Funded in part by the U.S. Department of Justice, VIPS pairs interested applicants with their local police stations, who “hire” them for help on evenings and weekends. Tasks can vary, but volunteers often assist officers with tasks like gathering data and vacation-home monitoring, as well as with staffing desks and kiosks.
Glenn Lasater, 71, volunteers twice a week with the Traffic Investigations Unit of the Denver Police Department. “I provide direct support to the detectives in handling their cases,” Lasater says. “I handle calls, and go out on accident scenes, and that takes that off the back of the detectives.”
Support from people like Lasater can be critical in cities and towns that desperately need it: According to the National Police Support Fund, some local police departments nationwide are losing funding, meaning that support from volunteers may ultimately prove mission critical.
To learn more about Lasater and VIPS, watch the video above.
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The GovTech Apps Changing the Way We Live
You don’t have to cast too wide a net to find people willing to criticize government officials as out of reach, out of touch or simply not doing enough to help propel communities forward. While those criticisms are subjective, of course, technology now offers an objective way for local leaders to better understand what’s working for their constituents and what isn’t.
Whether you’re a city official who wants to enhance your understanding of a specific community around you, or you’re a citizen looking to vent about impossibly long lines at the DMV to those in a position to do something about it, we’ve rounded up four apps that local governments are using to gauge how to best fix their cities.
THE APP THAT POLICES THE POLICE
It’s common practice for police departments to keep tabs on what’s happening in a neighborhood, such as the number of assaults, robberies and thefts. But there hasn’t been much traction in measuring more abstract problems, like how a community feels about their local officers.
Until now, beat cops have been the eyes and ears of a community, and major cities like Philadelphia and New York dispatch police to patrol on foot and talk with local residents in a protocol known as community policing. But how does one measure its efficacy?
Enter Elucd, a Brooklyn-based startup that compiles data on how residents view local law enforcement. The company reaches hundreds of thousands of people each month via location-targeted smartphone popup ads — including on perennially popular apps like CandyCrush and Instagram — that link to short surveys. So far, Elucd has announced partnerships with four police departments, including Los Angeles, Chicago and Grand Rapids, Michigan.
In New York City — home of the country’s largest police department and Elucd’s first client — precincts have implemented the company’s data-driven “sentiment meter,” which compiles users’ responses into a “trust score” and provides rankings on how safe they feel in their neighborhoods. Commanding officers then use that feedback to determine how to improve community engagement with neighborhoods where scores have gone down or remain low.
THE APP THAT ISSUES REPORT CARDS FOR CITY SERVICES
Had a really annoying time at the DMV? Disappointed by the state of your local park? Tell the government about it! In Washington, D.C., a city initiative has been letting residents do just that since 2012.
The website Grade.DC.gov is powered by software meant to analyze customer sentiment toward the hospitality industry, but local leaders in the nation’s capital have been tapping it to generate feedback on government services instead. On the site, users can grade their interactions and experiences with more than a dozen public agencies, including the departments of education, transportation and health, and submit comments; think of it as the Yelp of social services. The platform also culls publicly posted comments from sites like Twitter and Facebook and uses those to inform the letter grades.
The results have been mostly positive, and any bad grades that are initially recorded tend to improve almost immediately. For example, the District Department of Transportation received an initial F grade in November 2017; one month later, the agency was boasting an A-minus, putting it near the top of its class.
But whereas former Mayor Vincent C. Gray, who piloted the customer-service initiative, had viewed those grade bumps as incredible achievements, they also brought into question how measurements were actually done. For example, the Department of Transportation still has a B-plus rating as of June 2018, despite public sentiment showing quite the opposite.
Still, the platform continues to be a powerful way for people to voice their opinions on how their government serves them. Last month alone, Grade.DC.gov saw more than 4,000 people submit reviews.
THE APP THAT ENCOURAGES CITIES TALK TO EACH OTHER
As the old adage goes: People can find more strength in their similarities than in their differences.
Last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago began pairing urban areas with their sister cities through its Peer City Identification Tool, which was designed to help troubleshoot local issues based on what’s working in other cities of similar demographics.
