Special Edition: Mapping The Modern Public Safety Infrastructure
Though Americans regularly rank crime among their top concerns, and elected officials aggressively signal their commitment to public safety, the reality is that our nation’s current public safety infrastructure cannot meet its responsibilities of maintaining order or quelling violence and vulnerability.
At the same time, the country has witnessed breathtaking progress in public safety infrastructure innovation over the past few years, as cities across the country have created mobile crisis response and violence intervention teams, launched trauma recovery centers and crisis stabilization units, and integrated 9-8-8 and 9-1-1 call centers to ensure that the right responder is sent to the right emergency.
These advancements also enjoy overwhelming bipartisan support; and while no city has built all of the components of a modern public safety infrastructure yet, the fact that dozens of cities are actively building multiple pieces of the infrastructure provides both the contours of a vision for what a robust public safety infrastructure would look like and the concrete hope that the vision is within reach.
This map reflects the programs that Safer Cities has covered from across the country, and organizes them into a framework that could serve as a model for localities to aspire towards. Please tell us what’s right, what’s wrong, and what’s missing—and we’d also appreciate any other feedback you’d be willing to share. Email us at: matt@safercitiesresearch.com
The Central Dispatch Authority (911; 988; 311)
A Central Dispatch Authority would be a regulatory body that oversees and ensures seamless integration between a jurisdiction’s dispatch access points—911, 988, and 311—and with other local services so that callers quickly receive the right help for the right emergencies. Importantly, this agency would be independent of any first responder agencies, which protects freedom and neutrality in dispatching the right official.
Without sufficient coordination between dispatch agencies, police officers and firefighters often are dispatched to behavioral health crises instead of available mobile crisis response teams who are specially trained to handle these situations.
That's why cities and counties are building toward a more comprehensive and cohesive vision of emergency dispatch services, which, ultimately, could cohere into a central dispatch authority with the vision, focus, and political power necessary to secure the funding and personnel needed for the agency to thrive.
In sum, the Central Dispatch Authority oversees the “someone to call” function. Read more about the Central Dispatch Authority, including examples of how communities are modernizing 911, 988, and 311 across the country, here.
First Responder Agencies
Two agencies—the Community Safety Department and the Police Department oversee the “someone to respond” function.
Community Safety Departments centralize a city’s unarmed public safety services. These departments are co-equal to and work alongside other city first responder departments such as police, fire and EMTs.
Community Safety Departments house a variety of divisions, each with their own teams of trained experts who respond to situations involving behavioral health crises, substance use, homelessness, parking disputes, traffic investigations, and more.
Community Safety Departments also increase public safety through other programs like violence intervention efforts and increasing the number of “eyes on the street” to deter crime.
Read more about the Community Safety Department, including examples of how communities are implementing mobile crisis response teams, community violence intervention programs, safety ambassadors, civilian traffic enforcement, and more, here.
Police play an indispensable and unique role in a modern public safety infrastructure. Only police have the training, skill and mandate to investigate and solve violent crime such as murders and rapes, and to intervene in public safety emergencies such as active shooter situations or in-progress home invasions.
These are the kinds of violent and serious crimes that most undermine public safety. Yet, across the country, police departments simply do not spend enough of their time and resources combating these problems. That’s because the mission of a police department has expanded over and over again for decades to the point where we now expect law enforcement to respond to both a suicidal teenager locked in his room and an armed home invasion robbery. We expect police to both solve murders and solve the problems that arise from a city’s homelessness crisis.
The bottom line is that the police can’t do it alone. Not only are mental health professionals better first responders for mental health crises, but sending the police instead to these calls has led to plummeting clearance rates for serious crimes, slower response times, and decreased morale within police departments and the communities they serve.
A modern public safety infrastructure must refocus police departments on the unique and indispensable role that only law enforcement can play. That’s how to boost officer morale, increase public trust, and ensure that law enforcement efforts yield the greatest public safety gains.
Read more about the Police Department, including examples of their primary functions like solving murders and non-fatal shootings and rapid response to emergency calls involving a clear danger, here.
Facilities
Three types of facilities serve the “somewhere to go” function—the Centers For Community Safety; Jails; and Emergency Rooms. We don’t cover emergency rooms below, because the goal is to not take anyone who isn’t truly in need of emergency medical services to an emergency room. Instead, the infrastructure built under the Centers For Community Safety provides a better alternative.
First responders often need a place to take a person who is in crisis—for instance, a person suffering from an acute mental illness; someone who is intoxicated and needs to sober up; a person who suffered an overdose, people who are in chronic need of safe housing; and violent crime victims and their families.
To help ensure that the right facilities exist with the right expertise and resources to help stabilize people in crisis, the Centers for Community Safety serves as an umbrella agency that houses and coordinates hospital-based and community based care facilities. Collectively, these facilities provide an alternative—often one that is both safer and better suited to resolve the person’s underlying conditions—to bringing a person in crisis to jail or an emergency room.
Read more about the Centers For Community Safety, including examples of hospital (e.g. addiction stabilization unit; hospital based violence intervention) and community (e.g. crisis stabilization centers; sobering centers; trauma recovery centers) based centers, here.
Jails perform a critical but narrow function in a modern public safety infrastructure. They provide a last-resort locked facility to hold individuals pending trial who currently pose a serious and identifiable danger to the public.
By reducing jail populations to only hold the people who cannot be safely released to the community, it allows for modernization of these facilities to ensure they provide safe and dignified shelter for people who reside inside, create a safer and more rewarding environment for staff, and are tethered more tightly to providing treatment and rehabilitation to the people in their care.
As jails truly become a last resort option; and therefore the resources and imagination needed to transform them are within better grasp, we expect that jails will look and function extremely differently than they do today.
Read more about jails, including examples of rehabilitative programs provided by correctional institutions and reentry programs that make strides towards modernization and that can be implemented in any jail across the country, here.
The Community Safety Innovation Coordinator
A Community Safety Innovation Coordinator would be a cabinet-level position in the local government tasked with aiding departments across the public safety infrastructure to pilot programs that provide targeted economic or social supports that can reduce the risk of future violence or vulnerability of the kind that initiated the person’s contact with the public safety infrastructure (such as cash stipends for gun violence survivors), as well as place-based crime prevention measures (such as installing street lighting in unlit areas prone to robberies).
A Community Safety Innovation Coordinator would be responsible for following cutting-edge research on public safety efforts, identifying successful programs from other jurisdictions, and working with other agencies to implement them at the local level. The CSIC would rigorously evaluate pilot programs and submit reports and recommendations to local officials to ensure that their jurisdiction continues to fund the most effective programs. The CSIC would also obtain state, federal and grant funding for innovative public safety efforts and help transition successful programs to long-term funding sources.
Read more about the community safety innovation coordinator, including examples of programs that could be implemented with their assistance including Narcan vending machines, summer jobs programs for at-risk youth, cash stipends for gun violence survivors, and more, here.
