Politico convened a 50 person focus group to discuss major issues plaguing America’s cities. The twist: the 50 participants are all mayors; which, as Politico put it, allows readers to “hear directly from leaders who are far from Washington’s corridors of power, representing cities and towns big and small, urban and suburban.”
When Politico asked the mayors about the “single most pressing issue in their communities … Nearly half of the 50 [chose] public safety.”
So, how would these mayors go about making their cities safer?
When given a “hypothetical $500,000 public safety budget surplus” to allocate, most mayors prioritized hiring “social workers to handle nonviolent policing duties such as mental health issues” over “creat[ing] or hir[ing] more police officers.”
Here’s a great visualization from Politico, capturing this preference:
