Last week, Safer Cities featured the second of three editions highlighting an important aspect of New York University Law School’s Policing Project’s newly published report on Denver’s mobile crisis response program, STAR, or “Support Team Assisted Response”. The report includes insights from interviews with 911 dispatchers, police officials, STAR’s own clinicians, and “residents of Denver’s communities most affected by policing and other first response practices.”
This week’s edition dives into another thorny question discussed in the NYU report: What do community members and municipal actors in Denver believe the police should do?
- Community members told the researchers that armed police officers should focus on “really dangerous situations” and “high stakes cases” such as:
- “carjackings, assaults, and murder”;
- “domestic violence or gunshots”;
- “murder cases or rape”;
- “children being kidnapped”;
- “DUIs”; and
- “if you’re going 100 miles [per hour] in a 20 [miles per hour zone].”
- Municipal staffers, too, “generally believed that the ‘best utilizations’ of police time and energy involved addressing violent crime rather than deeply rooted social problems such as homelessness, substance use, and mental health issues.”
Takeaway: Both community members and municipal staffers indicated that a clear benefit of the Denver Star program—and other unarmed civilian responder services—is “freeing up police time [so that] police could respond to other more pressing ‘emergency’ calls/matters.” Again, “the ‘appropriate’ scope of police work often was described as responding to and solving ‘violent crime.’”
Related: These community responses echo results from a September 2021 Safer Cities national survey of 1,311 likely voters nationally on the importance of competing uses of police time and resources. The results reveal a wide chasm between how the police spend their time and how likely voters think the police should spend their time. Specifically, “solving shootings and murders” and “solving rapes” were the most important uses of police officer time according to voters while “responding to traffic violations” and “responding to mental health and homelessness related issues” were the least important uses of police time.