Three Things To Read This Week
1. 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%).
2. Biden Administration Official: Baltimore’s Murder Decline Represents The “Greatest Success Story … In The Country.”
For the Baltimore Banner, Lee Sanderlin reports that murders are “down nearly 50% [in Baltimore] compared to the same period two years ago.” Indeed, so far this year, Baltimore has endured “the second fewest homicides tallied in the first five months of a year since 1970.” For those of us who aren’t mathletes, that’s more than a half-century.
Rob Wilcox, deputy director of the White House’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention, told the newspaper that the city’s turnaround on homicides is the “greatest success story… in the country.”
How did Baltimore achieve this milestone? It’s impossible to pin down all of the factors that result in a dramatic decline in homicides, but there is one factor that local officials point to consistently: the city’s lauded Community Violence Intervention program. Mayor Brandon Scott made community violence intervention a central plank in his violence reduction strategy. Earlier this week, the mayor credited “a lot of partners from those working in neighborhoods as part of the community violence intervention ecosystem all the way up to the White House” for the decline in homicides in the city.
Daniel Webster, a professor at Johns Hopkins University has said that he, too, believes that the city’s flagship community violence intervention program, known as Safe Streets has “clearly” helped to reduce gun violence. Webster’s 2023 study “nearly 15 years of data” shooting related data concluded that the most pronounced decreases in homicides were concentrated in “the neighborhoods served by the five Safe Streets sites that have been open four years or more.”
As Safer Cities previously reported, one of these neighborhoods, Penn North—which historically had one of the highest homicide rates in the U.S. and was known as “the epicenter of unrest in the city”, recently marked a full year without a murder. The homicide decline, which followed the implementation of Safe Streets, led one local pastor to dub the community violence intervention program “the special forces of crime reduction in Baltimore.”
3. A New “Adult Care Team [Has] Improved Outcomes For County Residents [While] Saving Nearly $400,000 [And] 170 Public Safety Staff Hours.”
Earlier this year, in Guilford County, North Carolina, a new team within the county's Emergency Management Services department known as the “Adult Care Team” launched. Its mission: “improve life outcomes for adults with specialized needs who use Emergency Services for non-emergency assistance [while] preserving Emergency Services’ ability to respond to emergencies.”
As Scott Yost reports for the Rhino Times, the “county’s new approach to emergency calls is working swimmingly.” By focusing on a small group of people who disproportionately rely on emergency response services to handle non-emergency—but still critical—needs, this team of “three social workers and a supervisor” connects people “to more appropriate care.” The Director of the country’s EMS department told the local CBS news affiliate that this program was designed “to handle these calls in a way that doesn't bring ambulances to their house or fire trucks or police cars.”
It’s working so far: Over one 30-day period this year, the Adult Care Team reduced “this [high-frequency EMS user] group’s non-emergency calls to 911 over a 30-day period from 344 to four.” Next, the county plans to create “a new Aging and Adult Services case management system,” which would make the process of receiving treatment and support from multiple providers across multiple organizations over a period of weeks, months, or years much more “seamless” and “integrated” for people whom the Adult Care Team helps.
