Rainier Beach Campus Safety Continuum: A Comprehensive Place-based Approach, Seattle, Washington, 2016-2019 (ICPSR 38805)

Version Date: Feb 11, 2026 View help for published

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s)
Charlotte Gill, George Mason University

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR38805.v1

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RBCSC

The Rainier Beach Campus Safety Continuum (RBCSC), funded by the National Institute of Justice's FY 2016 Comprehensive School Safety Initiative, was a community-led, place-based, evidence-informed approach to addressing school and community safety and reducing racial disparity in school discipline and police contact in the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. The initiative built upon two existing local initiatives, Rainier Beach: A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth, a community-led place-based approach to addressing youth crime and victimization at hot spots, and Rainier Beach: Beautiful!, an application of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) that extends from the schools into community facilities and businesses.

The goal of the project was to examine whether PBIS can be successfully combined with school-based restorative justice (RJ) to increase student support and reduce racial disparity and, furthermore, whether this integrated PBIS-RJ program could also be extended into wider community and place-based approaches to change social norms and improve overall rates of youth crime and community safety.

The overall project ran from 2017 to 2022. The evaluation examines the effects of the program on crime, academic performance and school discipline, student perceptions of school climate, and community perceptions of neighborhood safety in Rainier Beach, several comparison schools, and neighborhoods. Behavioral variables from the police offense reports and police calls for service included offense details and classifications. Demographic variables from the community survey, school climate data, and school administrative data included gender and race/ethnicity.

Gill, Charlotte. Rainier Beach Campus Safety Continuum: A Comprehensive Place-based Approach, Seattle, Washington, 2016-2019. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2026-02-11. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR38805.v1

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United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. National Institute of Justice (2016-CK-BX-0005)

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2016 -- 2019 (Analysis)
2014-07 -- 2018-12 (Crime and calls for police service pre-intervention analysis), 2019-01 -- 2022-06 (Crime and calls for police service post-intervention analysis), 2019 -- 2016 (School climate survey Spring), 2016 -- 2018 (School climate survey pre-implementation), 2019 (School climate survey post-implementation), 2014 -- 2018 (School administrative data pre-implementation), 2018 -- 2022 (School administrative data pre-implementation)
  1. Some documentation references observational and qualitative data, however, the PI confirmed that neither were collected.

  2. The school climate survey collected data from 2015-2022, but the final report only analyzed data from 2016-2019.

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The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate the Rainier Beach Campus Safety Continuum (RBCSC), a community-led, place-based, evidence-informed approach to addressing school and community safety and reducing racial disparity in school discipline and police contact through non-punitive approaches in the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington.

The development and design of the RBCSC weaves together several conceptual threads from criminology and education research, presenting an innovative combination of a number of evidence-informed strategies within a strong place-based approach. The Rainier Beach neighborhood and its schools were chosen as the implementation site for this program in order to build on existing initiatives.

Due to the limited number of schools in the neighborhood and the proximity of the schools to one another, which the study team felt would affect their ability to assess effects on crime and other outcomes, a randomized controlled trial was not conducted. However, two comparison areas elsewhere in Seattle that had similar types of schools and/or demographic profiles and crime rates were selected.

The implementation of the first wave of the community survey in the summer and fall of 2019 was conducted as planned, roughly 1,000 addresses total before the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the uneven number of schools in each group and the geographic overlap of some schools, a weighted sampling approach was utilized by school, releasing approximately 72 addresses per treatment school and 63 per comparison school. This led to an overall goal of 30 surveys per treatment school location and 25 surveys per comparison school location. Where schools overlapped geographically, they added up these goals to get an overall target number for the buffer area; for example, they aimed for 120 completed surveys in site 5, a treatment area containing 4 schools (30*4) and 50 completed surveys in site 6, a comparison area containing 2 schools (25*2).

The lead author drew the sample by assigning each address within each group a random number using the Excel formula and sorting from smallest to largest. The first set of addresses that fell into the target sample for each site (number of completed surveys*2.5) were released. For the second wave, in the Fall of 2022, a total of 1,000 mailed surveys were sent out.

Longitudinal

Dataset 0001 (Police Offense Reports) includes youth (age 18-25) and adults (age 26 and older) around RBCSC study sites within 1,000 feet buffers. Dataset 0002 (Police Calls for Service) includes calls around RBCSC study sites within 1,000 feet buffers. Dataset 0003 (Community Survey) includes adult responses (18 and older), with various gender, race ethnicity, education levels, work experience, homeownership, and income levels. Dataset 0004 (School Climate Data) includes population of student responses with various gender, race/ ethnicity, and grade level (grades 3-12). Dataset 0005 (School Administrative Data) includes population of student responses with various gender, race/ ethnicity, grade level (grades preschool-12th grade), and additional services (English-Language, Special Education, and Advanced Learner).

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2026-02-11

2026-02-11 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

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