Three Things To Read This Week
1. New Poll: Virginians Love Mobile Crisis Response.
Governor Glenn Youngkin’s “Right Help, Right Now” plan, which aims to significantly expand mental health services across Virginia, includes a provision that would create *over 30* new mobile crisis response teams throughout the state. When voters learn that Right Help, Right Now includes resources for mobile crisis response, they are more likely to support it, according to a survey of 598 registered voters conducted in late January. Voters are even more supportive of Youngkin’s plan when informed that it’s “designed to relieve the law enforcement community’s burden of responding to behavioral health care crises and reducing the criminalization of mental health. From the polling memo:
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2. Community Violence Intervention In Action:
Alec MacGillis has a feature story co-published by ProPublica and The New Yorker, which surveys the landscape of community violence intervention programs across the country. It’s so long that even ChatGPT can’t summarize it, but it contains a concrete example of how community violence intervention works in practice that vividly illustrates why violence intervention workers can defuse some disputes that police officers could never resolve:
“Three months earlier, a sex video involving high school students had surfaced online, angering a rival group of teenagers, who had beat up one participant, stealing his designer bag and sunglasses, then fired shots at a car belonging to another participant’s mother … [The violence intervention worker] reached out to the mother of a member of the retaliating group, fearing that she might be a target, and, for several days, he accompanied her on the bus to work …. He also reached out to the father of one of the students in the video; the man was known as a ‘shot caller,’ someone who had the ability to arrange a killing or to defuse a conflict, and he had been making provocative comments about the episode online. At a 2 a.m. meeting on an abandoned block, arranged by the superiors in the crew that the father belonged to, [the violence intervention worker] urged him to de-escalate. ‘We were able to resolve it. That’s what we do out here … We squashed it. But nobody knows about those kinds of stories.’”
3. A Pink “N” Stands For Narcan
Traverse City, Michigan, is placing a pink “N” sticker in the windows of libraries and other government buildings around the city to signal the availability of Narcan. The city is then supplying vending machines stocked with Narcan, the life-saving drug that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, to those locations. Three-in-four voters nationally said they would support cities doing exactly what Traverse City is doing—getting cost-free Narcan to community organizations and businesses, as a 2022 Safer Cities poll found:
