived contributed to fear and threat to and from school, particularly as influenced by the community's physical and environmental design. In turn, the input gathered informed the process of planning Safe Passages programs around local schools. Safe Passages improves the physical environment for kids so violence less likely to occur by involving parents, youth, school staff, community leaders, and local law enforcement in securing routes students travelled to school. Combining resident knowledge with crime, demographics, and land use data observations, produced analytical maps, charts, and tables that were provided to local schools, law enforcement, community organizations to implement solutions and to promote policies that mitigated fear, threat, ,and intimidation children faced to and from school.