By gathering data on close to 1,000 cities and townships across the nation, local government leaders in places from Anchorage, Alaska, to Montclair, New Jersey, can peruse data on a range of issues. By examining their city’s labor market conditions or economic outlook against those of comparable cities, officials are better able to discern solutions that have demonstrated impact elsewhere.
For example, let’s say your smallish town has an affordability gap. You could see where there’s another town of roughly the same size with similar industries and population demographics, but with plenty of inexpensive housing options, to try and figure out if what worked to close the gap in that city can be replicated in yours.
In Rockford, Illinois, city officials used the data from the tool to map out its Transform Rockford initiative, which aims to build a more inclusive and equitable city by 2025.
“For a community our size, having access to the data the Chicago Fed has — there would have been no way we could have done that by ourselves,” Jake Wilson, Transform Rockford’s program manager, told NextCity.
THE APP THAT LETS YOU REVIEW RESTAURANTS — AND PRISONS
Many people turn to the giant of online user reviews, Yelp, to pontificate on everything from the bathroom condition of a local dive bar to the best brunch for your money on Sundays.
And now, prisons and jails are increasingly getting the Yelp treatment.
“I reviewed jail on Yelp because I couldn’t afford a therapist,” one user reported. Others have left comments on how to score the best meals from a prison’s kitchen staff; the dress-code requirements for prison visitors; and the interior design of the facility (“The windows were too small and the view sucked,” according to one disappointed former inmate).
It’s unclear if prison administrators actually act on the reviews, but according to a report by The Marshall Project, just letting people know what to expect before their time in the slammer is helpful in its own right.
Athena Kolbe, a social worker in Detroit, told the publication that she wanted people to “be prepared for [prison] mentally when you go into it, [and] when you come out of it, know that all that disrespect you experienced, everybody else is also experiencing that. It’s not just you.”
5 Policies That States Are Using to Curb Gun Violence, With Encouraging Results
On average, nearly 34,000 people are killed in the U.S. each year due to gun homicide, suicide or accidents, with another 81,000 who are shot but survive. But zeroing in on the causes of gun violence, in order to thwart them, is no easy task. It’s not just about a glut of available firearms or how easy it is to obtain one. As the Center for American Progress pointed out in its 2016 Progress Index, there is a connected web of social and economic issues that can impact rates of violence in a community — persistent poverty and a lack of employment, to name a few.
That’s led several communities to take novel approaches to curb the bloodshed, either by expanding existing federal law or implementing new ideas altogether. Below, five policies put in place by cities and states around the country whose smart governance on guns is changing the landscape for the better.
THE POLICY: A BETTER BACKGROUND CHECK
Federal law already requires licensed firearms dealers to perform criminal background checks on prospective buyers. But unlicensed private sellers — who are responsible for about 40 percent of all gun sales in “no questions asked” transactions — are not legally bound to follow the same rules.
Since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., six states (Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Oregon and Washington) have successfully closed this gap by passing and implementing these so-called universal background checks on every sale and transfer within their borders (including those purchased at gun shows and online) for all classes of firearms, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Nevada could soon be the seventh, but the state is currently undergoing a procedural dispute over the implementation of the measure.
THE POLICY: DENYING GUNS TO DOMESTIC ABUSERS
Research has repeatedly shown a lethal link between domestic violence and gun violence in the U.S. In 2011, nearly two-thirds of women who were murdered were shot and killed by their intimate partners. “It’s a huge epidemic,” says Hannah Shearer, staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Under federal law, people convicted of a felony or domestic abuse cannot buy or own a gun. But there are some limitations to that measure, like defining a domestic abuser only as a spouse. To protect more women, some states, including six in 2017 alone, have strengthened federal law by expanding that definition to also encompass former dating partners.
THE POLICY: LICENSING AT THE LOCAL LEVEL
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives requires a federal license for those in the business of selling guns. But the law doesn’t mandate that dealers perform background checks on their employees, says Avery Gardiner, co-president at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “They also don’t train them to recognize signs of illegal gun trafficking, nor is a gun store even required to lock up its inventory at night,” she says.
