Community centered public safety resilience under public emergencies: A case study of COVID-19

During public emergencies, the level of public safety will be resilient and follow a process from decline to rise. Regarding the concept and influencing factors of public safety resilience, a three-level public safety resilience framework that includes personal, community, and government levels was proposed in this study. It provided the overall metrics that used the resistance and recovery ability to describe the dynamic characteristics of public safety resilience as well as the resilience assessment indexes on three levels. In the context of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, this study applied the proposed framework in a case study on public safety resilience at the Beihang community, Beijing, China through descriptive statistics, structural equation model, and principal component regression analysis of questionnaire data. The data analysis results showed that community resilience was the most important of the three levels of public safety resilience. In addition, community resilience could improve personal resilience, and government resilience had a positive effect on community and personal resilience. Compared with the resistance ability, the recovery ability was influenced more by the operation and improvement of the community. This study is conducive to understanding and improving public safety resilience on the personal, community, and government levels and can help relevant parties improve their ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the methods used in this study can be extended to other studies on public emergencies.