The Greensboro City Council virtual work session on Thursday, July 15 at 2 p.m. is going to focus mainly on public safety judging from the agenda attachments.
The agenda item is “Police Calls for Service Cohort Review/Report” and that report to be reviewed is titled “Call for Service Research: Understanding Alternative Responses in Greensboro, NC.”
One of the first items is a report on focus groups conducted with Greensboro Police Department (GPD) officers of varying ranks and levels.
The “Key Takeaways” from those focus groups are:
“Officers feel that they are the least well equipped to respond to mental health or crisis related calls”
“In general, officers do not see mental health-related CFS [calls for service] as calls that should be responded to solely by the police.”
“Officers are interested in having a law enforcement supervisor or retired officer in the dispatch role to determine which calls require a law enforcement response.”
“Officers feel that the civil issues they respond to (truancy, child-parent disputes, neighbor disputes) impede them from their actual duty of deterring crime and protecting Greensboro citizens.”
The “Conclusions & Recommendations” are:
“Prioritize updating resource lists of mental health and other services for supporting community members in crisis”
“Educate community members about the role of law enforcement, with an emphasis on appropriate use of 911”
“Consider filling dispatch roles with individuals who have policing experience”
“Provide more frequent and comprehensive in-person training on responding to mental health and crisis calls”
“Develop and implement a protocol for providing officers with historical and contextual information about a caller before they arrive on the scene”
“Evaluate current resources and in-service trainings for officers”
“Solicit more input from early career offices on the training and support needed to respond effectively to mental health and crisis calls”
“Schedule City Council member ride-alongs with GPD officers”
That last recommendation scheduling ride-alongs for city councilmembers is something that City Councilmember Marikay Abuzuaiter who regularly makes ride-alongs has been pushing for at nearly every meeting where the police department has been discussed.
The report appears to be a comprehensive study of ways to allow Greensboro police officers to spend more of their time dealing with law enforcement issues and less time dealing with issues that could better be handled by social workers or mental health counselors.
The report also notes that some people make an inordinate number of calls to 911 for matters that are not law enforcement issues and makes recommendations on how to better handle these constant calls for service from a few individuals.
The virtual work session at 2 p.m. Thursday, July 15 can be viewed here: https://greensboro.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx .
Absolutely the right conversations to be having. Defunding the police is an awful way for the Left to sell the idea that police actually should not be handling the full range of calls they handle today. Policy actually need MORE support from mental health, family services, and social services so they can focus on more important calls. I also support rewarding officers with strong community feedback with extra compensation.
Good on Greensboro for taking this first step.
Don’t forget that the city is condemning some of Roy Carroll’s company’s properties. Why did you include that in this story, John?
Juan where did you come from. DC maybe
To Miller’s response:We can vote out the very people who are using our taxes unwisely.If all voting age person would read up on the history of all the people that represent us,they will see the same pattern over and over again.Spend,Spend and more spending.That’s all the Dems know to do.We had tried this method of voting for too long.Let’s try Republicans for a change .We saw what would happen when we had a group of Republicans in charge of commissioners for 8 years .We had smart people that knew about budgeting.NO TAX INCREASES.Why can’t we go back to that.That is All boards in the city and county.City council is the first to go.Democrats are all so glad to throw your money away to any sob story that comes alon,such as THE downtown Museum that is nothing but a place to rake your money.Then there is no accountability from them.Do you miss TRUMP YET?????
Wasn’t aware Trump had say in our local budgets. But to be clear, Trump ran up the deficit by over 2.5 trillion dollars to fund tax cuts but was too lazy to find off sets in spending for even a single dollar. And of course the tax cuts for middle and low income expire while the tax cuts for the corps and wealthy don’t.
Doesn’t justify liberal spending but don’t put Trump (the bankrupter of casinos) out as a fiscal conservative. He isn’t really a conservative. He is just what ever makes people clap for him…which requires a great deal of lying on his part.
So no, I don’t miss Trump at all.
The tax revenues increased to record highs with the cuts. How is that possible? Lower taxes increase economic growth, which increases the tax base, which increases federal tax collections paid. There’s your offset.
How about the six trillion borrowed for Covid spending in one year, with your buddies asking for six trillion more?
If there were enough officers on the street, empowered to enforce the law, there wouldn’t be much of a need to have this discussion.
No matter how much we give (or extorted from us) the govt, they squander every cent, and weasel even more on the cuff. This is not an opinion, it is fact. So any suggestions on how we can stop forking over all our hard-earned cash?
Did you even read the story? This analysis is AT THE REQUEST OF OFFICERS? They don’t want more police, they want to stop responding to mental health and social services calls. Like many of the ‘defund the police’ programs are promoting except here I hope they see it as a means to add services and leave police fund level versus an off set.
They don’t want the dozens of vacancies in the Greensboro Police Department to be filled? Wow, that IS news to me!