Maybe control the crime. If you can't fundamentally live in peace, there's no point in continuing the conversation.
Crime in cities is seriously over reported. Any concentration of population will have higher total crime, particularly if there's poverty.
Relieve the poverty, improve the education, crime drops.
How about we pay people enough so they don't have to steal and gut the police.
Stop crimes and prevent them
Put criminals behind bars
Rehabilitation for those who can rejoin society
Gotta do all three or it’s not going to work
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2025/03/19/tot-lot-ardmore-lo...
But it is strange that, if the park rules say that only children up to Age Five are allowed, why the father thinks this is so unjust and so horrible. It certainly makes sense to me, that keeping small children safe could involve restricting the age group. So many things are restricted to narrow age-groups for children. Because of different maturity and physique and needs.
If these parents deliberately chose an Age Five park to go play in [and they knew exactly what its name is before they even arrived], then they should've made themselves aware of the Park Rules (which are not too far away to read if you walk up to the sign. Park Rules are usually posted near every entrance and every main walkway!) And they have no right to be angry that the police intervened and had a chat with them, even if the "football toss" was an extreme red herring.
I don't see anything wrong in a community wanting parents to know and abide by those rules. They aren't difficult or obscure or unjust.
No, the children are not criminals. A minor is subject to their parents' responsibility, and the parents are the ones who placed their children into the park, and they are responsible for their children being there. Any liability or criminality is going to fall on the responsible adults.
Calling on the cops because one person in an undercrowded park, toss a ball? The cops actually acting on that report?
Maybe if the police had different narrative, they would have answered; from the article mentioned: "I reached out to the township and the superintendent of the Lower Merion Police Department on Monday and heard back from neither."
So it was likely a ludicrous report, and a ludicrous reaction for the local police department, that doesn't stand the light of a local newspaper.
If the only response to crime is repressive without managing/anticipating things way ahead, that do favour crime, it's not going to foster peace, neither a family/youth-friendly environment.
As the article series suggests, architecture alone _does_ influence individuals and groups experiences and behaviours. It's been studied and worked on for a long time [1] and it's worth studying further, reporting and repeating as the OP does very well.
1: see Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), Oscar Newman (Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space), C. Ray Jeffery (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design), Alice Coleman, among others.
This article and your comment makes me think of Lawrence Lessig's "Code 2.0" book where he writes that (at least) four things can shape human behavior:
* rules
* norms
* prices
* architecture
Hopefully we could do so in a "Kaizen" approach of incremental improvement and usually small steps within existing cities? But we likely need a lot of new cities too with more housing (perhaps by upgrading towns on existing transit lines). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
The real issue is that the Right campaigned mostly on security since the 1980s and successfully convinced everyone that hordes of migrant criminals are patrolling the streets to mug you, in spite of the data clearly showing that crime levels are at their lowest.
Ironically, Republicans are also the one wishing for a "high-trust society" while simultaneously acting paranoid against their neighbors.
It's important, and there's a whole sub-conversation in how to do it, but it's not a totally overriding concern.