I made it back to the Southcenter Mall again this past weekend (movie theater), and good news; no reported shootings this time. The situation was probably helped by the very visible presence of no fewer than eight Seattle Police Gang Unit officers, who wandered the mall with an eye on deterrence. Instead, the only nearby shooting this week was very close my house.

“Two Teens Shot on Trail near Maple Valley” was the headline on a local news station’s website, which evoked an image of two innocent school kids being menaced by evil-doers in the big, scary forest. We later find out that these were mostly young adults who were arguing with each other about possible gang affiliations.

“Gangs? In Maple Valley? But there’s no crime out here! Those people must have driven here from out of the area, probably those bad areas in Tacoma that I’ve heard about”. Nope; from all accounts so far, these were locals. One of those involved lives in my neighborhood, and I’ve been worried about his future for some time now.

The knee-jerk reaction would be that we need more police, with more patrols through neighborhoods, and maybe on the trail, too. Well, we do need those things, but not as a reaction to a single, high-profile event. Maple Valley added several new officers on New Year’s Day, which will give us some special emphasis teams to slow our drug problem.

The drug trade is this city is thriving among small players and teenagers at the moment, but the more organized gangs have taken notice, and are slowly moving in. They’ll go where the customers are, and we’ve got them.

But we can’t simply put an officer on every corner, unless we just want to push the problem into a neighboring city. That’s the selfish and lazy way out, and the neighboring city may simply return the favor in the near future. The role of police in solving the drug and gang problem is a small one anyway; they’re left to clean up the mess that we’ve helped to create.

When I say “we”, I mean all of us, through the choices we make in public policy, community organization, social control, parenting styles and collective efficacy.

Collective efficacy is made up of two parts; one is your willingness to participate in something that benefits your community and maintains order, and the other part is your belief that your neighbor feels the same way. This is particularly important in relation to kids.

For example, if you saw kids harassing the passers-by at the park, would you intervene to disperse them, and contact their parents if you knew them? Would you expect your neighbors to do the same? You might be uncomfortable doing that, but a community’s collective efficacy has a big impact on its crime rate.

Collective efficacy also applies to the public services that affect everyone. If our police and fire departments were facing damaging budget cuts, would you look into the problem and voice your concerns? Or would you simply say, “Ahh, those guys are probably all overpaid anyway”, and risk public safety to save $40 a year? If we simply think that it’s someone else’s problem to solve, then we’ve failed.

Maple Valley has a special challenge as a car-centric community with few sidewalks. We spend a lot more time inside our oversized houses than we do outside, or at community gathering places. When we do get to those gathering places, we drive there.

That leaves a lot of gaps in between stops that aren’t frequented by anyone but dog walkers, runners, and bored, wandering teenagers. On the trail, the runners barely acknowledge anyone besides other runners, and most of the dog walkers do the same (except to talk to your dog). There is one dog walker who makes it a point to tell everyone that she’s carrying a gun, so she might be the only one holding together our collective efficacy on the trail.

I think we can do better than this. It will take a concerted effort on the part of our community organization leaders to study how to improve our city’s collective efficacy, and then take steps to actually bridge the gaps. They’ll need to be more creative in getting people interested in meeting and working together, which means bringing on new people with good ideas.

It will take more than just running an ad in the local paper and holding a meeting in a school auditorium. It will take more than another event in the park. We either want to have a unified city that values social order, or else we’ll be left with a city that hides behind locked doors and leaves its children outside to fend for themselves.