public safety reform

It’d be easy to miss the new, care-based first responder branch — one blooming from the rough soil of the 2020 protests and the pandemic. Born, by and large, in efforts to defund the police, these first responder systems paradoxically deepened during the political backlash because, by removing non-criminal crisis calls, police are freed up for criminal matters. These teams are distinguished through strategies to calm a person in crisis, or at least make sure nothing worse occurs, as too often happens when police are involved.

Portland Street Response

Since 2018, this work has been my passion. It was during that time that I was running a street newspaper in Portland, Oregon, which was an extraordinary education both through the stories of people on the streets and also, my own navigation of street crises for which there was no good solution. I wrote over 30 columns both narrating these experiences and also, advocating for a new responder system. Our newspaper published a special issue on March 15, 2019 that proposed Portland Street Response, led by Emily Green’s reporting. In my nonfiction book, Unwanted Persons, I explore these years in the first section.

As the city began to build this I pivoted to working with unhoused people to engage in research on what the new system needed to look like, producing a report with Portland State University Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative. I am particularly proud of how extensively we worked to not only bring the ideas of unhoused people into the plan, but that the research methods to make this happen were based on unhoused people leading the research. The report, Believe our Stories and Listen, became the basis for Portland Street Response.

I have given numerous talks on Portland Street Response to local media and civic groups as well as national groups such as a delegation of elected leaders through Local Progress; the Mental Health & Law National Conference, and, internationally, the summit for the International Networks of Street Papers in Liverpool, UK.

National

Now I am writing a book on the national movement to build an alternative to police in the form of a new first responders system, and I am visiting leading systems, including Albuquerque’s Community Safety Division and in May, Durham, North Carolina’s HEART responders and Atlanta, Georgia’s PAD. I post writing through unwantedpersons.substack.com, publishing articles in the Nation and Orion Magazine. All told, I’ve been studying this issue closely for six years and understand the subtleties and challenges while maintaining a holistic, long-term view.

I have shadowed programs in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Durham, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; Dayton, Ohio; Fairbanks, Alaska; Seattle, Washington; and Rochester, New York, conducting over 50 interviews and growing.