Albuquerque Community Safety (ACS)
Albuquerque Community Safety (ACS)
Albuquerque created the nation’s first Community Safety Department in 2021 with ten employees. Four years later, it is a cabinet-level agency with 140 staff, a $23 million budget, a $10 million headquarters, a formalized training academy partnered with a community college, and a seat at the municipal leadership table alongside police and fire — the same table as the police chief and the fire chief.¹
“ACS Was Never a Temporary Solution.”
That line, from Mayor Tim Keller at the department’s 100,000-call celebration in March 2025, captures the central question Albuquerque answered differently than every other city.² Dozens of cities run alternative response programs. Albuquerque built a department: its own director, its own budget line, its own training academy, its own headquarters, its own branded vehicles, and its own seat at the municipal cabinet table. The department’s director reports directly to the city’s chief administrative officer, the same chain of command as the police chief and fire chief.
That institutional architecture is what makes Albuquerque the reference case for the Community Safety Department model, not any single program it operates.
How the Department Was Created
The department emerged during the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide calls for alternative emergency responses. The Albuquerque City Council approved its creation in June 2020. Operations launched on September 8, 2021.¹
But the political soil had been prepared long before that. Albuquerque’s police department had been operating under a federal consent decree since 2014 following a Department of Justice investigation that found APD had engaged in a pattern of excessive force.¹²
Mayor Tim Keller, elected in 2017, brought a willingness to experiment with alternatives. The national conversation following George Floyd’s death in May 2020 accelerated what had been a slower process. But Keller’s framing was always additive, a third branch of public safety alongside police and fire, not a reduction. “By sending the right responders to the right calls, we’ve eased pressure on police and fire while providing real help to people in crisis,” Keller said at the department’s four-year anniversary in September 2025.¹ “ACS has fundamentally reshaped public safety in Albuquerque.”
The additive framing mattered politically. ACS was not presented as taking anything away from police. It was presented as adding a new capacity the city had never had. Police Commander Luke Languit would later validate that framing directly: “With 100,000 calls for service, the Albuquerque police officers that are out here in our community, they’re now able to focus more time on those felony crimes… and we’re able to bring down our crime rates because we have this third branch of public safety taking those calls for service for us.”²
The Growth Trajectory: From Pilot to Permanent Institution
ACS’s year-by-year expansion followed a pattern that other cities have studied closely. Each year added a layer of institutional depth.
Year One (2021): Foundation. Ten employees. One response team. Limited daytime hours. The department existed on paper and in the field, but its institutional footprint was minimal.
Year Two (2022): Expansion and diversification. Grew to citywide operations and established a swing shift, extending hours. Critically, the department absorbed the city’s existing Violence Intervention Program, adding prevention and intervention work to its portfolio. This was the first signal that ACS was building a multi-division department, not just running a single crisis response program.
Year Three (2023): Full 911 integration. In September 2023, ACS became a 24/7 emergency response department dispatched through 911.¹ This was the milestone that moved the department from a daytime supplement to a co-equal public safety partner. The 24/7 commitment required significant staffing investment and signaled that the city was treating ACS as essential infrastructure, not an optional add-on.
Year Four (2024-2025): Institutionalization. Opened the nation’s first standalone alternative response headquarters in May 2024.³ Opened a satellite office at the Alvarado Transportation Center, the city’s main transit hub.⁴ Launched the School-Based Violence Intervention Program in four high schools. Created the CORA team for door-to-door neighborhood outreach in areas affected by trauma. In August 2025, opened New Mexico’s first Trauma Recovery Center.¹
Each year added something that made the department harder to reverse: more staff, more divisions, more physical infrastructure, more institutional relationships — more public expectation.
Governance and Institutional Standing
ACS holds cabinet-level status within Albuquerque’s municipal government. The director of community safety reports directly to the chief administrative officer, the same reporting structure as the police chief and the fire chief. This co-equal positioning is the defining structural feature.
The practical consequences of cabinet-level status:
Budget independence. ACS has its own budget line, separate from police, fire, or any other department. The proposed FY26 budget is $23.3 million.⁵ That figure is debated, amended, and approved through the same council process as every other city department budget. The department is not a line item inside someone else’s budget that can be quietly zeroed out.
Hiring authority. ACS hires its own staff through the city’s HR system. Responders are city employees with civil service protections, benefits, and retirement. The department is not dependent on a contractor’s willingness to staff shifts or a nonprofit’s ability to retain clinicians.
Operational autonomy. The department sets its own protocols, training standards, and response criteria. It coordinates with APD and AFR but does not report to them.
