The National Network for Safe Communities partners with communities to reduce violence and harm, build trust, and increase public safety. Our work focuses on the safety of the most vulnerable communities in the United States, Sweden, Mexico, and Brazil. Our action research framework, originating in the “Boston Miracle” of the 1990s, works with front-line law enforcement, community members, and service providers to create powerful, immediate responses to violence and other sources of community harm. We have invented and taken to scale transformative, proven interventions around homicide, gun trafficking, drug markets, intimate partner violence, prison safety, and a range of other substantive issues. Our work and operational approaches are rooted in the foundational need for safety in the lives of communities, families, and individuals; the strength and resilience of communities; a recognition that the application of the law is a critical democratic function which can also do tremendous harm; the need to address the trauma caused by both community violence and abuses of state power; the need to change harmful policing and other criminal justice practices; the practical and moral obligation to address important public safety issues quickly and effectively; and academic rigor and transparency.