In response, 15 states, along with Washington, D.C., have made state-issued licenses mandatory for gun dealers. Additionally, six states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, Virginia and Washington — now require gun stores to do background checks on employees.
THE POLICY: A FOCUS ON INNER CITIES
“Sometimes gun deaths in cities that are ethnically diverse get overlooked,” Shearer says, adding that instead, there’s a tendency to focus on mass shootings and rare events. But the reality is that deaths by guns happen every day across the country.
The Law Center published a report last year on promising approaches being implemented nationwide to reduce urban gun violence. One such city that’s seen success: Richmond, Calif.
In 2007, the Bay Area city was considered one of the country’s most dangerous. So officials there enacted intervention programs and policy reforms in response. They created a new agency, the Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS), to treat violence as a communicable disease and connected vulnerable residents to social services. As ONS’s director DeVone Boggan, a 2015 NationSwell AllStar, described the agency’s mission: “You’ve got to understand the nature of [violence], and you’ve got to understand the drivers of it” in order to combat it.
The results were impressive, with homicides in Richmond dipping by 2010. Three years later the city saw its murder rate fall from more than 40 homicides a year to 16, its lowest number in more than three decades.
THE POLICY: DETERMINING WHO’S TOO DANGEROUS TO HAVE A GUN
A measure designed to keep guns away from people perceived at risk of harming themselves or others allows police, and sometimes family members, to ask the courts to intervene. Provided with enough evidence, a judge might temporarily deny a person’s access to guns if he or she is deemed to be a significant danger.
Connecticut was the first state to enact a version of this order in 1999, followed later by Indiana, California and Washington State. Others, including Oregon, are considering adopting similar bills. In 2016, researchers from Duke University led a study that found a measurable reduction in Connecticut’s suicide rate as a result of its risk-warrant policy.
“These laws have a huge potential for saving lives,” Shearer says, “because family members often notice warning signs that somebody is suicidal or homicidal before something really bad happens.”
Homepage photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.
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To Reduce Drug Abuse, These Members of the Criminal Justice Community Advocate for Legalization, Not Criminalization
A former undercover narc who busted drug dealers in Baltimore, Maj. Neill Franklin is an unlikely advocate for loosening America’s drug laws. Even more unexpected is the fact that he probably holds the most liberal views of all those lobbying Congress for reform. But Franklin, more than anyone, also has the credentials to back up his talking points. He says his 23 years with the Maryland State Police Department — spent confronting addicts, hauling in dealers, training cops to search and seize narcotics — convinced him that the War on Drugs has failed. He believes substance abuse must be treated as a public health issue, not a law enforcement operation.
“In simple terms, the War on Drugs is the criminalization of people who use and sell drugs,” says Franklin, now the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an educational nonprofit that has swelled to 160,000 members since its founding. “It is the policy we have chosen in managing this use of drugs which has become more problematic than drug use itself.”
Franklin got a first-hand look as one of the war’s foot soldiers trying to stop the flow of marijuana and heroin into Baltimore. “Initially, I thought they deserved [jail time],” Franklin says. “We used the lingo: We called them dirt-balls, anything you can think of — junkies, degenerates.” Franklin saw young kids, barely 10 years old, acting as lookouts for crews involved in the drug trade, and he saw bodies of rival gang members, killed in shootouts and drive-bys. Upset, he initially responded to the violence with crackdowns. After each arrest, “all we did was create job openings that others fought for,” he soon realized.
He lost all hope in waging a punitive battle against narcotics in 2000, when his good friend Ed Toatley, a 37-year-old trooper with the Maryland State Police Department, was killed in an undercover drug buy. Sitting in an SUV, Toatley handed a 23-year-old dealer $3,000 in cash. Instead of delivering the drugs, the dealer shot the decorated officer in the head. Investigators say Toatley’s cover wasn’t blown; the dealer just planned to rip off his competitor.
