Safer Cities provides coverage and analysis on innovative efforts to deliver more safety for our cities and our country.

Portland City Council passed a resolution last week to expand the Portland Street Response team, “formally establishing [it] as an equal branch of the city's public safety system… to take some of the burden off first responders like police and firefighters.” The department, which has been responding to mental health calls since 2021 when it first launched, will now be expanding its ranks and reach to 24/7 service across the city. Its staff receive the full “designation [] as first responders, with all the associated [employment] benefits,” and the team “will also get direct dispatch through 911.”

Momentum Grows For Integrating Mental Health Crisis Experts In Dispatch Centers. In Missouri’s Springfield-Green County, Mental Health “Crisis Specialist To Now Work Inside 911 Full-Time.” For The Springfield News-Leader, Marta Mieze reports on county leaders bringing more mental health expertise into the county’s 911 emergency dispatch center “to more effectively address mental health crisis 911 calls” in the region by “decreas[ing] the number of responses from police to individuals who are experiencing mental health crises” and dividing those calls to trained mental health experts instead.

To gauge public support for Community Violence Intervention programs as part of a city’s public safety infrastructure, Safer Cities recently conducted a national survey of 2,503 registered voters. 

First, we explained that “many people know less about community violence intervention programs than they do about police departments. Most shootings and murders are not random. Gun violence is contagious, it spreads through cycles of retaliation.” Community violence intervention programs, we explained, “use trained community leaders to intervene in conflicts and prevent cycles of violence before they start.”

We then provided participants with reasons for implementing community violence intervention programs as a public safety policy that a city might consider, and then asked them to tell us “how convincing, if at all” each of those reasons are. Here is what we found.