Three Things To Read This Week
1. NEW POLL: Voters overwhelmingly support the creation of community safety departments that handle unarmed crisis response and act as a separate and coequal department working alongside the police and fire departments.
Safer Cities recently covered the Albuquerque Community Safety Department, which is an umbrella department that centralizes the city’s unarmed crisis response programs. For example, the department’s:
“behavioral-health workers respond to calls, mostly from 911, about nonviolent crises involving mental health, homelessness, or substance use” and are “trained to connect people from some of the city’s most vulnerable populations with professional help. In doing so, they also reduce those residents’ interactions with local law-enforcement agencies, which in recent years have had the second-highest fatal-shooting rate among major American cities.”
Since its creation, Albuquerque Community Safety has responded to more than twenty thousand calls, and “less than one per cent have required eventual police involvement.”
To gauge whether Americans would support or oppose an Albuquerque style community safety department where they live, Safer Cities conducted a poll of 1,704 registered voters nationally.
Here’s what we found:
75% of voters, including most Republicans and most Democrats, support their city creating a community safety department that would function as a separate and coequal city department alongside the police and fire departments. Among Democrats, support sits at 88% (51% “strongly support”).
After watching a local television news segment on the Alburquerque Community Safety department, voter support for creating a community safety department where they live spiked to 88%.
You can watch the news segment here.
2. “School-based violence intervention program shows promise.”
About a year ago, a fight between two teenagers at West Mesa High School in Albuquerque devolved into a fourteen year-old boy fatally shooting a sixteen year old boy. Reflecting on the tragedy, the high school principal told the Albuquerque Journal: “If we’ve learned anything in the past few months it’s that being reactive is not working. We cannot rely on a single solution to prevent this kind of violence. We need a multi-faceted strategy that draws on our existing systems and agencies to support meaningful preventative efforts that center around the well-being of the most at-risk students.”
Fast-forward a year and West Mesa High School is home to one of the first school-based violence intervention programs in the country. The school-based program is an extension of the city’s community violence intervention program that “interrupts cycles of violence by providing victims and their associates with credible messages of non-violence, pathways to various social services, peer support and an ‘honorable exit’ from committing future acts of violence.” As Mayor Tim Keller wrote at the time the program was announced the move to “expand to our public schools [allows the program to] work on upstream prevention with our youth.” The director of the city’s violence intervention program told the Albuquerque Journal that the school-based program works with “students and their families off campus” and “includes on campus peer-to-peer support through community based efforts and it includes intensive long-term case management support for those most at risk for becoming engaged in the cycles of violence and gun violence.”
This week, KOB4 Eyewitness News, the local NBC affiliate, ran a tv segment describing the school-based intervention program and the early promise that its shown:
Related: In Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Scott announced the launch of a school based violence intervention pilot program where “intervention staff members will provide support to students identified as being at a high-risk of participating in violence and partner with faculty to provide restorative practices to combat violent behavior through five intervention strategies.”
3. “This is something we’ve never had before. It is a place for people to go, people who are experiencing some of the biggest levels of crisis to go to have a safe space to have stability, to have access to things like laundry and showers.”
That’s Vega Pederson, the newly elected Multnomah County Chair—the top executive in the county that encompasses Portland, Oregon—discussing Portland’s recently opened Behavioral Health Resource Center with the local CBS affiliate. Describing the center as “a first-of-its-kind facility to help the homeless with chronic mental health and addiction,” the CBS News characterized the center as “crucial because it will serve the homeless who are often unsuccessful in regular congregate shelter settings due to their mental health and addiction issues. At the resource center, visitors will have access to kitchens, bathrooms and showers, along with private spaces. A cornerstone of the Behavioral Health Resource Center is to rebuild trust where it’s been lost among those battling mental illness and addiction, bringing them inside a space designed to meet their greater needs.”
Pederson, the Multnomah County Chair, told CBS News that while the resource center focuses on being a site for “getting people into housing [and] staying into housing,” the work starts with “the consistency of the outreach that is happening, and how successful we are in bringing people safely off the street.” That’s why Pederson says she’s “a big supporter of things like Portland Street Response [the city’s mobile crisis response team] and having a non-law enforcement way of getting people help that they need when they’re in crisis.” Both the mobile crisis response team and the behavioral health resource center are ways to disrupt the status quo, which too often means: “those who are having a mental health crisis on the streets are sometimes taken to jail or the state hospital but there is no system in place to provide mental or behavioral health support.”
