Three Things To Read This Week
1. New Polling Shows Robust Support For Building A More Comprehensive Approach To Community Safety Even Over Hiring Additional Police Officers.
Over the next few editions, we’ll report on the results of a new Safer Cities national survey of 2,400 registered voters.
We start with a question that asks voters to tell us how they’d “prefer” to “invest additional funding to make your city safer” when forced with the choice of “hiring more police officers to address public safety” or “spend[ing] the additional funds on comprehensive approaches to address public safety.”
The lead-up to the question explains:
“In recent years, many cities and municipalities have implemented new approaches to address public safety. These approaches vary, and they include initiatives such as:
–Sending medical professionals to the scene of an overdose to administer immediate treatment and then connect the patient to an addiction treatment program and other services.
–Sending healthcare experts to respond to 911 calls for most mental health crises and substance abuse-related calls for service.
–Creating violence intervention programs that train community leaders to de-escalate conflict before it leads to another shooting.
These programs are meant to supplement, not replace, existing public safety infrastructure like police departments, fire departments, and emergency services.”
By a 26 point margin, voters told us that they’d prefer to “spend the additional funds on comprehensive approaches to address public safety”:
We also segmented respondents and forced them to consider more granular trade-offs between hiring additional police officers and spending the resources instead on programs such as addiction stabilization units, violence intervention, mobile crisis response, community violence intervention, and safety ambassadors.
Here are the results, which, in general, show that specific trade-offs tend to garner even more robust support than framing the tradeoff as between additional police officers and “comprehensive approaches to address public safety.”
Expect more interesting results from our survey in the coming editions. For now, though, to see the full questions and responses, click here.
2. Cities Establish Gun Violence Response Fund To Support Shooting Victims And Their Families.
In Ohio, the City of Akron established a Gun Violence Response Fund in response to a mass shooting that left 29 people wounded and one dead earlier this summer. The fund, which is a partnership between the city, the Akron Community Foundation, and United Way, has raised over $250,000 so far to help victims and their families “deal with the physical, emotional, psychological and financial aftereffects.”
The Akron City Council voted unanimously to allocate $150,000 to launch the fund; and, Mayor Shammas Malik has attracted other high-dollar pledges from the philanthropic and business communities.
For the Akron Beacon Journal, Patrick Williams and Bryce Buyakie report that the city plans to maintain the fund for gun violence survivors more broadly to help “those impact by it by providing, for example, “financial aid to cover funeral expenses, medical bills and missed work due to injuries.”In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson announced that the city is expanding its “Emergency Supplemental Victims Fund, [which] started in 2022 as a pilot program.” As Jamel Valencia reports for ABC news in Chicago, the “program will begin to offer victims $1,500 for funeral and burial expenses and $1,000 for families of victims.” This financial assistance can’t undo the trauma, but, as Mayor Johnson underscored, it can help pave a “path and journey to full healing."
Here’s Rita Oceguera reporting for The Trace on how a mother used support from the fund to help pay for the unexpected funeral expenses after her 8-year-old son Jacari died from a gunshot wound last year:
“[Mother] Tennile Brown was left to make sense of her loss, and with it, the financial weight that takes a heavy toll on families like hers — $14,000 in funeral bills. To help cover those expenses, Brown turned to the Emergency Supplemental Victim’s Fund.
Five days after Brown’s son died [she applied] for all three areas of assistance. One day later she was approved for basic needs and funeral expenses … [and] used all the emergency funds to help cover some of her funeral costs.
Brown said she would love to see other people receive the same help she has: “There’s a lot of young women out here like myself that probably don’t have insurance on their kids. We’re not really planning for the future like that, or preparing to bury our child.”
3. Three New Interventions That Effectively Address Mental Health Crises While Reducing Arrests.
San Antonio’s Mental Health Response Team Focuses “More On Helping Someone Through A Mental Health Crisis Than Catching Them In A Crime.” For KSAT, Garrett Brnger reports on San Antonio’s “robust expansion of the city’s mental health response initiative, [known as the] San Antonio Community Outreach and Resiliency Effort.” The “heavily-lauded” program, which launched as a pilot project in 2022, receives “praise for its empathetic and non-confrontational approach to mental health crises” and ability to “defuse mental health-related situations without resorting to arrests.”
Reporting for Hoodline, Drew Archer explains how the program started with a single “three-member team” working in limited geographic areas during limited hours of the day. However, as of last month, the city approved “additional teams to ensure 24-hour coverage across San Antonio.”
The team’s “focus is more on helping someone through a mental health crisis than catching them in a crime, and they prefer to resolve problems on the scene.” In these cases, a clinician “will follow up within 24 hours and then again in seven days,” providing “personalized intervention to prevent future crises.”
However, even when the situation demands that the team make an “emergency detention” or “bring someone to a clinic or behavioral hospital, very few cases end with an arrest.” Indeed, “part of the program’s success in avoiding arrests is getting people to the right facility and checking in with them later.”
Karen Falks, an Assistant Chief of the San Antonio Police Department told Hoodline that she wishes the city could allocate more resources to the programs: “I wish we could have more SA CORE teams that could respond to all of those [calls]. It’s right now, not a reality. Maybe one day it will be.”“San Luis Obispo Opens First Sobering Center.” For KSBY, NBC’s local affiliate in Central California, McKenzie Diaz reports on the county’s first sobering center which “aims to reduce the burden on law enforcement and emergency departments” by providing a dedicated facility where people “under the influence of drugs or alcohol… to start on a path to recovery,” rather than be taken to “jail and [face] potential legal repercussions.” People experiencing substance use disorders can “spend up to three days sobering up, getting clean, and deciding on their next steps” at the center while receiving care from trained staff who also provide individualized “referrals to [further] mental health and substance use treatment, [as well as] housing supports, legal services, social services, case management, transportation, food assistance, and basic needs,” at no cost.
Nebraska’s New Mental Health Crisis Stabilization Center “Aimed At Keeping People Out Of Jail, Hospitals.” For WOWT News, NBC’s local affiliate in Omaha, Joe Harris reports on the region’s new Crisis Stabilization and Resource Center offering services and care for people experiencing mental health crises in an effort to “keep more of them out of the criminal justice system” and hospital emergency rooms, where they often “don’t receive proper treatment.” The facility—with a staff composed of psychiatrists, therapists, and nurses—offers a range of care options from “medication management,” to “mental health triage, where someone can stay for a day,” to “residential beds...to stay for three to five days where they will meet with a therapist every day … [and] up to 30 days for mental health respite, if needed.” Once treatment is completed at the facility, patients “work with a case manager after they’re released” to support their reintegration back into the community.
