Three Things To Read This Week

1. “Safety Ambassadors Help Keep Indianapolis Safe.” An Excellent Television News Segment From WTHR 13 in Indianapolis.

As part of a multi-edition effort (here, here and here) to highlight compelling, fair, and informative local television news reporting, today we feature a segment reported by Lauren Kostiuk from WTHR 13, Indianapolis’ local CBS affiliate, on the city’s unarmed safety ambassadors program.

“When it comes to keeping downtown safe, there is a group that's approaching it in a new way,” Kostiuk writes: “They are called ‘Safety Ambassadors,’ and they act as the ‘eyes and ears’ of Mile Square.” Kostiuk interviews one of the city’s safety ambassadors, a retired military veteran, who sees the job as “keeping the streets of Indianapolis safe” and “giving people a sense of pride for the city they are visiting.” 

Kostiuk also interviewed the President & CEO of Downtown Indy, a pro-business alliance, who fully supports the safety ambassador program, calling the program the “connective fiber between the people in downtown and law enforcement.”

Here’s the full news segment:

Related: Last month, Nora Mckeown reported for Spectrum One News in Cleveland that, “as part of Cleveland's plan to ‘Reimagine Downtown,’ the city [will] hire 20 more safety ambassadors … trained in de-escalation and security who patrol downtown to make people feel safer.” As Mckeown details, the “role is primarily about keeping the community safe, but it’s also about welcoming people downtown, [which means] anything from pushing scooters out of the way of pedestrians on the sidewalk to responding to dispatches to escort[ing] people from one part of downtown to another.”

2. Two New Studies Demonstrate How Community Violence Intervention Related Programs Reduced Violence In Chicago and Denver:

• Denver: “Clients assigned to the intervention were nearly 70 percent less likely to perpetrate violence.” That’s one key finding from a new study authored by CU Boulder Professor David C. Pyrooz and colleagues—Jose Antonio Sanchez and Elizabeth Weltman. Here are the authors describing the study:

“The multidisciplinary team and street outreach worker intervention led by the Gang Reduction Initiative of Denver (GRID) was subject to a randomized controlled trial between 2019 and 2022. One hundred forty-three people were assigned at random to receive individualized, coordinated case management, developed by the multidisciplinary team and facilitated by street outreach workers …  The impact evaluation was paired with a process evaluation, which entailed 19 interviews with members of organizations participating in the multidisciplinary team, 197 hours of multidisciplinary and GRID team meeting observations, and 70 hours of field-based observations with street outreach workers.”

And here is the most relevant finding:

“Violent offending variety and prevalence scores were statistically significant and lower [for people randomly assigned to GRID]. In other words, respondents assigned at random to GRID … were 69 percent less likely to perpetrate violence during the recall period. On the whole, we can conclude that assignment to GRID corresponded with reductions in the perpetration of violence.”

• Chicago: In a study supported by the National Bureau of Economic Research, University of Chicago researcher Monica Bhatt and her colleagues—Sara B. Heller, Max Kapustin, Marianne Bertrand, and Christopher Blattman—conducted “a randomized controlled trial (N = 2,456) of a community-researcher partnership called the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI) Chicago.” READI “operate[s] in five of Chicago’s highest-violence neighborhoods” and provides support to men with “the very highest risk of shooting involvement” by providing them with “subsidized, supported work combined with group cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). 

Here’s the logic that drives the support:

“The job was designed to provide several elements: a stable source of income to deter illegal work, an incentive to participate in the therapy, a place to build and reinforce new skills and norms, and a reason to spend less time in dangerous settings. Meanwhile, the CBT-informed programming was designed to foster several complementary behavior changes: to help participants reflect on their own thinking, practice less harmful responses in dangerous situations, and promote more positive behaviors and identities. Due to the significant barriers to participation this population faces, READI also provided participants with referrals to housing, substance abuse, mental health, and legal services when needed.”

The results show “signs that this program model has promise.” For example, “shooting and homicide arrests, decline[d] 65 percent. [And], because shootings are so costly, READI generates estimated social savings between $182,000 and $916,000 per participant, implying a benefit-cost ratio between 4:1 and 20:1.” Moreover, “participants referred by outreach workers—a pre-specified subgroup—show enormous declines in both arrests and victimizations for shootings and homicides (79 and 43 percent, respectively) that remain statistically significant even after multiple testing adjustments.”

ICYMI: Earlier this Spring, Safer Cities covered a Johns Hopkins study of Safe Streets, Baltimore’s flagship community violence intervention program, which focuses resources on high gun violence zones within the city, using trained experts to de-escalate conflict before it spreads. The researchers concluded that Safe Streets is “associated with a statistically significant 23% reduction in nonfatal shootings” across the various program sites. Moreover, in the city’s five longest running program sites, “homicides were 22% lower than forecasted” if Safe Streets “had not been implemented.”

3. Three New Mobile Crisis Response Programs Launch: 

• Arlington County, Virginia to “launch [a] new behavioral health crisis response team.” 
  
  ARLNow, an independent news outlet based in Arlington, reports that the “new “Mobile Outreach Support Team [or, MOST] consist[s] of “a licensed behavioral health clinician, a certified peer recovery specialist, and an outreach worker from Arlington’s Department of Human Services.” 
  
  The county emphasizes that “the goals of MOST include increasing access to mental health and substance use treatment and decreasing the role of non-clinical first responders in addressing mental health needs.” Moreover, “[t]he team will work alongside emergency responders, providing alternatives to incarceration … while decreasing hospital emergency room and psychiatric hospital admissions.”

• In Indianapolis, a “clinician-led response team begins to respond to mental health crises without police.” Reporting for NPR in Indianapolis, Katrina Ross details how “Indianapolis’ new Clinician-Led Community Response Pilot,” which  “consists of clinicians and peer specialists … are dispatched to people in crisis who call 911. The team can connect people with mental health resources, and transport them to a hospital or treatment center, such as the city’s Assessment and Intervention Center at the Community Justice Campus.” Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett told NPR that he supports the clinician-led response because the “team can divert health problems away from incarceration and into effective treatment.”

• “Laguna Beach launches Be Well OC mobile mental health and wellness services.” Reporting for the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Turner explains that “advocates of the program have touted its ability to lighten the load on law enforcement and emergency medical service personnel.” As the Vice President of Be Well told Turner, “We are the [people] who shoulder those calls because we have the time, we have the resources, we have the ability to focus on that issue [and] we’re able to focus and de-escalate and to stabilize in the community, and that’s the benefit of us working alongside of public safety.”