What To Read This Week

1. The New Yorker’s Deep Dive On The Albuquerque Community Safety Department

“The spirit and timing of A.C.S.’s creation, nearly three years ago, conjured a vision of greater public safety in Albuquerque, including increased protection of its residents from police,” Murat Oztaskin writes in his feature on the city’s much-lauded “third branch of public safety.” 

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.” Those are impressive results for the young program  and compare favorably to other mobile crisis responder programs across the country. Yet they only account for “about three per cent of the million-plus [calls] that Albuquerque receives a year.” 

That’s because the department “faces a mandate that outstrips its resources.” For context, “the Albuquerque police budget is more than twenty times larger.” And this imbalance comes with a tragic cost: “Albuquerque Police Department officers shot at a record eighteen people in 2022, killing ten.” Here’s Oztaskin providing a concrete example of why scaling the community safety department could help:

“By the end of the winter, A.C.S. will grow its roster of responders beyond seventy, allowing it to take on greater numbers of calls. But that workforce still won’t be enough to have staffing around the clock. Currently, responders work between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. In August, during that overnight gap, police responded to a call about an intoxicated man parked for hours at a gas station downtown—the kind of ‘down and out’ call that might otherwise have gone to A.C.S. [T]he responding officers, after allegedly seeing a gun in [the man’s] hand, fired at him sixteen times. [Keshawn] Thomas, who was twenty-seven, died immediately.”

2. NEW POLL ALERT:

Nearly three in four Chicagoans (74%) support reassigning “certain duties currently handled by the police department—[for example,] traffic enforcement and certain 911 calls related to homelessness, mental health, minor crime, and substance abuse—to unarmed civil officers, social workers, and EMTs.” That’s according to a survey of 1,040 likely voters in Chicago, which IZQ strategies conducted via SMS in late January. 

Here are both the question and the results:

3. “A deeper, broader view of crime.”

Writing in the New York Times, Spencer Bokat-Lindell argues that some of the most promising ideas for reducing crime “work more indirectly” than “interventions — police-based or not — that promise to prevent crimes on an individual and relatively immediate basis.” Here’s the TL; DR:

“A 2002 meta-analysis of 13 studies found that improved street lighting can decrease crime by 20 percent …  In Philadelphia, cleaning up vacant lots produced a 22 percent decrease in burglaries, a 29 percent reduction in gun violence and a much improved sense of community safety …. the Readi program in Chicago, which attempts to identify young men at risk of gun violence and offers them employment, job training and cognitive behavioral therapy … In a randomized controlled trial carried out in Chicago, teenagers who were given summer jobs were 43 percent less likely to be arrested for violent crimes for over a year after their jobs ended… [H]ousing can be an important factor too: In Denver, a five-year randomized control trial of a program that provides housing subsidies to people at risk of homelessness found a 40 percent reduction in arrests.”