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Birutė Mikulskienė Birutė Pitrėnaitė Algirdas Astrauskas

Abstract

The paper aims to design an assessment system to monitor and evaluate safety parameters and administrative efforts with the purpose to increase safety in municipalities. The safety monitoring system considered is to be the most important tool for creation and development of safe communities in Lithuania. Several methods were applied to achieve this purpose. In order to determine the role of local government in ensuring the safety of people, property and environment at the local level of a meta-analysis of research reports, the Lithuanian national legislation, strategic planning documents of the state and local government were carried out. Analysis of statistical data, structural analysis, comparative analysis and synthesis methods were used while investigating the areas of safety uncertainty, risk groups, identifying safety risk factors, determining their relationship, and creating a safe community assessment system.
A safe community assessment system, which consists of two types of criteria, has been elaborated. The assessment system is based on the multi-level criteria for safety monitoring and the multi-level criteria for the evaluation of municipal activities in the field of building safety. Links between the criteria, peculiarities of their application and advantages in the process of safe community creation and development are analyzed.
Design and implementation of the safe community assessment system is one of the most important stages to implement the idea of safe communities. The proposed system integrates a variety of risk areas, the safety achievement criteria are linked to the criteria used in the strategic planning. Periodic assessment of the safety situation using the proposed system ensures possibility to monitor current local safety conditions and assess the changes and the trends. A safe community assessment system is proposed to be used as a tool to unified municipalities safety comprehensiveness and compare safety level in different municipalities thus increasing motivation to enhance efforts to create a safer environment for the public and to exchange good practices in this field.
The proposed safety assessment system can help local authorities identify priorities for strengthening local safety; to warn about the critical factors of insecurity; can be useful to identify the highest risk groups and places, evaluate the administrative efforts taken by local government to influence the safety situation in a municipality; considered to be convenient to monitor and analyze changes in the field of ensuring safety of people, property and environment.
The community safety assessment system is created taking into account the existing practice of statistical information monitoring. Since municipalities are not the owner of statistical information they have no impact on statistical practice. This practice fixes freedom of creating multi-criteria assessment system.

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