Making a Safe City

Paul Ryburn has been writing a lot about downtown crime lately. He's received lots of support and a little bit of flak for writing about it. The flak is apparently coming from folks of the "if we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist" persuasion. Paul apparently subscribes to the "we can't fix it if we don't talk about it" school of thought. And he's working to fix it.

He doesn't mention the Broken Windows theory, but it sounds like he's a believer:

I don't think cruising in and of itself is the biggest crime problem downtown, but I do believe that would-be criminals see that violations of the cruising ordinance, the noise ordinance, traffic laws, etc. will be tolerated, and they see an environment in which more serious crimes will be tolerated as well.

By the way, he's only recently started writing about crime. The rest of the time he's writing about the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of downtown Memphis.