For decades, America has measured public safety all wrong. We’ve treated it like a scoreboard—counting arrests, tracking crime rates, and equating bigger police budgets with safer communities. But those numbers don’t tell the real story—they reflect a culture of fear and punishment rather than the reality of community safety.

Real safety is freedom from fear—fear of losing your home, your job, your health care—not just freedom from crime.

That’s why Campaign Zero is launching Safe Cities—a national campaign and first-ever data platform that redefines what public safety means and how it is measured. Rooted in care, equity, and data, Safe Cities challenges the false, worn narrative that safety comes from punishment and control. Instead, it starts with a simple, radical question: What is public safety, really?

For generations, we’ve defined public safety as crime control—a narrow, punitive framework that tethers safety to law enforcement, surveillance, and incarceration. This framework sustains a public safety paradigm that criminalizes poverty and treats social problems as offenses to be contained rather than conditions to be changed. It’s not about what people actually need to be safe.

But policing and punishment don’t address the foundation of what makes us safe. They don’t help us find a job, provide child care, or heal us when we’re sick. Nearly 80% of Americans in a recent Campaign Zero/YouGov poll said that well-lit streets, accessible healthcare, affordable housing, and jobs matter to their safety—showing that real safety is built on many foundations, including:

• Economic and educational security that ensures opportunity and stability
• Accessible health care that sustains well-being
• Stable housing that offers dignity and protection
• Social connection and belonging that ground us in community
• Freedom from carceral harm that fractures families and neighborhoods
• And yes, protection from crime — but as one element among many.

Safety is something communities create together through care, cooperation, and collective action. Our polling showed that about 80% of voters living in cities say they trust local business owners, educators, and social workers as much or more than police, underscoring what people already know: safety is built through relationships and experience, not punishment. A well-resourced community is a safer community.

If policing and punishment actually made us safe, the United States would be a global model. Instead, we are the world’s leading incarcerator with the highest imprisonment rate of any independent democracy on Earth—and worse, nearly every state locks up more people per capita than most entire nations.

This approach has created a fixation on violent crime, amplifying fear through political rhetoric and media narratives that exaggerate danger while ignoring the social conditions that actually shape safety. Crime statistics dominate headlines, but they capture only a narrow slice of reality—they reflect what police record, not what people experience. 

The media plays a central role in sustaining this distortion—repeating isolated stories of violence until they appear ubiquitous, manufacturing a sense of constant danger while overlooking the deeper realities that make communities unsafe. Our poll reveals a major mismatch: while 50% of Americans (and 73% of Fox News viewers) believe crime is rising nationally, just 12% believe crime is rising in their own neighborhoods. Violent crime remains near historic lows across the country, highlighting a stark divide between what people are told to fear and what’s actually happening. That gap reflects how fear is manufactured and monetized, even as real violence declines.

Safe Cities is redefining what safety means and how it’s measured. The project builds new tools and narratives that center care over control, equity over enforcement, and community well-being over state power. Because the safest communities aren’t the ones with the most police—they’re the ones where people’s basic needs are met.

The Safe Cities Platform

What is Safe Cities?

Safe Cities is an interactive platform that analyzes diverse safety indicators for 11 major U.S. cities. It is the first-of-its-kind platform to offer a comprehensive view of what shapes safety in these places. Rather than focusing solely on crime data, the platform expands safety data to include six safety domains, informed by community research done by the National Innovation Service: housing affordability, healthcare access, economic security, education access, carceral harm, and crime.

What Will I Find on Safe Cities?

A new, more comprehensive way to look at safety in communities.  It includes:

• National map showing trends across different safety indicators and crime metrics across the 11 major cities
• City-specific safety data, key takeaways, and key racial disparities across safety indicators
• Data and methodology explaining where our data comes from, and the research that laid the foundation for this work

Who is Safe Cities For?

Everyone. The platform is designed for anyone who wants to understand, report on, or shape safety in their city, including:

• Community organizers who want to make data-driven arguments for change.
• Journalists who need clear, contextualized data to tell more accurate stories.
• Voters and residents who want to understand what’s really happening in their communities.
• Researchers and policymakers who are looking to advance restorative safety solutions and public safety research.

How Can I Use Safe Cities?

• Explore city-level data across multiple domains—crime, housing, healthcare, economic security, and incarceration.
• Compare trends over time to see how shifts in policing or incarceration align with broader community conditions.
• Use data visualizations to support advocacy, reporting, or research.
• Build informed narratives about what truly drives safety and well-being in your communities.

Our Hope for Safe Cities

We want Safe Cities to help communities reclaim the conversation about what safety means. By consolidating a comprehensive set of safety data into an easy-to-use platform, Safe Cities enables users to see how crime trends intersect with broader community conditions over time. 

By providing voters, organizers, journalists, and decision-makers with accessible, transparent safety data, we aim to ground public dialogue in truth—not headlines, fear, or political agendas.

At Campaign Zero, we believe data is power, and access to data should be open and free. Ultimately, our goal is simple: Equip communities with the knowledge and tools they need to build a future where safety is defined by well-being, connection, and justice—not control.

Austin Case Study: Safe Cities Data Powers AJC’s Push for Community Investment

To learn how Safe Cities could best support organizers on the ground, Campaign Zero partnered with the Austin Justice Coalition (AJC) to pilot the first neighborhood-level safety scorecards. AJC, a community organization focused on improving conditions for Black, Brown, and marginalized residents, was leading a campaign for a Community Investment Budget—an effort to shift city resources toward community needs.

What We Did

We began by analyzing Austin’s Safe Cities data by city council district, connecting granular insights to how residents vote and how council members govern. From there, we met with the Austin Justice Coalition to identify which Safe Cities indicators best reflected the priorities in their community investment budget campaign. Through those conversations, we refined our focus to the most relevant indicators and added new metrics—eviction rates, city budgeting data, and food insecurity—to better capture local conditions.

Using these prioritized indicators, we developed ten Safety Scorecards—one for each Austin district—offering both citywide and district-level insights to highlight where deeper investments in housing, health, and economic stability are most needed, reinforcing the case for funding community resources rather than policing.

The Safe Cities scorecards were used by the AJC coalition during Austin’s budget engagement process – even prompting City Council members to request they be the subject of town halls for broader community discussion on budget priorities and neighborhood needs. Campaign Zero co-presented with AJC at some of these community discussions, which garnered local media coverage, featuring Safe Cities data and an interview with AJC founder Chas Moore, who spotlighted the need for a city budget that reflected the community’s actual needs. Ultimately, AJC and its coalition were successful in getting almost all of their Community Investment budget line items integrated into the approved City budget.

Thanks to Safe Cities data, we were able to achieve our goals with a community investment budget. We know the Safe Cities scorecards led to much greater public engagement with the city budget. Even the city council members said the data helped them better understand the needs of their community –  we have a housing problem, but some city council members didn’t realize that until they saw the numbers.

—AJC Founder Chas Moore

The Austin city page on Safe Cities now features the district-level data and the scorecards. Through this pilot, we learned how to build a more granular view of Safe Cities domains and indicators—and how to translate those insights into data stories and visualizations that can eventually be scaled to other cities. The Austin partnership serves as a model for how Safe Cities can evolve into a dynamic resource for organizing, storytelling, and impact.

What’s Next

Building on what we learned in Austin, the next phase of work will focus on delivering district-level data insights across other cities, each tailored to reflect local realities and organizing priorities.

To keep this evolution grounded in lived experience, we plan to continue partnering with safety organizers in these cities. Their on-the-ground knowledge will guide which safety domains to highlight, what indicators matter most, and how to tell each city’s story in a way that resonates with and serves its residents.