Political visibility. A cabinet-level department has a named director who testifies before city council, a budget that gets debated publicly, and performance that gets covered by local media. This visibility creates accountability but also political protection: eliminating a department is a far more visible and consequential political act than defunding a program — and everyone in city hall knows it.
The three public safety departments combined (APD, AFR, and ACS) account for over $400 million, roughly a third of the city’s $1.4 billion total budget. APD’s budget alone is approximately $270 million, more than eleven times the ACS budget. That disparity is both a criticism and a constraint. Commander Jeff Barnard has publicly called for ACS to receive additional funding and resources.⁵ Mayor Keller has described wanting the department to double in size.⁶
Leadership and the Career Ladder
ACS has had two directors, and the transition between them itself tells a story about institutional maturity.
Mariela Ruiz-Angel served as founding director from the department’s launch through early 2024. She was then promoted to Associate Chief Administrative Officer in the Keller administration, overseeing ACS, the Office of Emergency Management, the Office of Equity and Inclusion, and Health, Housing, and Homelessness.²
Jodie Esquibel became permanent director in July 2024.² Esquibel brings more than two decades of emergency response experience as a paramedic, with a background in field operations, tactical medicine, search and rescue, and community medicine. The director position pays $168,000 annually.⁵
Walter Adams serves as Deputy Director of Field Operations. Adams was one of ACS’s original five responders when the department launched. He started in an entry-level position and worked his way through division manager to deputy director.¹ Adams graduated magna cum laude from Western New Mexico University with a degree in criminal justice and previously managed the Behavioral Health Courts at Bernalillo County’s Metropolitan Court, giving him experience on both the social service and justice system sides of the work.
Jasmine Desiderio serves as Deputy Director of Violence Prevention and Intervention, overseeing the department’s proactive programs.¹ She previously directed a Native American youth suicide prevention program and brings eight years of experience coordinating multidisciplinary teams for injury prevention services.
The leadership team illustrates a pattern: ACS draws people from emergency services, criminal justice, behavioral health, and community organizing. The department’s institutional home gives them a single organizational structure to work within — rather than requiring coordination across multiple agencies.
The Training Academy
For its first four years, ACS operated its own internal training academy and produced cohorts of new responders. In October 2025, the department formalized a partnership with Central New Mexico Community College (CNM) to professionalize the training through CNM Ingenuity, the college’s workforce development arm.⁷
The ACS Academy runs eight weeks. The core curriculum totals 140 hours and covers mental health first aid, crisis intervention, de-escalation techniques, crisis prevention, and self-care for responders. Trainees complete an additional 80 hours of scenario-based training, using actors in simulated crisis situations. They also participate in service projects at local resource providers (food banks, housing coalitions, shelters) to build direct familiarity with the organizations they’ll be connecting people to in the field.⁷
“The ACS Academy is proof that Albuquerque is reimagining public safety from the ground up,” Director Esquibel said at the CNM partnership announcement.⁷ “With this partnership we are not only giving our responders accredited training, we are creating a pathway for other communities to follow.”
The CNM partnership matters for two reasons. First, accreditation: having the training delivered through a community college gives it formal institutional standing that an internal departmental program lacks. Second, replicability: Mayor Keller described the goal as creating “a national model” for training alternative responders “with the same rigor as traditional first responders.”⁷ Other cities building departments can adopt or adapt a curriculum rather than developing training from scratch.
For context: 73% of voters nationally say approximately 1,000 hours of training is appropriate for Community Safety Department professionals, comparable to the 800-900 hours required for police officers.⁸ ACS’s current academy totals roughly 220 hours (140 core plus 80 scenario-based), well below that public benchmark. Whether the current training is adequate, and how it compares to what other cities provide, hasn’t been independently assessed. The gap between current training hours and public expectations represents an area where the department’s workforce infrastructure is still developing.
Physical Infrastructure
Albuquerque’s physical infrastructure investment distinguishes it from programs that operate out of office space.
ACS Headquarters (1210 San Mateo Blvd SE). Opened May 2024. 10,800 square feet. Cost: $10 million, funded through General Obligation Bonds, the same fiscal mechanism cities use for police stations and fire houses.³ Located in the International District, deliberately chosen because the neighborhood has the highest call volume in the city. The building houses staff and programs and includes space available to the public for safety trainings and community events. Mayor Keller called it “a massive symbol that we are never going to give up on anywhere in our city.”³
Previously, ACS had operated out of temporary leased space at the Gateway Center.
