Mayor's Update: 2017 Budget Focus: Community Partnerships for Public Safety

Via a November 7 e-newsletter from the office of Mayor Hodges:

2017 Budget Focus: Community Partnerships for Public Safety

Public safety — being safe on the streets, at work, in your home, anywhere and everywhere you go — is the most important thing that I work on as Mayor. It’s the most important thing that all of us — police officers, firefighters, police chief, fire chief, city attorney, licensing, City Council, and I — work on at the City of Minneapolis. And all of us know that in the 21st century, policing alone, as necessary as it is, is not sufficient: in the 21st century, the community must be involved as full partners if every person in every neighborhood is to be, and feel, safe.

For years, I have heard from community members that they want to partner with the City and with our Police Department in keeping their neighborhoods safe on the ground. This is why I invest nearly $1 million in several community-based strategies to enhance public safety in the City of Minneapolis’ 2017 budget that I proposed earlier this year.

These are the highlights of those strategies:

• I have funded $200,000 for a mental-health co-responders pilot program. Trained mental-health professionals will be paired with three highly-trained police officers to respond with sensitivity, understanding, and compassion to public-safety calls where someone may be experiencing a mental-health crisis. This is the public-safety initiative that community members have most often asked me for.
• In addition, I have funded $290,000 for a strategy called Group Violence Intervention. It teams community, law enforcement, educational and social services to offer support and resources to the most violent offenders who desire to leave violence behind, and relentlessly holds accountable those who do not. This is a violence-reduction strategy that has been put to use successfully in other cities. We have already received a federal grant of $250,000 to implement it this year, and I propose adding more resources in 2017 to expand it next year.
• I have also funded $500,000 for collaborative, community-driven, public-safety strategies in two locations with high levels of youth violence: the West Broadway Corridor and the neighborhood in and surrounding Little Earth. We will provide technical and financial resources for residents and business owners of these areas, and the community-based organizations that serve them, to decide for themselves what on-the-ground, downstream, public-safety interventions will best improve public safety there. I know of no other city that is providing resources directly to community members to design and implement the strategies that they think will keep them safe.

I am working with the City Council to pass these investments, and many more that I have proposed for 2017 to enhance public safety, by December of this year. Fully 70 percent of the new, ongoing investments that I propose in the 2017 budget are dedicated to public safety. I have made many more investments in public safety and public trust that I will tell you more about soon.

These public-safety investments join others that I propose for 2017 in running the city well and in managing the great growth that we are seeing all around our city. As I said in August when I proposed the 2017 budget, rising to the imperatives of good government, growth, and public safety is increasingly one and the same thing in our 21st-century city. To me, innovative, community-based, public-safety strategies are a terrific example of community and government working together as partners not only to keep people safe, but to manage our growth and run our city well for the benefit of all of us.

Sincerely,
 
Mayor Betsy Hodges