A couple of weeks ago, the city of Seattle announced that its community violence intervention work would move into the city’s community safety department, also known as CARE. The next day, Baltimore announced the creation of a Department of Neighborhood Safety, which will manage the city’s violence prevention and community crisis response efforts. These cities are just the latest examples of an intriguing new trend of jurisdictions across the nation launching agencies specifically dedicated to community safety, a field of public health interventions designed to build safer neighborhoods. Just this year, New York City and Harris County, Texas, have launched or proposed agencies that join earlier established departments and offices of community safety in Albuquerque, Durham, Greensboro, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis.
The emergence of this community safety ecosystem is one of the more striking innovations in municipal governance in recent years. Community safety agencies are beginning to consolidate jurisdictions’ efforts to address safety through prevention and early intervention, rather than just law enforcement. These community safety interventions include community violence intervention, a range of programs designed to prevent community violence before it happens; community crisis response, a branch of first response designed to handle a range of behavioral health crises and low-level conflicts; and victims services and homeless outreach.
What binds all of these interventions together is a recognition that the most effective way to build safer neighborhoods is to rapidly connect vulnerable populations in crisis to stabilizing services. A violence intervention worker might only have a few hours to find new housing in a neighborhood across town for a family at risk of retaliatory violence. A community crisis responder may be able to provide mediation services to resolve a dispute between neighbors before it takes a darker turn. Or she may be the best equipped to stabilize a person in the downtown corridor experiencing a mental health crisis and then connect them to long-term care.
Community safety interventions are best understood and organized separately from law enforcement—not in opposition to law enforcement but because the draw of relying on enforcement and coercion can undermine the core ethos of community safety. The very point of these agencies is to develop city infrastructure that can intervene before law enforcement becomes necessary. These services can operate without the downsides of relying on force or coercion. Community safety and law enforcement may partner on specific initiatives, such as to deliver a co-response that pairs clinicians and officers to respond to highly volatile situations like high-acuity domestic violence calls or barricaded suspects. But ultimately, cities are wisely recognizing that trying to deliver community safety services from law enforcement agencies is not as effective as giving community safety its own home in the municipal ecosystem—and its own well-trained personnel.
These new community safety agencies are often leveraging services that already exist, but are doing so in a way that addresses long-standing problems in municipal governance related to siloing and reliable investment in and delivery of services. Public health–oriented safety interventions have often operated at a remove, scattered across—and sometimes duplicated across—various city departments. This disconnection has meant that the community violence intervention worker might not know whether a housing voucher is available for their vulnerable family, if they know anything about available housing services at all.
These safety interventions also have not historically received the level of investment afforded to law enforcement, and so, relatedly, they have not been held accountable for responding with the same level of urgency we expect from law enforcement. As a result, the person experiencing a mental health crisis has often faced a difficult choice: a police officer who can arrive quickly but may not be equipped to address the crisis or a trained clinician who may take hours, or days, to arrive. Traditional social services—even those with an implication for public safety—simply were not designed for rapid response. That is beginning to change. Instead of cities considering these programs as charitable and “nice to have,” they are beginning to build them into the city’s safety infrastructure as critical assets that must be deployed as reliably, and sometimes as rapidly, as law enforcement.
In doing so, they reflect a broader understanding of safety that more closely aligns with what residents have been seeking for decades. In Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, James Forman Jr. writes about how Black communities asking for both better protection from law enforcement and better social services and neighborhood investment over the course of the last half century have been given more (although rarely better) policing, but almost nothing in the way of services and investment. Building dedicated community safety agencies that are focused on leveraging social services, prevention, and early intervention rather than enforcement can help cities take a step back in the right direction, and in a way that also better aligns with how communities are actually thinking about safety.
Politicians often wrongly assume that communities concerned about safety are solely focused on law enforcement as a solution. But both opinion polling and academic research make it clear that people also prioritize prevention and early intervention strategies, including housing, education, employment, and even the design of the built environment of the neighborhood as part of their understanding of the safety of a place. In this way, community safety agencies represent the culmination of a long-overdue effort to address these concerns as vigorously as efforts to address crime rates through enforcement.
Community safety interventions are designed to keep some of the most vulnerable people in our neighborhoods safe, to the benefit of all of us. For example, people living with serious mental illness are more vulnerable than the general population to a range of victimizations, including from police violence. Despite this, our safety infrastructure has largely treated them primarily as a source of potential danger and a problem for law enforcement to solve. In a community safety framework, a moment of mental health crisis is an opportunity to get that person the help they need from someone trained to provide it—and in a way that is most likely to lead to long-term care, reduce the likelihood of additional crises, and ultimately create a safer environment for a person in need of help.
None of this would matter if the evidence base for this work wasn’t strong—and growing. Evaluations of crisis response programs in several cities indicate they reduce arrests, crime reports, and response times while increasing connections to immediate and follow-up services. One multisite study found the likelihood of arrest was 42.5 percent lower in the year following contact with a mobile crisis team. Countless evaluations of community violence intervention programs across the nation have shown impact. A recent study of Richmond, California’s Peacemaker Fellowship found sustained reductions in firearm violence over the course of 14 years.
The community safety field still faces several barriers to achieving its full potential. For one, the field’s interventions are only effective as long as services remain available. Community safety work is already beginning to expose the insufficiency of our decades-long underfunding of the social safety net—especially in housing and behavioral health. Policymakers have always been willing to find the money necessary to jail and imprison as many people as the police were willing to arrest. But they haven’t always been willing to find the money necessary to house and treat those who need it. That will have to change. Governments will need to figure out how to develop and deliver services at a scale commensurate with problems that have been papered over by overreliance on jails, which have become the nation’s de facto treatment facilities for mental illness. As Moki Macias, the director of Atlanta’s Policing Alternatives and Diversion once asked me, how effective would we think the police were if they didn’t have a jail to take people to?
Community safety agencies have emerged primarily (though not at all exclusively) within city governments, raising real questions about how to develop complementary roles for federal, county, and state governments in advancing the field. This is especially the case because many of the behavioral health interventions critical to effective community safety reside in county departments. Bridging the gap and figuring out resource allocation between these county-based services and public safety–oriented teams operating out of cities will be critical for long-term success. State governments will need to begin developing standards for program operations, workforce development, and protocols for partnering with other governmental entities like 911 call centers.
Perhaps most important, federal and state governments will need to develop reliable funding streams for needed community safety services, as well as operations. Current federal streams like Medicaid and Department of Housing and Urban Development housing vouchers can provide some help to budget-strapped localities, but neither program was designed with community safety in mind. Reforms will be needed to ensure these resources can be reliably used by community safety agencies. The federal government may also need to develop dedicated grants for community safety agencies, much like it does for police through the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Community Oriented Policing Services Office.
If these early successes are any indication, the field of community safety has the potential to fundamentally redefine and expand the way cities address safety concerns and improve the quality of life for everyone—including an unburdened police force. Policymakers, researchers, philanthropic organizations, and community members all have a role to play in ensuring the field continues to grow. The reward for this focus could be that, for the first time, local governments could have infrastructure specifically designed to build safety through prevention and early intervention—not just law enforcement and incarceration.
