Safety First

 

 

Public safety has become a charged issue in American cities. City folks rightfully take umbrage when non-city folks characterize cities as dangerous war zones. Non-city folks marvel that news coverage of crime and mayhem can be so quickly minimized by city folks. It is natural that something as basic to human existence as feeling safe has become so politically divisive to talk about and socially complex to resolve. 

Complicated problems require complicated solutions. My job today is not to wade into that, but rather to speak personally from my own experience navigating a big East Coast city and making sure my wife and children can do the same. You may have similar or different experiences, and similar or different takeaways from those experiences; in fact I assume there is a wide range of experiences and takeaways when it comes to moving around an American urban setting. 

Let me start by saying that crime is just one aspect of staying safe when getting from Point A to Point B in Philadelphia. For one, and understood that climate change may have something to say about this in the future, but we enjoy four true seasons and therefore lots of different kinds of weather, including shifting patterns from day to day or even within a day. Which means that one needs to check forecasts, plan accordingly, and prepare for unforeseen changes, or else run the risk of being miserably hot or cold or wet, and even worse having your ability to safely move around compromised or even completely blocked. 

Staying safe also requires being thoughtful of what mode of transport you choose and how to successfully navigate each mode. Most places in the US are not truly multi-modal, and in fact in many you have exactly zero choices, where things are so car-dominant that transit is unavailable and walking or biking is prohibitive. In Philly, “should I drive or bus or bike or walk” is a common question to ask oneself. 

Each mode, naturally, introduces its own risk calculation. I describe my urban driving as a weird combination of “defensive” and “offensive,” in that my goal of course is to avoid a collision (with another car, with a bicyclist or pedestrian, or with a concrete barrier or construction fence), but in order to do so one has to be ready to act decisively and not be too passive. When biking and walking, I now have to be mindful of those who are driving, wearing flashing lights when on two wheels, and not assuming cars will stop at stop signs when on two feet (and teaching my kids to do the same). 

Walking around or riding public transit involves its own game plan and game face. I tell my kids they are not allowed to do anything that displays to others that they are distracted, namely looking at their phones, wearing headphones, or anything besides having your head on a swivel. I’ve had to walk through different scenarios with Jada so she knows how she can, as a young woman, stay safe against the advances of men with bad intentions. And I tell Asher, as a large Black boy, that for his own safety he is not allowed to walk around with anything that can remotely be confused as a weapon and cause others around him to view him as a threat and take action against him. 

I wish this sort of vigilance wasn’t necessary but in fact it often is. Let me give three personal vignettes, which are relatively harmless but help illustrate this notion that what should otherwise be a mundane experience requires significant attention to stay safe:

1. One day, I was making the one-block walk from getting off the bus to walking into my office building. As I was quickly striding down the sidewalk, I noticed a guy coming towards me who was looking around in a shifty sort of way. I registered his erratic behavior even as I was thinking about the day’s schedule and being mindful of bumps and other people on the pavement. As the guy got closer he looked at me and then lunged at me as if to kick me, and I instinctively abruptly stopped walking forward and jumped backwards while yelling “whoa!” He missed me and then kept walking away, leaving me and everyone around me to look at each other and think “what the heck was that?” I am pretty sure that, if I hadn’t noticed him up the block, I wouldn’t have been able to elude his attack in time. I am also pretty sure that, if he had decided to use his fist instead of his foot, I also wouldn’t have been able to elude his attack in time. And yet, less than a minute later, when I entered my office building, my heart had stopped racing and I was on to the business of the day. 

2. I often bike to our local Y before the sun is up to get a workout in. It is so early that there are few if any cars on the road. Not that I don't keep my head on a swivel anyway, since I as a vulnerable and tottering cyclist need to share these local roads with two-ton steel boxes going at fast speeds. Sure enough, one morning I was roused from my sleepiness by a car abruptly arriving at an intersection as the same time as me, reminding me that I needed to pay attention. Which was fortunate, because the very next block a car driving erratically in front of me suddenly made a 180-degree turn and started speeding right towards me (on his left side of the street, which for me coming towards him meant right into the lane where I was biking). I immediately swerved from the street through parked cars and onto the safety of the sidewalk, not wanting to play chicken with a speeding car or hope he would steer closer to his side of the street once he got close to me. I was lucky there was a space between parked cars for me to make this transition from street to sidewalk, otherwise I'm not sure what I would've done to get out of his way, given how fast he was hauling and how directly he was going into my path.

3. Walking home from dropping Asher off at his friend's house, I turned a corner at an intersection with a spacious sidewalk and noticed a scary looking dog coming towards me. I looked up to see its owner, a petite young woman with her nose in her phone. Realizing that if the dog lurched at me, she might not be ready to rein it in, my gaze turned back to the dog to prepare for this possibility. The dog must have interpreted my looking at its owner and than at him as an act of aggression, because it immediately lunged at me with bared teeth. Thankfully its owner was able to keep grip on her leash, but I still had to jump back to avoid further danger. It was good that I was ready to, since I've definitely had multiple occasions when, while running in the dark, I come upon a scary dog and its sleepy owner, and there have been times when the dog feels sufficiently threatened and the owner sufficiently unprepared that the dog has run off towards me and the owner has lost grip of their leash. So I know, and tell my kids, to do everything you can to not sneak up on a dog, especially in the dark and especially if the owner doesn't look like they're paying attention.

In none of these situations was I directly hurt, even if I was deeply startled in all such cases. Unfortunately, not all encounters allow for such avoidance. I hold in my head countless stories of family members, friends, and colleagues who have witnessed or been directly affected by crime, sexual assault, and vehicular collisions. Some are minor and some are major; all of them accumulate to a body of direct and vicarious experiences that shape our thought process when we choose to move about this city. 

And so the mundane task of commuting to work or getting home from school is burdened with a hyper-awareness to things that can compromise our safety. And while it is good that I and others possess the “street smarts” to calculate danger potential and assess risk exposure, at its extreme it is tiresome, debilitating, or even paralyzing. 

We should approach conversations about and remedies for public safety with humility, because there are consequences to uninformed takes and ineffective actions that demean people, diminish concerns, and create more problems. But I hope it is not controversial to say that certain settings require a lot of planning and awareness to safely navigate, and that that overload of thinking is taxing to our wellbeing and worth considering how we can make things less taxing. To invoke my kids’ own experience again, a young woman walking around a city at night has to act in a certain way to stay safe, and I hope for a day in which that isn’t true. And a young Black boy biking to the park to play with his friends has to take care to avoid confrontations that can turn violent, and I wish someday this won’t be a problem. For now, safety is always first, and today’s post has been an attempt to inventory some of what that means in my own life.