John, After over a year in the making, the Law Enforcement Action Partnership is excited to announce the release of a detailed report showing how cities across the country can dispatch community responders to low-risk 9-1-1 calls to reduce the burden on police and improve police-community relations. The report titled, “Dispatching Community Responders to 911 Calls,” is a collaborative effort between the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, the Center for American Progress, and the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law. The report identifies and compares three principal models for community responder dispatch gleaned from over a year of interviews with existing community responder programs and their 9-1-1 call centers. It answers frequently asked questions, and it shares lessons learned from cities who have been able to successfully dispatch community responders to a large volume of calls. Co-author of the report, LEAP Program Director, Amos Irwin, explains, "Since I started working with LEAP ten years ago, speakers have often stressed to me that police officers are forced to wear too many hats, including enforcing drug laws, which turns people against the police. They also pointed out that even as most departments are understaffed, police spend most of their time responding to 9-1-1 calls. If a call isn't a fire or medical emergency, the dispatcher sends it to the police by default. Together we started looking at 9-1-1 call data and saw that most police calls for service were for low-risk issues: noise complaints, verbal disputes between family members, neighbors, and strangers, and welfare checks, so we began exploring how individual cities could reduce the burden on police and remove them from situations where they aren't needed. "We learned that some cities employ unarmed, trained teams of 'community responders' to handle these calls in place of police. These teams can reduce overreliance on police and the criminal justice system, reduce negative interactions with police, and connect people to services to address any issues at their root. "Since 2020, we have been working with individual cities to help them establish locally-tailored community responder programs, such as Dayton, Ohio's Mediation Response Unit. Each time we started working with a new city, they asked how their 9-1-1 call center could route the call to community responders. Finally, we decided to write a report for everyone to demystify the process of dispatching community responder teams." As we continue our mission, your support is more crucial than ever. Your contributions enable us to participate in such influential projects and push forward meaningful change in policing. Every donation, big or small, fuels our advocacy, research, and educational efforts. Thank you for your continued support and belief in our mission. In solidarity, |
