Communities cannot afford to lose a discipline devoted to understanding how social life works. The suggestion of eliminating sociology, raised by Pamela Paul’s Wall Street Journal essay, deserves rejection (Paul, 2026). For community-safety practitioners, the stakes extend beyond university departments. The ability to examine neighborhoods, public institutions, and the relationships among residents is part of the knowledge needed to prevent harm and build conditions in which people can thrive.

The Community-Safety Exchange centers housing and community stability, educational opportunity, and mental health and well-being. Each pillar requires attention to the organization of everyday life. A home exists within a rental market and a neighborhood. A school operates within a network of families, agencies, and public decisions. Access to care depends partly on how services are distributed and organized. Sociology gives these relationships sustained attention and makes them available for investigation rather than leaving them as background assumptions.

Safety is a social relationship as well as an outcome

Research on collective efficacy illustrates the contribution. Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls (1997) studied 8,782 residents across 343 Chicago neighborhoods. They found an association between lower violence and a combination of neighborhood cohesion and willingness to act for shared purposes, accounting for several other characteristics. This was an observational study, not a randomized demonstration that a particular program would prevent violence. Its importance lies in making neighborhood relationships measurable and testing their connection to safety.

For a municipality, that kind of research changes the questions worth asking. A count of emergency calls does not explain whether residents trust one another, whether young people have access to dependable adults, or whether local organizations can coordinate assistance. A practical safety strategy needs to understand those conditions alongside incidents of harm. Research does not remove the need for judgment, but it can discipline judgment by showing what was measured and how strongly the evidence supports a conclusion.

Three pillars that require social inquiry

Housing stability illustrates why individual circumstances and institutional arrangements must be examined together. When a household moves repeatedly, practitioners should be able to investigate rent burdens, building conditions, displacement, support networks, and service eligibility. The relative importance of those factors will differ across places. A useful investigation would ask which mechanisms are operating locally and what changes might interrupt them. Eliminating sociology would diminish an important source of expertise for that work.

Educational opportunity presents a related challenge. Attendance figures can identify a pattern without explaining it. A community partnership might need to examine transportation, disciplinary practices, family responsibilities, neighborhood conditions, or students’ relationships with school staff. These are possible explanations to test. Sociological inquiry helps prevent a dashboard from becoming a substitute for understanding the experiences and arrangements behind its numbers.

Mental health and well-being likewise require attention to the setting in which care is sought and delivered. Community-safety planning should ask how residents encounter crisis systems, what barriers separate agencies, and whether support remains accessible after an immediate emergency. These questions complement clinical expertise. They help planners consider whether the structure of a service system supports the outcomes it promises.

What dismantling a discipline would cost

Existing publications would not disappear if sociology departments were closed. The loss would be in the capacity to produce new knowledge, train researchers, sustain collaborations, and challenge outdated explanations. A city cannot assume that yesterday’s findings settle tomorrow’s questions about changing neighborhoods or new institutional practices. Books on a shelf do not replace the people and organizations that make continuing inquiry possible.

That is why the liquidation premise is so damaging. It encourages a sweeping institutional response without demonstrating how communities would retain the knowledge and research capacity they need. Disagreement with a scholar or a conclusion provides no adequate basis for dismantling a field. The relevant response to a contested claim is examination, comparison, and further investigation. Communities benefit when explanations can be tested in public, including explanations favored by government or service providers.

The Exchange’s practical position is to strengthen collaboration among sociologists, other researchers, practitioners, and residents. Municipalities and community organizations should develop research questions together, distinguish descriptive findings from causal claims, and make evaluation results understandable to the people affected. Residents should help identify meaningful outcomes, including stability, access, trust, and experiences of safety. The point is to improve decisions through shared inquiry.

Condemning the elimination of sociology does not require an agreement that the discipline must first be repaired. Its continuing contribution to understanding social life is sufficient reason to defend it. Community safety depends on the capacity to see beyond the immediate incident and investigate the conditions surrounding it. Dismantling one of the disciplines that develops that capacity would leave communities less equipped to understand harm and less prepared to prevent it.

References

Paul, P. (2026). Is it time to “liquidate” the study of sociology? The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/is-it-time-to-liquidate-the-study-of-sociology-6b85ac14

Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277(5328), 918–924. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.277.5328.918