This week’s edition of Safer Cities focuses on the continuum of mental health crisis care starting from when a person calls for help; to the dispatching of a mobile crisis team; through placement of a person in a crisis stabilization center.

In New York, a “new law allows [mobile] crisis team members to install flashing green lights in their vehicles to alert other drivers they are on the way to a mental or behavioral health emergency.” The mobile crisis teams “are allowed, if necessary, to exceed the speed limit, but not at a dangerous speed.”

When a person calls 911, whether about “a person shouting at a bus stop or a child who refuses to go to school”, there now are community responder teams in dozens of cities across the country who are supposed to be handling those calls. Yet, how frequently those teams are actually dispatched swings wildly across jurisdictions. A major driver of these fluctuations comes down to how the call centers that dispatch first responders are structured and operate, according to a new joint report from the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, the Center for American Progress, and the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law.

After New York City launched two of the country’s first overdose prevention sites—a space that provides people with a safe and supervised place to use drugs—researchers found that the centers were associated with both reduced overdose risk and decreased public drug use. Now, for The New York Times, Maia Szalavitz reports on a new study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which finds that “violent and property crime rates near the two overdose prevention centers did not increase any more than crime in similar neighborhoods elsewhere in the city.” As Szalavitz writes, these findings “should ease fears surrounding overdose prevention centers…”

Trauma Recovery Centers are a place where crime survivors and their families can connect to mental health, relocation, job resources and more services that they need to achieve stability after life-altering violence. And where they have been established—they are working, “serving the populations the model was designed to support” and “providing a wide range of benefits to their clients and to the broader service community.” Those are the main findings of a new preprint paper—which presents findings from “the first national survey to document Trauma Recovery Center operations and the people they serve”—from New York University Professor Angela Hawken and Sandy Mullins, a senior research scholar at NYU’s Marron Institute.

Meet Scott Person, who “patrols [downtown Indianapolis] from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. every weekday in a red jacket emblazoned with the words ‘Safety Ambassador.’ He carries no gun [and] envisions himself more as an agent of deterrence, betting that most people won’t break the law around someone dressed like a security guard.” Over the course of the day, Mr. Person helps a man with schizophrenia who hasn’t eaten in four days to get a meal; mediates potential tension between workers entering a building and a person sleeping on the sidewalk in front of it; and “gives directions, answers questions and listens to concerns.” Near the end of the day, a man taps him on the back and says: “Just wanted to say thank you for what you do … it makes a difference.”

As cities across the country seek innovative solutions to address the country’s growing unhoused population, homeless outreach programs are becoming a core policy lever that leaders are pulling. This week’s Safer Cities spotlights three homeless outreach efforts that illustrate the strategy’s growing momentum.

Introducing Safer Cities Explainers: Last week, Safer Cities introduced our coverage map, which curates many of the innovative programs that we’ve covered from crisis stabilization to mobile crisis response teams, from Narcan access to trauma recovery centers. This week, we’re introducing short explainers on four key issues that we’ve covered.

As cities across the country build out a new public safety infrastructure, the good—and bad—news is that there’s so much activity that it’s hard to keep track. That’s why Safer Cities created this coverage map, which curates many of the innovative programs that we’ve covered from crisis stabilization to mobile crisis response times, from Narcan access to trauma recovery centers.

A newly released report from New York University Law School’s Policing Project contains insights from interviews with clinicians from Denver’s mobile crisis response program—known as STAR, or “Support Team Assisted Response”—as well as with 911 dispatchers, police officials, and “residents of Denver’s communities most affected by policing and other first response practices.”

Seattle Set To Launch Its “Third Public Safety Department.” For The Seattle Times, Sarah Grace Taylor reports on Mayor Bruce Harrell's announcement that the city will invest $26 million to establish the “Community Assisted Response and Engagement department” as “a new branch of the city’s public safety response—along with the police and fire departments.”

As cities across the country seek innovative solutions to curb gun violence, community violence intervention is becoming a core policy lever that leaders are pulling. This week’s Safer Cities spotlights five community violence intervention efforts that illustrate CVI’s growing momentum.

Lewis and Clark County is a county of 72,000 people that encompasses Helena, Montana. Over the past few years, the county has embarked on a mission to ensure that “more residents [can] connect to holistic and equitable support for behavioral health and substance use services.”

Crisis Stabilization Centers provide “substance use disorder and behavioral health support services” for people experiencing acute mental illness or intoxication. First responders, including police departments and mobile crisis response units, can take people in crisis to these facilities—which are designed to get people the help that they need quickly—instead of taking them to jail or the emergency room. Here are four new crisis stabilization centers launching around the country.

The country has witnessed breathtaking progress in public safety infrastructure innovation over the past few years, as cities across the country have created mobile crisis response and violence intervention teams, launched trauma recovery centers and crisis stabilization units, and integrated 9-8-8 and 9-1-1 call centers to ensure that the right responder is sent to the right emergency. These advancements also enjoy overwhelming bipartisan support; and while no city has built all of the components of a modern public safety infrastructure yet, the fact that dozens of cities are actively building multiple pieces of the infrastructure provides both the contours of a vision for what a robust public safety infrastructure would look like and the concrete hope that the vision is within reach.

This week’s edition is focused on cities that are building public safety teams into their fire departments—specifically, we focus on how the renowned CAHOOTS team in Eugene, Oregon shifted its home from the police department to the fire department; the launch of new fire department-based behavioral response teams; and the launch of overdose response teams housed within fire departments.

The Vera Institute of Justice recently published a new polling deck—Winning the Narrative on Safer Roads and More Equitable Traffic Stops: Findings From National Polling and Public Opinion Research—that contains extensive framing advice for talking about how to shift police capacity towards the traffic stops that most impact public safety (for example, drunk driving). Here are three key findings.

“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.”

This proposed mobile crisis response system is a key piece of a broader plan known as the “Treatment Not Trauma” measure. What we’re focused on in this newsletter is the framing of the measure, because, when it comes to support from the public and the lawmakers who represent them, how policies are framed can matter as much as the substantive details contained within the policy.

The 9-8-8 Lifeline launched one year ago with a vision of providing “24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you or your loved ones, and best practices for professionals in the United States.” For mental health professionals and advocates, 9-8-8 is a critical part of a broader mission to provide everyone in crisis with someone to call (e.g. 9-8-8), someone to respond (e.g. a mobile crisis unit), and somewhere to go (e.g. a crisis stabilization center).