In the latest annual Violence Prevention Index report—“the first and only national annual assessment of municipal violence intervention and prevention investments and policies”—the City of Albuquerque ranked in the top 10 for the first time among 100 U.S. cities. The report ranked Albuquerque so high due to city leadership’s work building “the policy framework, institutional capacity, and cross-sector infrastructure that make effective, sustainable violence reduction possible,” and as the report highlights, a significant part of that infrastructure is housed within Albuquerque Community Safety, the city’s third branch of public safety, which pairs crisis response with prevention, trauma-informed care and community-based violence intervention.
Produced by Community Justice, the fourth annual VPI assessed 100 U.S. cities with the highest levels of gun violence against “35 recommendations that form the framework of a comprehensive public health response to violence” in the various cities. Albuquerque scored 66 out of 100 (compared with a national average of 36), placing it ninth overall and among four cities to reach the top 10 for the first time. The report found the 11 cities with top-ten scores all invested in outreach-based and hospital-based violence intervention, teams Albuquerque houses inside of ACS. The report describes the kind of modern public safety infrastructure that ACS provides as “vital to reducing all forms of violence — including gun violence,” with local agencies charged with strategies that “leverage the entirety of local government and community resources.” The full report is worth reading, but here are some toplines from its findings about Albuquerque and its successful Community Safety Department:
- Building Trusted Relationships With People At Highest Risk. ACS says its Violence Intervention Division’s “peer support workers and intervention specialists engage individuals at highest risk of involvement in gun violence,” providing “ongoing mentorship, conflict mediation, and connections to housing, employment, behavioral health, and other services.” The report found that these workers “build relationships and trust … negotiate cease-fires, mediate disputes, and connect individuals to comprehensive support networks.”
- Helping Survivors Recover After Violence. ACS opened New Mexico’s first Trauma Recovery Center—a place for survivors of violence, and their families, to connect to mental health, relocation, and job resources that they need to achieve stability after life-altering violence—“to provide coordinated, trauma-informed support to people impacted by violence.” The report noted that TRCs like Albuquerque’s effectively provide “no-cost comprehensive wraparound care … trauma-informed mental health care and individualized case management,” including help with “housing, food, clothing, financial, and legal assistance.”
- Sending The Right Response to Behavioral Health Crises. ACS responders take calls involving “behavioral health, substance use, and other non-criminal and non-medical issues.” The report found that people experiencing mental health crises are too often “not met with the appropriate responders, increasing risks of violence,” and calls for “a real-time behavioral and mental health crisis response system … [that] relies on mental health professionals.”
Here’s the VPI scorecard for Albuquerque:
Cities, Counties Launching Community Safety Departments Around The Country:
- Harris County Announces Proposal For $4.5M Community Safety Department. For the Houston Chronicle, John Lomax and Matt deGrood report on Commissioner Rodney Ellis’s effort to “expand and centralize a trio of [behavioral and mental health] programs into a new [community safety] department” that would serve “as an umbrella for the county’s crisis-response, violence-intervention and domestic violence-support programs.” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez explained to the newspaper that there has been “a growing interest in alternative response models” like the county’s lauded Holistic Assistance Response Team, or HART—a mobile crisis response team that Sheriff Gonzalez has watched grow “from a small pilot initiative into a robust countywide service.”
The HART unit recently hit a major milestone over the summer, surpassing 30,000 responses to calls for service since its launch. As The Chronicle reported, HART dispatches “unarmed first responders to nonviolent police reports” and has been touted as an “effective deescalation tool that also frees law enforcement to pursue violent offenders.” Under the proposal from Commissioner Ellis, HART and the county’s community violence interruption team, RISE, would grow their headcounts by roughly 75–80% by 2028. Sam Houston State University’s Jay Coons called the approach the “best of both worlds… you can have a trained mental health technician that does the heavy lifting on a call, unless the situation calls for an arrest or use of force.”
- Seattle Moves Gun Violence Prevention Teams Into CARE Department. For KUOW, Amy Radil reports on Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to move the community violence intervention teams with nine organizations into Seattle’s CARE Department, which already houses 911 dispatchers and crisis responders, “to oversee community groups focused on violence prevention” into a single community safety-style department. CARE Chief Amy Barden said consolidating the work will create “a department [to] act as coordinating entity,” making information about who is serving specific individuals “more readily accessible when 911 calls come in” and supporting “one central dashboard” tracking shootings, referrals and case management.
Interim Police Chief Andre Sayles, a supporter of the mayor’s plan, explained that “the plan is about breaking down silos… ‘I think the best thing about this is it’s not a police-led initiative… it’s a collaborative initiative, but we’re going to be the backstop to work with all our internal and external partners.”
- Baltimore Moves To Establish “Third Branch Of Public Safety And Emergency Services.” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Council President Zeke Cohen announced new legislation that creates a new Department of Neighborhood Safety to operate alongside police and fire/EMS as a “third branch of public safety and emergency services,” and establishes “a formal, coordinated alternative response system” for some mental and behavioral health emergency calls. Mayor Scott called the new community safety department “the future of public safety in Baltimore,” explaining that it will “create a new, comprehensive alternative response system to ensure that when residents call 911, they receive a response that meets their needs.” The department’s responders will be “trained professionals, coequal with emergency responders within the Police and Fire Departments,” with calls treated “as emergency responses, not simply referrals.”