Community Safety Departments

A 911 dispatcher in Albuquerque pulls up a call: an intoxicated man slumped outside a gas station, unresponsive to passersby. Three years ago, that call went to police. Two officers would arrive, lights flashing, hands near holsters, and try to rouse a man who needed water and a ride, not a badge and a command voice. Now the dispatcher routes it to the city’s Community Safety Department.¹ A trained community responder arrives in a branded vehicle, no weapon, no arrest authority. The responder sits with the man, checks for medical distress, connects him to a sobering center or shelter. No force. No arrest. No emergency room.

That shift, replicated across more than 120,000 calls in Albuquerque alone,² is what a Community Safety Department does. The distinction from other crisis response programs is organizational: a CSD is not a program. It is a department.

In cities around the country, 911 dispatchers face the same limitation every shift: three buttons. Police. Fire. EMS. A woman calls because her brother is having a psychotic episode in the backyard. Police. A business owner calls about a man slumped in the doorway, intoxicated and unresponsive. Police. A resident reports a neighbor screaming at no one on the sidewalk. Police. A school reports a student threatening self-harm. Police. Needles on the playground. Police.

The University of Chicago’s Health Lab found that over 75% of 911 calls dispatched to police across America do not involve the type of serious crime or public safety threat that requires an armed response.¹ In Atlanta, researchers determined the city’s crisis response program could have been the appropriate responder to more than 600,000 calls over four years to which 911 operators instead dispatched police.²

The Community Safety Department exists because no single program solves this mismatch at scale. A mobile crisis team handles behavioral health emergencies. A violence intervention team handles retaliatory conflict. An outreach team handles chronic homelessness. A clean team handles biohazard removal. Each of these programs addresses a real piece of the problem. But when they live in separate agencies with separate budgets, separate chains of command, and no shared dispatch infrastructure, the gaps between them become cracks that people fall through.

The CSD is an institutional answer to an institutional problem: the 911 system was built around three departments, and the calls that don’t fit those departments need a fourth.

Most American cities already have some version of non-police crisis response. Denver sends civilian crisis teams to mental health calls.¹ Portland dispatches civilian responders to behavioral health emergencies.² Harris County deploys crisis specialists across unincorporated areas.³ San Diego County fields 44 civilian crisis units across the region.¹⁶ The question a council member considering a Community Safety Department must answer is not whether to offer these services, but whether the institutional structure around them matters.

The distinctions from what already exists are structural.

A mobile crisis team handles mental health emergencies. A violence intervention team handles retaliatory conflict. A clean team handles needle pickup. A Community Safety Department handles all of these and the calls that fall between them.

The scope of a CSD is broader than any single program it houses. The department covers the full range of 911 calls that do not require weapons, arrest authority, or emergency medical transport. Where a mobile crisis team might pass on a call about an intoxicated person who is not in psychiatric crisis, and a homeless outreach team might not be dispatched through 911 at all, a CSD can receive the call, assess it, and route it to the right internal team.

Two questions sound identical but are not. First: do the programs housed inside Community Safety Departments produce measurable results? Four independent evaluations have examined this. Second: does the CSD structure itself produce better results than the same programs housed in separate agencies? On this question, no study exists.

A decision-maker evaluating whether to create a CSD is evaluating both questions simultaneously. This card lays out what the evidence supports, how strong the underlying sources are, and where the gaps remain.

Not many places yet. While more than 1,800 civilian crisis teams operate across the United States¹ and at least 14 of the 20 most populous cities host or are launching civilian crisis response programs,²⁹ the number of cities that have built a unified Community Safety Department, with its own director, budget, training infrastructure, and cabinet-level standing, can be counted on one hand. Several more are in development. National polling shows 82% public support,² but roughly five cities have built one.

Community Safety Departments poll with bipartisan margins that hold after voters hear opposition arguments. What makes the numbers actionable is that law enforcement leadership has landed in the same place as voters.

All polling data in this card measures public sentiment, not program effectiveness. Polling tells you whether a policy is politically viable. It does not tell you whether a program works. The outcome evidence is in Q05.

Every person in the room where a Community Safety Department is proposed, debated, funded, or evaluated experiences it through a different lens. The line officer wants calls off his plate. The union strategist wants headcount protected. The dispatcher worries about liability. The family calling 911 is afraid of what happens when police arrive. The budget director needs HR classifications. The council member needs quarterly metrics. A CSD that satisfies one of these constituencies at the expense of the others does not hold.

A leader who launches a Community Safety Department without understanding how these programs can fail is unprepared for the failure modes she will encounter. The risks below are not theoretical objections. They are documented patterns from cities that have tried, and in some cases failed, to build and sustain civilian response programs. Named failures with identified causes are more useful for implementation planning than success stories.

There are roughly ten design decisions every city faces when building a Community Safety Department, and they are sequential. Each one constrains the next. The institutional home determines the hiring pipeline. The hiring pipeline shapes team composition. Team composition dictates which calls the program can safely take. Call types drive the dispatch protocol. And the dispatch protocol determines whether anyone actually uses the department.

Robert Blaine, a program specialist at the National League of Cities who has tracked program design across dozens of jurisdictions, makes an observation that keeps surfacing in the data: cities do not need to pick one model permanently.¹ Programs that started with a limited scope and expanded as they built evidence tended to perform better than those that either overdesigned on paper before launching or launched so cautiously that the program never handled enough calls to demonstrate its value.

What follows is how cities have actually made each of these decisions, what they chose, what tradeoffs they encountered, and what the documented outcomes show.

Community Safety Departments cost less per response than police handling the same calls, and when downstream savings are included, some programs generate a net fiscal gain. But the funding landscape is more complicated than any single cost comparison suggests. The type of funding matters as much as the amount, because different revenue sources carry different sustainability profiles, different political vulnerabilities, and different gaps in what they actually cover.

The language that works is operational, not ideological, and it has been tested. Three themes appear across every city that has successfully built a Community Safety Department, and the specific phrases that resonate share a common structure: they center public safety, clarify roles, and position the department as additional capacity rather than a replacement for anything.

If I’m having a heart attack, 911 isn’t going to send the police. Why do we do that when someone is having a behavioral health crisis?

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo¹

It’s time that we work towards getting law enforcement out of mental health. We have never claimed to be the experts, but yet we have been charged with the responsibility of responding to mental health crisis.

Austin Police Association President Michael Bullock, testimony before city council²

When a police union president says that on the record, the “anti-police” attack line collapses.