Mayor Arreguin Unveils Blueprint for Safety and Reform with Elected Leaders from Around the Country
Atlanta, GA – Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín, already on the forefront of transforming public safety institutions to enhance safety, fight police violence and racial inequities, joined elected leaders from around the country today to unveil a blueprint for officials to make transformative change in their own communities.
The document, All Safe: Transforming Public Safety, was released at People For the American Way’s Big Ideas Summit in Atlanta, Georgia. It features a range of public safety reform options while also highlighting the Ithaca Public Safety Model, which shares similarities with the proposals introduced by Mayor Arreguín and recently approved by the Berkeley City Council. The timing of the report is critical, as leaders face twin crises of police violence and residents’ concern about rising crime. Numerous reports on California’s recent elections featured analysis suggesting that the public opposes police reform, despite the fact that many progressives and reformists won district attorney and sheriff seats throughout the state.
“Special interests and partisans seeking to sow division in advance of the midterms have leaned into fear mongering to suggest that reform comes at the price of our safety,” said Mayor Arreguín. “As someone who has read the research, the reality is reforming our policing institutions enhances safety for our community and police officers alike, all while drastically reducing wasteful taxpayer spending. In Berkeley, we are modernizing our traditional police force with a Public Safety Department staffed by unarmed and armed responders. A majority of 911 calls do not require an armed response. Prioritizing police on 911 calls involving violence increases response times and ensures we’re using effective and less costly personnel to respond to the other types of calls for service. That, in turn, reduces over policing that’s disproportionately experienced in communities of color.”
“We are very proud to unveil All Safe: Transforming Public Safety as a guide for local communities to take solutions to our public safety crisis into their own hands,” said Ben Jealous, president of People For the American Way. “Let’s face it: the federal government has failed to act on meaningful public safety legislation. Meanwhile Black and brown people are dying at the hands of police officers. This has to stop. We can seed true, nationwide change by putting the right tools into the hands of communities now and building on their success, to create an unstoppable movement for public safety transformation.”
“It’s time for a fresh approach to the delivery of public safety in this country, because the hard truth is that what we have been doing hasn’t worked,” said Dr. Niaz Kasravi, founder and director of Los Angeles’s Avalan Institute and editor in chief of All Safe. “We have some of the most highly armed police forces and the greatest rates of incarceration in the world. If those strategies worked, we should be the safest nation in the world. But we all know that’s not the case. It’s time to transform our approach, and this report offers a range of options for communities to do that – and to improve and save lives, starting now.”
Local governments can reduce police violence and improve public safety overall by taking steps in four key areas, according to All Safe: Transforming Public Safety:
· Restructuring public safety, by eliminating over-reliance on armed response to address a range of public safety issues
· Holding officers who engage in misconduct accountable, by ensuring that unfit officers can be identified and disciplined
· Removing officers who are found unfit for duty, by establishing reliable processes to permanently remove unfit officers
· Recruiting better and more fit officers, by changing recruitment material to focus on positive traits, and enhancing pre-employment screening
All Safe: Transforming Public Safety was timed for release at People For the American Way’s Big Ideas Summit in Atlanta this week. The event brings together elected officials, faith leaders, grassroots activists and civil rights leaders from across the country. Among them are mayors and other local officials who will be empowered to take the recommendations in All Safe back to their own communities for implementation.
Key Facts and Statistics from All Safe: Transforming Public Safety:
Police violence disproportionately affects communities of color. In 2021, while Black people accounted for only 13 percent of the US population, 28 percent of people killed by the police were Black. Another 19 percent were Latinx.
Of the estimated 240 million calls made to 911 each year, studies have found that 90 percent of calls involve situations that are nonviolent before police are called.
Unions impose barriers to removing officers accused of misconduct. At the state level, unions have passed police officer “bills of rights,” which provide extensive protections for officers not afforded to other individuals in similar situations.
Over policing is encouraged by the emphasis on meeting quotas in evaluating officer performance.
Police recruitment strategies attract aggressive individuals. A comprehensive study analyzing the recruiting materials used by the 200 largest police departments in the United States found that: 42.7% contained some display of drawn firearms; 34% depicted military-style weapons; 32% depicted officers in tactical vests; 27.7% depicted paramilitary policing units.