Research, combined with some heavy thinking, convinced him to alter his views. Able to spout off statistics like he’s reading them from a book, Franklin points out that since the War on Drugs began, more than 39 million have been arrested for nonviolent drug offenses — many of them black and Hispanic — quadrupling the prison population and costing us a trillion-and-a-half dollars in criminal justice-related costs (cops, courts, prison cells). Community relations with police throughout the country are strained, Franklin speculates, because of negative interactions from drug searches and arrests. The drugs themselves, he adds, are cheaper, more available and stronger than four decades ago. To him, that appears to be a losing strategy.
Franklin, who is African-American, didn’t immediately know what to do with his change of heart. He discovered LEAP’s website in 2003, a couple years after it developed out of a conversation between two cops. One was Jack Cole, a retired detective with the New Jersey State Police who spent 14 of his 26-year career arresting users. (He came to believe that serving time turned these individuals into criminals.) The other was Peter Christ, a retired police captain from upstate New York who took a libertarian slant on the issue: thinking that people should have the freedom to choose what substances they wanted to use. Hearing from other officers who shared their views, they created LEAP and expanded its ranks to include representatives from every aspect of law enforcement that deals with drugs — cops, sheriff deputies, DEA and FBI agents, prosecutors, judges, prison wardens and probation officers — to share a unified message with voters. Franklin signed up in 2008.
Converted, Franklin advocates full legalization of drugs (from marijuana to heroin). This seems to mark a major shift from his work as a cop, where he would make an arrest for even a trace amount of an illegal substance. But in a way, Franklin’s position hasn’t changed that much. He doesn’t want it to be a free-for-all for hard drugs (which is pretty much what we have now, he believes), but he thinks they should be regulated so that their use can be monitored. That oversight reduces the likelihood of an overdose and gives professionals an opening to provide education and possibly, medical treatment for addiction. In essence, it’s the same as existing regulations for alcohol and cigarettes.
Franklin doesn’t expect an overnight shift in policy, but he does hope that the legalization of marijuana in some states will be an impetus for further change. “The linchpin is marijuana,” he says. “I think if we could take one drug — and marijuana is good because it’s so prevalent — and change the policy to legalize it, regulate and control it, people will see a number of things. Number one: they see, wow, the sky didn’t fall,” he says.
Nor does he believe there will be an uptick in abuse of pot or a rise in fatal car accidents in the four states and in the District of Columbia where marijuana is legal for recreational use; instead, he predicts, fewer costs in law enforcement resources in both time and tax dollars, more sales tax revenue, a boon for sluggish job markets, a decrease in alcohol abuse and a drop in painkiller overdoses. If he’s right, and legalization in Colorado, Washington and other early adopters is a success, Franklin says it will be much easier to broach the more radical topics of legalization, such as treatment centers where a person could receive methadone or heroin, changes in the law to require all cops to carry naloxone (which reverses opioid poisoning) and giving amnesty to good samaritans who report ODs.
These are far more radical proposals than most you’ll hear on Capitol Hill. Several groups — National Organizational for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), Americans for Safe Access, the Marijuana Policy Project and Veterans for Medical Cannabis Access — focus explicitly on legalizing marijuana (not other illegal substances), sometimes only for medical purposes. Even the Drug Policy Alliance, perhaps the highest-profile advocacy group for reform, has limited its message to legalizing marijuana and a select group of psychedelics like MDMA (commonly known as Ecstasy or Molly), LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. The group is pushing to pilot supervised injection facilities in San Francisco and New York, but it largely pushes off which other drugs should be legalized as an unsolved question, according to a platform on the group’s website.
Although it’s become the face of some legalization campaigns, LEAP primarily operates as “a speakers bureau,” Franklin says. At first, they took their message to anyone that would listen: Rotary and Kiwanis clubs, college campuses. Today, they win audiences in the halls of Congress. Their persuasive power comes from their knowledge of the black market, similar to the way that Vietnam Veterans Against the War once spun their firsthand experience into a pacifist message. Notably, this allows LEAP to go toe-to-toe with other law enforcement groups, even as it delivers a stronger message than most drug advocacy groups, who are fearful of using the “L-word.” “We have always used the word [legalization]. We tend to be a few steps ahead of everyone else. We can do that. We’re cops, we’re judges. We can push the envelope.”
