...I haven't heard that line used in a long time, plus I was thinking about the "Officer Krupke" song from West Side Story last night, so I had to use it. But I do kind of believe it, to some extent.
In 2021 and 2022 I was a pro bono consultant working with the Chicago Central Area Committee and the City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development for Lori Lightfoot's "Invest South|West" program, which identified 10 areas across the south and west sides where the city wanted to promote investment. I helped on three of those: Bronzeville, Englewood, and my old stomping ground, South Shore. The teams included people from the worlds of architecture, urban planning, design, law, and real estate. I've been appraising property all over the City of Chicago for 30+ years and am generally familiar with things like rents, housing prices, etc., but the deep dive into the complete demographic context was eye-opening. There are a whole lot of people with poor levels of income, education, transportation access, and places to buy groceries.
The planning solution is to make the built environment better, and this has been true for the better part of the last 100 years; the city beautiful, carefully designed vertical housing, parks and other open spaces, and so on. This has been reinforced in my mind by reading The Battle of Lincoln Park by Daniel Kay Hertz, an excellent contribution in a long history of such books going back to the classic by Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960.
Improving the built environment can only take us so far. we need to focus more on improving the people who are intended to live in our built environments, starting with much greater emphasis on rigorous childhood education. This will lead to a greater number of people with higher potential earning power and would reduce the motivation to commit crime. That motivation will never disappear from society, but it can be mitigated. The community policing strategies mentioned elsewhere in this thread, if they are designed and implements appropriately, can also have an impact.