Southwest Public Safety Center. A facility north of 98th Street and Rio Bravo will house ACS, APD, and Albuquerque Fire Rescue staff under one roof.¹
Alvarado Transportation Center Office. ACS opened a satellite office at the city’s main transit hub.⁴ Over the prior six months, ACS had responded to more than 1,000 calls within a half-mile radius of the center. The transit director called it “a great benefit to our riders, staff, and the community who interacts with our facility.”⁴
Substation Planning. ACS is converting vacant police and fire stations, including Albuquerque Fire Rescue Station 14, into substations throughout the city.¹
The infrastructure portfolio (headquarters, multi-agency center, transit hub office, substations) mirrors the physical footprint of a traditional public safety department. Each facility represents a capital investment that outlasts any single budget cycle, any single director, and any single political administration.
Multi-Division Architecture
The feature that distinguishes ACS from a standalone program is its multi-division structure. The department houses three divisions:¹
Field Response. The division that answers 911 calls for behavioral health crises, substance use situations, welfare checks, and quality-of-life issues. This is ACS’s largest division and accounts for the bulk of its call volume.
Violence Prevention and Intervention. Houses the Violence Intervention Program (absorbed from elsewhere in city government in 2022), the School-Based Violence Intervention Program operating in four high schools, the CORA neighborhood outreach team, and the newly opened Trauma Recovery Center.
Administration. Training, public outreach, performance management, quality assurance, data reporting, and community engagement.
Under the multi-division architecture, a field responder who encounters someone affected by community violence can connect them to the Violence Intervention Program within the same department. A neighborhood outreach worker who identifies a recurring crisis address can flag it for the field response division. These handoffs happen inside one chain of command rather than across agency boundaries.
Police Support
Albuquerque’s police department has become one of ACS’s most vocal institutional supporters — a trajectory that wasn’t inevitable.
At launch, 911 dispatchers were hesitant to send unarmed responders on calls. ACS overcame this by building a track record: tens of thousands of calls completed safely, with police backup needed in fewer than 1% of cases across the department’s entire history.¹
Commander Luke Languit, at the 100,000-call milestone: “On behalf of the Albuquerque Police Department, your work is so much appreciated and it does not go unnoticed.”²
Commander Jeff Barnard publicly called for ACS to receive additional funding and resources.⁵
Then-Chief Harold Medina (retired December 2025) described the department as helping “to free up our officers.”⁵
The police support provides political cover for institutional durability. When police commanders publicly praise the department and ask for it to grow, the claim that ACS is “defund the police with a new name” loses its basis.
Scale and the Capacity Gap
ACS handles roughly 3% of the million-plus calls Albuquerque receives annually.⁶ More than 120,000 calls have been completed since launch. Current volume runs about 3,000 calls per month, up from 900 per month in the first year.¹ Over 85% of calls have been diverted from APD and AFR.
But the eligible call volume far exceeds current capacity. Director Esquibel (and before her, Director Ruiz-Angel) has described calls pending when staff arrive in the morning.⁹ The FY26 proposed budget would grow the workforce to 140. Even that expansion, which represents significant budget growth, would only begin to address actual need.
This scale gap is the central institutional challenge. It is not a failure of the model. It is the consequence of building a new branch of public safety from scratch while police and fire departments have had decades and far larger budgets to build their capacity. The question for Albuquerque, and for every city studying its model, is how fast a new department can grow to meet the full scope of eligible demand.
What Other Cities Are Learning
Several cities have explicitly studied or modeled their efforts on ACS:
Seattle invested $26.5 million to launch its CARE Department, which The Seattle Times reported is “modeled after the one in Albuquerque.”¹⁰ Multiple cities have sent representatives to study ACS’s approach, and Hobbs, New Mexico has explored adaptation. Fayetteville, North Carolina launched its Office of Community Safety in summer 2025 with a similar multi-division structure.¹¹
The CNM Academy partnership was designed in part to make the model exportable.⁷ By creating accredited, standardized training through a community college, Albuquerque is building a curriculum other jurisdictions can adopt rather than developing training from scratch.
What Makes Albuquerque the Reference Case
Other cities have alternative response programs. Some have independent evaluations of those programs. Albuquerque has department status, a dedicated headquarters, a training academy with community college accreditation, co-equal cabinet positioning, multiple divisions covering different functions, a career ladder from entry-level responder to deputy director, and four years of continuous operation at scale.
