First In The Country: The “Albuquerque Community Safety Department Headquarters Is Now Open.”
As Jessica Salinas reports for KRQE in Albuquerque, “The city has opened the doors on the first-of-its-kind headquarters” for Albuquerque Community Safety, the unarmed public safety department “dealing with homelessness, addiction, and mental health issues.”
It’s a striking achievement not just for the Community Safety Department, but also for Mayor Tim Keller and the other city leaders who envisioned—and then built—a “third branch of public safety” that didn’t exist in Albuquerque (or anywhere in America) just three years ago.
Between then and now, the community safety department has “responded to over 75,000 calls for service – [and] close to 80 percent of those are calls that are diverted from police.”
The city’s press release notes that the headquarters is located in a part of town with a particularly high concentration of people struggling with addiction and behavioral health issues, which is on purpose because “the new ACS headquarters will play an integral part in ensuring [the department] is connected and engaged with the communities it serves.” Or, as Mayor Tim Keller put it: the headquarters is “a massive symbol that we are never going to give up on anywhere in our city.”
While both the Community Safety Department—and, by extension, its headquarters are first-in-the-nation developments, it’s clear that communities all over the country want a community safety department where they live. Late last year, a Safer Cities poll found overwhelming support (75%) from voters for the creation of Community Safety Departments where they live and that they support them because they think that it will make their cities safer (76%) and feel more orderly (73%).