SALINAS — Painting murals on the side of a building may not seem like an effective way to prevent violent crime, but for one local program, that is exactly the strategy.

Striving To Reduce Youth Violence Everywhere (STRYVE) is a program through the County of Monterey Health Department involving students at Rancho San Juan, Everett Alvarez and Salinas high schools to use environmental design strategies to help prevent crime.

The concept – known as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design or CPTED – has been around since the 1960s, said Julia Muruato, coordinator for STRYVE.

“It’s really about looking at how our built environment affects the way that we behave in that space and the kind of activities that it encourages,” Muruato said

One principle of CPTED is something Muruato called “natural surveillance,” the idea that crime is less likely to occur when urban design embraces open, well lit and accessible spaces. By making spaces more welcoming, people are more likely to be present, discouraging crime.

That could be through adding sidewalks to a street so more people walk there, lighting to a dark corner or artwork to attract people’s gaze.

“You have eyes on the streets,” said Murato.

Ishana, a student involved in the program for the past few years, said at Rancho San Juan she’s seen firsthand the way that something like a mural can affect people’s behavior.

“At my school, we would have a lot of students that kind of just loiter around a lot of the darker spaces,” said Ishana, who declined to give her last name. “Though they weren’t harmful, they would just kind of block a lot of paths that were meant to be accessible, like going to the restroom.”

“One of the things that we did a couple summers ago was we installed a mural on a blank wall near the men’s restroom.”

Because of the mural – which depicts labor organizers Larry Itliong and Dolores Huerta as well as Jose Hernandez, the first migrant farmworker to travel to space – Ishana said students now stop by the mural for inspiration, which has discouraged the previous loiterers.

Murals are not the only solutions being suggested by the program: In identified higher crime areas, like the area of Kern Street where drug use and prostitution are issues, students in the program have helped advocate for surveillance cameras and better lighting.

Other projects have included community gardens, improvements to Clay Street Park and a community center where students can go after school at Everett Alvarez High.

Muruato said the program’s focus areas are arrived at through surveys with local students about their experience living in the city.

“We surveyed between 300 and 1,000 students every year for the last five years, asking them about their experience in the city of Salinas and their school campus,” Muruato said.

From these surveys, groups of students in the program get to see which common locations rise to the top as priorities for new CPTED projects.

“These groups meet throughout the school year to evaluate various challenge locations and collaborate on projects to improve their sites,” Muruato said

Suggestions are then referred to the city of Salinas via the Salinas Connect App, a non-emergency reporting tool that directs that complaint to the relevant city department. For school sites, school principals are notified directly.

Monterey County received funding for the project through a five-year CDC grant, which was recently extended an additional year. It was one of just four public health departments in the country to receive this funding.

Salinas was selected as the focus of the program based on higher violent crime rates than other cities in the county, with a particular focus on north and east Salinas, said Muruato.

Chris Hamilton is a California Local News fellow covering Salinas and the Salinas Valley for The Herald. To find out more about the California Local News Fellowship, visit https://fellowships.journalism.berkeley.edu/cafellows/