ACS’s founding director was promoted to Associate Chief Administrative Officer.² Its current director earns $168,000.⁵ Its deputy director started as one of the first five responders and worked his way up.¹ Its headquarters was funded through General Obligation Bonds.³
Remaining Gaps and Unanswered Questions
No independent evaluation. Despite being the nation’s longest-running Community Safety Department, ACS has not undergone an independent academic evaluation. The call volume figures, the diversion rate, the police backup rate, and the Violence Intervention Program’s reported success rate are all program-reported data. No external researcher has independently verified these figures or analyzed ACS’s downstream impact on crime, hospitalizations, or other outcomes. This is a significant gap in Albuquerque’s evidence base.
Training hours below public expectations. The 220-hour academy (140 core plus 80 scenario-based) falls well short of the 1,000 hours that 73% of voters nationally consider appropriate.⁸ How ACS’s training compares to what other departments provide hasn’t been independently assessed.
Compensation data not published. ACS has not published detailed compensation ranges for field responders. The director position pays $168,000.⁵ Responder-level pay is not in the public record reviewed for this profile.
Replicability outside progressive cities. Albuquerque is a majority-minority city in a blue-leaning state with a progressive mayor who championed the department. Whether the CSD model can take root in politically conservative jurisdictions, rural areas, or cities without a federal consent decree creating political space remains an open question. The model requires significant political will, sustained budget commitment, and willingness to create a new permanent branch of government.
Scale remains the binding constraint. At 140 employees handling 3% of calls, the department would need to grow several times over to reach even a quarter of eligible volume. Whether the city’s budget can sustain that growth, and whether the workforce pipeline can produce enough qualified responders, remains to be seen.
Source Appendix
1. City of Albuquerque, “Albuquerque Community Safety Department Marks Four Years of Impact and Innovation,” press release, September 2025. 120,000+ calls, 140 staff, 24/7 since Sept 2023, three divisions, TRC, Adams and Desiderio bios. https://www.cabq.gov/acs/news/albuquerque-community-safety-department-marks-four-years-of-impact-and-innovation
2. City of Albuquerque, “Albuquerque Community Safety Marks 100,000 Calls for Service Milestone,” press release, March 2025. Keller quote, Languit quote, Esquibel and Ruiz-Angel leadership transition. https://www.cabq.gov/acs/news/albuquerque-community-safety-marks-100-000-calls-for-service-milestone
3. KRQE News 13, “Albuquerque Community Safety Dept. headquarters is now open,” June 2024. 10,800 sq ft, $10M GO Bonds, International District, Keller quote. https://www.krqe.com/news/albuquerque-metro/albuquerque-community-safety-department-headquarters-is-now-open/
4. KRQE News 13 / City of Albuquerque, Alvarado Transportation Center satellite office. Transit director quote. KRQE reporting on ACS facility expansion.
5. CSG Justice Center, “Albuquerque, NM — Expanding First Response Program Highlights,” April 2025. $23.3M FY26 budget, Medina quote, Barnard quote. https://csgjusticecenter.org/publications/expanding-first-response/program-highlights/albuquerque-nm/
6. Murat Oztaskin, “Sending Help Instead of the Police in Albuquerque,” The New Yorker, February 4, 2023. 3% of calls, Keller “doubling in size.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/sending-help-instead-of-the-police-in-albuquerque
7. CNM, “CNM and City of Albuquerque Launch Annual ACS Academy to Train Alternative First Responders,” October 2025. 140 core hours plus 80 scenario-based training hours, Esquibel quote, Keller “national model.” https://www.cnm.edu/news/cnm-and-city-of-albuquerque-launch-annual-acs-academy-to-train-alternative-first-responders
8. Safer Cities, national survey of registered voters. 73% say approximately 1,000 hours of training is appropriate for community safety responders.
9. KRQE News 13, Alexa Skonieski, early ACS interview with Mariela Ruiz-Angel. “Calls pending when we get to the office at 7am.” Original broadcast; URL not independently verified.
10. Office of Mayor Bruce Harrell, CARE Department launch, September 2023. $26.5M. https://harrell.seattle.gov/2023/09/21/mayor-harrell-announces-investments-supporting-upcoming-launch-of-care-seattles-new-public-safety-department/. Seattle Times, “partly modeled after the one in Albuquerque, N.M.” https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/harrell-boosts-budget-for-dual-dispatch-team-ahead-of-october-launch/
11. Evey Weisblat, “Fayetteville’s Office of Community Safety gets to work,” CityView NC, June 27, 2025. https://www.cityviewnc.com/stories/fayettevilles-office-of-community-safety-gets-to-work/
12. U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, “Investigation of the Albuquerque Police Department,” April 10, 2014. Finding of pattern of excessive force. Consent decree entered November 2014. https://www.justice.gov/crt/us-v-city-albuquerque
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