Three Things To Read This Weekend

1. What’s in a name? Overdose prevention centers are more popular than safe injection sites or safe consumption sites—even though those are just different names for the same thing. 

Lawmakers, researchers, advocates, and journalists use different names to refer to a space that provides people with a safe and supervised place to use drugs in an effort to curb overdose deaths. Does it matter what you call them? 

To shed light on the question, Safer Cities conducted a survey of likely voters nationally in partnership with Data for Progress (methodology). We split respondents into three groups of approximately 400 people, provided each group with a brief description [read it here] of what these facilities do and why, and then changed one critical component of that description—the name of the facility: safe injection sites; safe consumption sites; or overdose prevention centers.

The results: Yes, what you call these facilities matters.

Calling these places overdose prevention centers significantly increased support by 11 percentage points over “safe consumption sites” and 15 points over “safe injection sites.” More granularly, the overdose prevention center framing increased support for the facilities among self-identified Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. 

• +26 net support for “opening overdose prevention centers where you live”—60% of voters support, 34% oppose, and 5% don’t know. 

• +15 net support for “opening safe consumption sites where you live”—53% of voters support, 38% oppose, and 9% don’t know

• +11 net support for “opening safe injection sites where you live”—52% of voters support, 41% oppose, and 11% don’t know.

Bottom Line: Overdose prevention centers are popular no matter what you call them, even when you cue people to imagine that the centers will operate where they live. However, calling these facilities “overdose prevention centers” (as opposed to “safe injection” or “safe consumption” sites) significantly increases support for them, especially among Republican voters whose support increases by 16 percentage points over the safe injection framing.

2. Dirty Needles In The Park

Dirty needles in public spaces are a fact of life in cities across the country, especially as the opioid epidemic rages on. Cities usually respond to the discarded syringes problem in one of the two ways—mostly ignore it, or else use armed law enforcement to step up drug enforcement and sweep homeless encampments. Both approaches are problematic. 

No parent should have to worry about their kid stepping on a dirty needle while walking to school or strolling through the park. But people who are using drugs, especially those who struggle with substance use issues, will keep using drugs and needles as soon as they return home from jail or set up camp in another part of the city. 

There is a third option, though: Just pick-up the needles. 

The city of Lowell, Massachusetts funded a full-time syringe collection program coordinator as a “proactive strategy” that includes both collecting “hypodermic needles from the city’s parks, playgrounds, streets and sidewalks” and allowing “the public to call in or report locations of discarded syringes through an online portal, similar to when a pothole is reported.” In just three years of operation, the program has collected over 50,000 needles. The Lowell Sun recently quoted the program’s coordinator, Andres Gonzalez, on what motivates him: “My main driving goal is to make sure people are safe … It’s something that I take personally. I wake up every day to try and find those needles.” 

Lowell is among a handful of cities trying different models for cleaning-up needles. In Seattle, for example, a “clean team” uses devices that safely sweep up needles in addition to cleaning up trash and other bio-hazardous materials off the streets and sidewalks. Boston has taken a page from successful can and bottle recycle efforts and now “buys back” needles from users in the same way you can redeem $.05 for turning in an empty bottle of Coke. And, in Albuquerque, the city’s Community Safety Department has tasked its community responders division with responding to citizen requests for needle pick-ups. 

3. Governor Newsom Signs California’s Freedom To Walk Act

Cities taking a more comprehensive approach to public safety typically focus on the question of who is the best expert to respond to a particular situation. But sometimes the best response is no response at all. For example, last year, Philadelphia became the first major city in the United States to ban traffic stops for minor infractions such as outdated registrations, broken tail lights, or bumper issues. Another good example is the Freedom To Walk Act in California, which decriminalizes jaywalking in most situations. For LAist, Ryan Fonseca explains what the “bill does and doesn’t do” ….

“The Freedom to Walk Act does aim to protect pedestrians from ‘jaywalking’ tickets when they cross a street outside of a crosswalk or against a traffic light (and let's be honest, most everyone has done this at some point) … But you must meet specific conditions to be in the clear. AB 2147 states that police officers should not stop and cite a crossing pedestrian ‘unless a reasonably careful person would realize there is an immediate danger of a collision with a moving vehicle or other device moving exclusively by human power’ (such as a bicycle).… Citing people for “jaywalking” has little-to-no effect on a pedestrian's behavior and does not improve public safety. ‘So why are we doing it so much?’ [Assemblymember Laura Friedman] asked. ‘If people are jaywalking a lot in an area, it's probably because they don’t have a good way to get across the street … I’d rather have communities start thinking about adding more crosswalks, adding better signage, putting a light up, putting up a stop sign, adding a sidewalk—doing all the things that we know actually do make people safer.’”