Maya Singhal: How neighborhoods create a feeling of safety across cultures

A touchstone of city living is being immersed in diverse cultures. Often ethnic or racial groups create pockets of community-building their own social structures to help residents feel safe.

Maya Singhal, assistant professor of Asian studies, College of Arts and Science (Submitted photo)

"Ultimately, safety is a feeling and a relationship with other people," said Maya Singhal, assistant professor of Asian studies. "The reality is almost every city in America is getting safer. There's less violent crime almost everywhere, with some notable exceptions. But no amount of guns or walls or police will ever make someone feel safe if they don't feel that way on their own."

That's where community connection comes in. Singhal is examining the dynamics of how different ethnic neighborhoods create a feeling of safety, without official constructs like police.

Singhal's current research, titled "Safer: Community Defense in New York City," explores the conflicts and collaborations that have come from communities creating their own forms of protection in Chinese, Black and Latine neighborhoods across New York City from the 1960s to today.

"Chinatown is surrounded by other diverse communities as well as having several jails, a police headquarters, homeless shelters and drug rehabilitation clinics," Singhal said. "Because of that, it can be challenging to think about what public safety looks like in a neighborhood that is so diverse and has so many populations coming in and out of it."

STOP ASIAN HATE

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, residents in Chinatown and many other Asian American communities were victimized through anti-Asian violence. Singhal explains that along with a nationwide Stop Asian Hate social justice effort, many communities took it upon themselves to try to protect residents.

"Police are traditionally reactive, not proactive, in these types of situations, so people worked to start self-defense groups and survival training and neighborhood patrols," Singhal said.

Stop Asian Hate marches took place across the United States in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

They gave an example of the founder of a 1960s Black Panther-affiliated Chinese organization, called the Red Guards, who helped empower people of all races-especially elderly Chinese Americans-by teaching a form of Tai Chi for self-defense in a lower Manhattan park.

"Another of my favorite programs was an organization launched by a New York City firefighter, called Angry Asian Women, to help women and femmes learn self-defense and situational awareness," Singhal said.

Maya Singhal, assistant professor of Asian studies, lived in New York City while gathering her research. (Submitted photo)

LEARNING FROM THE PAST

That's when Singhal, who considers New York City their second home, started examining how neighborhoods handled violence in past generations.

"There used to be a ton of gangs in Chinatown from the late 1960s to the early '90s. The gangs became a form of community defense because kids were getting beat up in school, and people were coming to Chinatown to rob people because it was a largely unbanked community," they said.

When the gangs expanded into illegal activities, then the community had to defend itself in different ways.

REFRAMING PUBLIC SAFETY

The goal of Singhal's research is to reframe the idea of a community's role in public safety.

"It's more about thinking about how do you build trust with your neighbors and people who are different than you, than how do you prevent violence," Singhal said. "I think part of the issue is that people are so suspicious and scared, and it heightens situations that could be de-escalated instead."

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