Fed up with all the antisocial behaviour and fly tipping, Dan Stevenson placed a statue of Buddha in his street. Crime dropped more than 80%.
Law enforcement can sometimes get a little… heavy handed. At least, that’s the opinion of Dan Stevenson, a resident of Oakland, California, USA.
Dan has seen a lot of antisocial antics in his neighbourhood over the decades. Aggressive attacks were not uncommon, but he seems to prefer to turn a blind eye to incidents where no one comes to any harm. Sometimes people are just down on their luck, why kick them when they’re down? It’s not usually worth reporting trespassers, drug dealers, graffitist, and sex workers to the police anyway, he tells Phoebe Judge on her podcast, Criminal, because the authorities either over-egg the response or ignore the issue completely.
He thought differently, though, when people started fly tipping near his home.
A City’s Good Intentions Gone Awry
In the mid 2000s, city authorities built a traffic diverter opposite Dan’s house, creating a separation between nearby roads and a space for a touch of greenery. Nowadays it can be viewed online. In the centre, there’s a small, roofed structure: a shrine to Buddha.
Before it was put there – by Dan himself – people randomly began dumping their rubbish on the traffic diverter. The city refuse department couldn’t clear it up fast enough and so the “broken window effect” kicked in: people would leave more and more because they didn’t respect the space.
For Dan and his wife, Lu, it wasn’t a pleasant scene to look out onto and so they concocted a simple plan that they hoped would make people think twice about littering there.
Buddha Becomes a Symbol of the Community
They put a simple statue of the Buddha, bought from a local hardware store, in place during a rare rubbish-free moment. (Dan chose not to wonder too much about whether this was any more legal than the fly tipping.)
It seemed to help curb the fly-tipping. And the community quickly took the statue to their hearts.
Within months, it had been painted white, then in realistic flesh tones with black hair and a golden robe. Dan had fixed it in place but strangers began caring for it. They’d leave offerings, erected a shelter, elevated it on a granite plinth, and began worshipping there – especially the local Vietnamese community, who keep the space clean and occasionally shared meals on the roadside.
Years later, Buddha is flanked by other gods in their own houses. Any time they make an upgrade, people ask Dan’s permission, but he relinquishes any ownership. It’s part of the community now, to such an extent that public outcry prevented the city’s Public Work’s Department from removing the shrine following a complaint.
Community Action That Works
The Stevensons had unwittingly drawn on the power of tactical urbanism: making direct, small-scale, local, and sometimes temporary interventions that influence behaviour change.
Speaking on the podcast in 2015, Dan estimated that 70 worshippers were coming by each day, and more tourists beside that, some international. In an update to the story released in June 2026, Dan reports that tour buses still show up. For a decade, this chance bottom-up intervention has done more than keep people from dumping their waste; it has inadvertently brought in an endless stream of eyes on the street.
That might explain the drop in crime rates in the area. “Since 2012, when worshipers began showing up for daily prayers, overall year-to-date crime has dropped by 82 percent,” Chip Johnson wrote in 2014 for San Francisco Gate. “Robbery reports went from 14 to three, aggravated assaults from five to zero, burglaries from eight to four, narcotics from three to none, and prostitution from three to none.” Figures were supplied by local police.
And there’s something about the story that hits home with people. It’s been written about many times before and is one of the Criminal podcast’s most popular episodes. In bleak times, the capacity of citizen action to galvanise community is the kind of feel-good story many of us need. For some, maybe its the simplicity of the remedy that they enjoy. It’s certainly a reminder that we all have the power to enact change, and efforts to clean up a city might work better if we repurpose the space rather than try to tackle a persistent problem head-on. Sometimes, it’s best just to try something and see what happens.
Listen to the original episode of the Criminal podcast in full below.
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More InformationAnd if you like stories of everyday people making small acts of rebellion for the good of their neighbourhood, get inspired by our article about Emma Cutting converting small patches of sealed pavement into garden plots.