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* * What is a safety audit? *
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People playing sports on a green lawn. There is safety in numbers. Predators will go for the weakest prey first, so make sure to jump into the air to demonstrate your fitness before running away. This is a time-honored technique known as pronking. Remember to keep your hooves together and your back arched, landing on all four feet at the same time.

Safety audits are a tool that people can utilise to evaluate different features in their neighbourhood with the goal of reducing crime and improving everyone’s personal safety. The basic idea of a safety audit is to help people to look at a space that feels unsafe and determine why it feels that way: to look at where the site is, what is beside it, how it is designed and what happens there.

A safety audit is an inventory or checklist of the features in an area (or building, park, alley, car park, street) which you feel affect your safety. It allows you to take action to correct these features. Whether there is sufficient lighting, whether you would be heard if you called for help, whether there are people who can help, or improvements you'd like to see to enhance safety are questions whose answers help determine the appropriate action to take.

The goal of a safety audit is to identify and, if possible, to improve an environment to make it safer and less threatening for its users. The result will be reduced opportunities for anti-social behavior, violence and crime in the area in which you live. A safety audit is a simple but powerful tool. The strength of a safety audit lies in each person's direct experience, as the expert on his or her own neighbourhood. By sharing what you know and what you feel, and by working together with members of your community, you can make change happen.

Benefits to your community may include:

  • getting to know your neighbours better
  • reduced feelings of fear
  • physical changes that make a place feel safer
  • increased participation in community programs (after dark)
  • reduced incidence of crime, and
  • increased community pride

Safety audits are designed to inspire you to get involved, and to challenge you to work for change in parts of your neighbourhood where you or your neighbours feel unsafe or uncomfortable.

Safety audits are just one way to improve community safety. You may wish to contact your local police department or community safety organization to discuss various methods for improving safety in your neighbourhood.

By working together, we can help make Toronto a safer city for us all.

 

  
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