Still, the work is a constant uphill battle. Retired captains, for instance, are willing to be vocal, but it’s tough for LEAP to recruit active-duty cops as speakers. “Many who have signed on as members — not speakers — do it covertly because they face retribution,” Franklin says, listing several highly publicized examples of firings because those individuals shared LEAP’s views. One arose at the Mexican-American border in Deming, N.M., where a young Border Patrol agent, Bryan Gonzalez, expressed his frustration with how pot’s criminalization supported violent cartels across the fence to another agent. He mentioned LEAP and was soon fired for holding “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and espirit de corps.” Another, Joe Miller, was removed from his position as a probation officer in Mohave County in Arizona after signing a LEAP petition supporting California’s failed ballot measure to legalize weed in 2010. (Both went to court to appeal their cases.)
For too many years, police chiefs pressured their officers to handcuff and lock up nonviolent drug offenders; now, Franklin believes that education will eventually prompt those same departments into rethinking their response — prioritizing compassion and care over incarceration.
LEAP’s education work prompts Franklin to recall the lesson learned a century ago when this country placed a federal ban on alcohol. To overturn the 18th Amendment, reformers battled state-by-state until the movement could not be ignored. In a political process that took nearly 14 years, the law was repealed, taking back control from the Mob’s underground smugglers and instating strict government regulations on liquor. Now that several states have taken the first steps toward legalization, Franklin figures that another big change in drug policy will occur before 2026.
He can’t wait.
Homepage photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
Drug-Addicted Veterans Find Compassion in a Surprising Place
It goes without saying that prescription drug abuse is a growing problem in this country. A whopping 52 million Americans over the age of 12 have used prescription drugs non-medically, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. In some cases, former service members among those addicted. They return home from war injured and are prescribed powerful painkillers; some struggle to wean themselves off the drugs and end up in trouble with the law.
Judge Robert T. Russell Jr. of the City Court in Buffalo, New York thinks vets in this situation deserve special consideration. Which is why, back in 2008, he established a special veterans’ treatment court and joined the nonprofit Veterans Healing Initiative.
There are now 131 courts for veterans suffering from drug addiction across the country like the one Judge Russell started. “It’s a vicious irony, as the soldier who served his country honorably is hooked on drugs by a military doctor and then the system tosses them aside,” Judge Craig Trebilcock, a colonel in the Army reserves who serves at the York County court, told Michael Smerconish of the Olean Times Herald.
One soldier the court helped is 29-year-old Justin Slesser. Nine years ago, he served in Iraq and was twice-injured due to falls from vehicles during his time overseas. After returning home, the Percocet he was prescribed for his pain wasn’t helping, so the Veterans Affairs doctors supplemented it with OxyContin. Like many others, Slesser became addicted to the drugs and when the doctors cut off his supplies, he started using heroin.
Slesser committed various crimes and wound up in the court of Judge Trebilcock, who sentenced him to a veterans treatment program. With its assistance, Slesser consolidated and addressed his legal troubles, got clean, and received treatment for his PTSD. “Without the veterans court, I’d probably be dead,” Slesser, who graduated from the treatment program two months ago, told Smerconish. He now works for a distribution company, which knows about his past and is cooperating with his treatment needs.
Judge Trebilcock said that Slesser “is highly intelligent, eloquent, was an outstanding sergeant in Iraq, and became an incredible addict who was essentially using his organizational skills learned in the Army to coordinate stealing, using drugs in a four- to five-county area with a number of other people. It took over a year, but we got him off the heroin, and he is once again highly successful.”
According to Justice for Vets, one in six soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan suffers from substance abuse, but with savvy members of the judiciary like Judge Trebilcock, more of them can make a clean start.
MORE: This Florida Jail is Giving Veterans a Second Chance