This work proposes school safety be considered in terms of the wider perspective of urban safety in general, taking a totalitarian approach and presenting the basic problems and possible solutions inherent within the issue of safeguarding schools. School safety should not merely lie within the boundaries of any one school. School safety must be considered as one aspect of urban safety as a whole. Data presented in this article was collected by the International Strategic Research Organization (ISRO) as part of the four year, 2008-2012, Istanbul Urban Safety Project. The article does not consider threats to safety inside the school and its environs as matters to be dealt with by the police, but rather takes a holistic approach in the context of wider social problems to which the solutions lie in the implementation of comprehensive policies that include the school, the family, the social environment and policing in that order.