Partnership with Urban Alchemy Advances Research into Public Safety

Lena Miller founded Urban Alchemy in her native San Francisco with dual goals in mind: to improve public safety and to provide careers for people coming back to the community after long prison terms.

Urban Alchemy — whose employees help de-escalate situations related to homelessness, mental health, and addiction in the neighborhoods where they are deployed —  now employs over 600 people and has expanded to Los Angeles, Austin, and Portland, Oregon. But Miller felt the program was missing a stamp of approval that would show its effectiveness.

“Nothing is true unless a peer-reviewed study has validated it,” said Miller, founder and CEO of Urban Alchemy, who has a doctorate in psychology from the University of San Francisco.

So when Forrest Stuart, professor of sociology at Stanford and director of the Stanford Ethnography Lab, said he wanted to study Urban Alchemy, she agreed.

“I said, ‘Come in so you can see — you can tell the story in the language people need to hear it in,’” Miller said.

It was a good fit for Stuart, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow whose research focuses on the effects of aggressive policing and mass incarceration on communities. He became interested in what was happening in San Francisco in 2021, when the mayor issued an emergency order to address an increase in drug overdoses. 

On a visit to the city, he discovered an extraordinary contrast: In some areas, “it’s an open air drug market, with people with acute psychosis running into the street,” Stuart said. “On the other side of the street, there were kids walking in a line to Head Start programs, people selling tamales out of coolers, people coming peacefully out of the liquor store. And there were these older, confident Black and Brown men standing on corners watching, high-fiving kids, escorting someone with a cane or wheelchair across the street. I didn’t see any cops — there was this group of unarmed people creating peace on that street.”

Stuart and Miller discussed their partnership in a lunchtime presentation on February 19, “Increasing Engagement and Decreasing Crime in San Francisco.” The presentation was part of the Faculty Seminar Series: Research in the Real World and was sponsored by Stanford’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies and the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. It illustrated how scholars can engage in long-term collaborative work with community partners. 

The discussion was moderated by Tomás R. Jiménez, professor of sociology and founding faculty co-director of the Institute for Advancing Just Societies. He described the collaboration between Stuart and Miller “a demonstration of the best version of this kind of research.”

Quantifying social impact

Stuart set out to test the efficacy of Urban Alchemy’s program — which was a challenge, because programs like this tend to be rolled out where emergencies are happening. 

“This creates a complicated research situation,” Stuart said, since it doesn’t allow for comparison with a control group. “Studying the kinds of programs that solve real, acute, immediate problems requires a level of thoughtfulness to fit with the type of research designs that don’t normally evaluate such programs in real time.”

To get around this problem, Stuart and a graduate student paired each block where Urban Alchemy worked with a comparable block not served by the program that had had similar crime rates before Urban Alchemy started. They then compared the blocks’ crime rates after Urban Alchemy got involved. 

They found that crime dropped where Urban Alchemy worked — and the decrease was not just due to moving incidents to other areas, or to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. They attributed a 15% decrease in overall crime, and a 30% reduction in drug-related crime, to Urban Alchemy’s work. 

Stuart and Miller discussed why Urban Alchemy is effective at reducing crime even though its employees — whom they call practitioners — have no authority to force people to change their behavior.

“What is the thing that we use to get someone to not sell drugs in front of the Head Start center, or to walk down a block and go to the safe consumption site? If we were to think of connections and trust and reciprocity to be at the root of our request to folks to change their behavior, how far can we go with that?” Stuart said. 

He analyzed the effectiveness using the concept of social debt. 

“You do a favor for somebody, you get to know their name and their kids’ names, you let an employee take the afternoon off, you let someone get in line in front of you,” Stuart said. “Little things like this establish social debt. The practitioners are out there for 7 to 8 hours a day, creating social debt with everyone that comes around.”

Much of the practitioners’ connection with the people in the neighborhoods stems from small connections such as greeting people and buying them a cup of coffee. But they also carry naloxone with them and save lives from drug overdoses.

Another innovative aspect of Urban Alchemy’s program is that it seeks to build on transferable skills that practitioners learned in prison. 

“When your survival depends on your ability to reach people in and engage with them in a way that they won’t hurt you, you get real good at it,” Miller said. “Let’s elevate the things that kept people surviving and thriving in the most difficult situations.”

Co-creating research

The success of the Urban Alchemy model is not based solely on the emotional intelligence of its participants. Local government capacity is critical, as well, Stuart said. Urban Alchemy practitioners can point people to local services, but only if those services exist.

“It looks very different to be able to walk up to someone you have social debt with and say, ‘Let’s walk to the safe consumption site’ than to just say, ‘Hey, you can’t do that here,’” Stuart said. “There’s this thin line between banishment and directing folks to services.”

The co-creation process has also led to new directions for the research. When Stuart asked Miller what she wanted to learn, she said that in addition to getting peer-reviewed data on the program’s effectiveness at reducing crime, she was curious about the effects on employees. 

To address this question, Stuart plans to use state data to compare recidivism rates for Urban Alchemy employees compared with the state overall. They will pair the quantitative data with qualitative observations and interviews with the practitioners. 

Miller is hoping those results will help quantify the results she has observed: “If you give people a way to support themselves, they’re not going to get involved in the underground economy.”