Safer Cities recently covered the Albuquerque Community Safety Department, which is an umbrella department that centralizes the city’s unarmed crisis response programs.

Nearly two months ago, five Memphis police officers beat a 29-year-old man to death, Tyre Nichols, during a traffic stop. That killing has sparked a new round of calls for police reform around the country; and, in particular, calls to limit the role of armed police officers in traffic stops. Memphis is considering a new bill that would reclassify a half dozen different traffic infractions as minor, meaning that they would no longer warrant a traffic stop. Montgomery County, Maryland is too. So are the legislatures in California and Washington. In light of the renewed interest in the role of police officers in traffic stops, Safer Cities conducted a new national poll. Here are the key findings.

Two U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory boards, both of which are composed of physicians, addiction medicine specialists and first responders, unanimously voted to recommend that the FDA make Narcan available over the counter without a prescription.

San Diego County Update—“Mobile Crisis Response Teams have responded to nearly 3,600 calls since the program launched two years ago.”

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.”

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.

“Ninety-six percent of victims of violent crime did not receive victim compensation to help recover,” according to the latest national survey of crime victims from the Alliance for Safety and Justice commissioned David Binder Research.

Crisis stabilization centers, which provide “substance use disorder and behavioral health support services” for people experiencing acute mental illness or intoxication, give first responders an alternative to bringing a person in crisis to a jail or emergency room.

Our new poll finds broad bipartisan support for Quick Response Teams that deploy experts trained to prevent overdose deaths.

Last year, Albuquerque, New Mexico, launched the country’s first community safety department—an unarmed civilian force that takes a public health approach to protecting public safety. Albuquerque Community Safety deploys different types of first responders, including a “community responder” division, which “responds to minor injuries or incapacitation, abandoned vehicles, non-injury accidents, needle pickups, or other calls for service in the community.” Safer Cities conducted a poll to gauge how the concept of a community responder unit would be received by voters across the country.

Community Violence Intervention—What They’re Saying; Three new mobile crisis response programs launched this Fall; An Update From Columbus, Ohio responders program.

“We want to return the vibrancy, the beauty, the healthy feeling of the streets of the Mission, but we want to do that without criminalizing poverty… and we believe the community ambassador program is the way to do that.”

Over the summer, Los Angeles County announced that it will add 300 unarmed, uniformed transit ambassadors to watch over the county’s trains and buses to “create a culture in which the ambassadors [act as] the front line, managing the lion’s share of incidents in transit [and] reserve law enforcement and armed responses to those incidents that truly warrant it.” As these novel approaches to transit security launch, Safer Cities conducted a poll to gauge public support for civilian transit ambassadors.

There’s an emerging bipartisan political consensus that cities need to get Narcan—a life-saving drug that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose—into the hands of as many people as can responsibly administer it. And a new Safer Cities poll with Data For Progress (methodology) shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans would welcome that change.

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

Our results show there is also a strong, bipartisan support for unarmed security ambassador programs. Cities and counties should consider replicating West Hollywood's program. But we also suspect there is a broader lesson to learn here: there likely is a healthy public appetite for a range of innovative programs that solve real problems for residents and do so without forcing armed encounters or wasting critical law enforcement resources.

In the two years since George Floyd’s murder, America has made significant progress towards re-envisioning the role that first responders, including the police, play in keeping communities safe. Minneapolis is further along than nearly anywhere else—having added a range of new unarmed public safety responders and related services, which collectively are shifting the city’s public safety ecosystem.

Oregon is the first state to be approved for 85% Medicaid reimbursement for mobile crisis response services. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “strongly encourages other states to follow Oregon’s model …”

Our suggested readings this week revolve around a central theme: as opioid deaths reach historic highs, promising new overdose prevention programs are taking shape—and federal funds and opioid litigation settlement dollars could help launch more of them.

“This is about which expert should respond to a 911 call,” Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who helped spearhead HART’s creation, told Safer Cities: “When it's a robbery in progress, or a shooting, then obviously we need to send an armed sheriff’s deputy. But if we are talking about a person sleeping on a sidewalk, or a teenager who is suicidal and swallowed pills, then we need a behavioral health expert to respond. That’s the kind of crucial work that HART’s crisis intervention specialists do everyday, and this is what it looks like to fully fund public safety in Harris County—we’ve got law enforcement, we’ve got mobile crisis response, and we’ve got community violence intervention. We are sending the right experts to solve the right problems.”