An alert database in Fishers, Ind., provides police officers, firefighters and EMTs personal information, like whether there’s an elderly citizen who’s homebound or a child with autism who is upset by the sound of sirens, in advance of reporting to an emergency.
“As much information as we can gather prior to arrival, the better prepared we are for what situations may occur,” says Fishers Fire Department Captain John Mehling.
Through the Special Needs Data System, citizens voluntarily can provide first responders with specific information about disabilities or a medical situation, such as blindness or mobility issues. Dispatchers send details to the computers in emergency vehicles while they’re en route.
Mehling says that all personal information is protected: Only the responding personnel have access. And the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ensures data privacy and security for safeguarding medical information.
So far, a few hundred citizens have enrolled in the registry.
Still, some have mixed feelings about the database since it labels residents with certain conditions.
One downside could arise when a family moves and doesn’t update the information in the system to alert responders about the change, which would cause officials to prepare for a scenario that no longer exists at a certain location, says Denise Saxman, program director for the Alzheimer’s Association Greater Indiana Chapter.
“I can truly see the benefit to the families who are very worried about their loved ones, and I can see the benefit to the first responders,” says Saxman. “At least they seem to be coming at this from a, ‘Let’s make the best use of our time in an emergency situation with people who may be at more risk.’”
The idea developed out of a roundtable discussion held earlier this year in which the participants sought ways to make their community more accessible and inclusive and was implemented in March. A resident can choose to remove the information from the system at any time.
Other communities, including Bloomington, Ind., and the state of Illinois, have also implemented a similar database.
MORE: This Is What Community Oriented Policing Looks Like
Category: Making Government Work
Wave Goodbye to DMV Lines
If the existence of countless online survival guides is any indication, there are few tasks more dreaded than a visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Fortunately, in an attempt to modernize (and repair its reputation in the process), a handful of states are revamping the DMV for the better — by offering digital services to drivers.
“People want to access government the same way they access Amazon,” says Mary Lou Prevost, vice president of state and local government and education at CA Technologies, a software company with clients in government and financial industries. “There’s a huge push to move from in line to online.”
West Virginia is speeding driver’s license and vehicle registration renewal by installing three self-serve kiosks across the state, with more planned. According to the state’s DMV, citizens can complete the transaction to renew their license in just a few minutes (the actual ID will arrive via mail); a kiosk prints registration decals and cards on-demand.
In Irvine, Calif., a city about 50 miles south of Los Angeles, the state’s first DMV kiosk was installed at the local University of California in April this year. Since then, the department has added more booths in grocery stores in two other cities, Lancaster and Palmdale.
(The state’s forward progress stalled, however, with Gov. Jerry Brown vetoing a bill that would allow drivers to store an electronic license on their phone.)
MORE: Go Inside the Mission That’s Bringing the Federal Government Into the Digital Age
For the past year, Iowa has been piloting an electronic driver’s license and is expected to roll out a digital ID sometime next year, according to the Des Moines Register. State-sponsored apps that issue electronic driver’s licenses have been proposed in Delaware, New Jersey and Arizona.
But there’s more to bringing the DMV online than just providing a seamless service to drivers. Throughout the U.S., departments are slowed down by outdated software and computer systems in desperate need of an upgrade.
“We think about it as just our driver’s license, but you’ve got to think about vehicle registration, truck registration and health information. It’s a wealth of data they’re dealing with,” Prevost tells NationSwell.
Plus, switching to digital solutions can be problematic, as was the case in Connecticut, where wait times extended to seven hours during a software rollout. While the transition may be painful, says Prevost, “The net result of modernizing will be far better citizen engagement and a far better view of the government.”
Homepage photo courtesy of the California Department of Motor Vehicles.
Harsh Sentences for Drug Users Go Up in Smoke
Sure, everything’s bigger in Texas. Except, that is, jail sentences for casual stoners who get caught toking up.
Houston’s newly elected district attorney, Kim Ogg, is issuing the lightest sentence the statute allows for in cases for minor marijuana possession. Instead of being tossed behind bars, most pot smokers can pay $150 fine and take a four-hour-long class on decision-making. Plus, the incident is kept off their record.
Ogg, a Democrat, made the push for leniency the centerpiece of her 2016 campaign for district attorney. It was a bold gamble when running against a Republican incumbent in a red state known for being tough on crime, but Ogg managed to gain conservative votes by pledging to go after “violent criminals, burglars and white-collar thieves,” instead. She won by eight points.
Criminal justice reformers did not see Ogg’s win as new freedom to light up a joint, but as an electoral strategy that could offer a roadmap for changing drug policy in traditionally strict counties across the country. Theoretically, they don’t need to write new laws; they can vote out incumbents that read laws as mandates to incarcerate drug users.
The concept, of course, has its critics. Next door in Montgomery County, District Attorney Brett Ligon told the Houston Chronicle that Ogg was making Houston into a “sanctuary for dope smokers.”
Additionally, it’s unclear if any of the money typically spent misdemeanor marijuana prosecutions will be saved. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner referred to the program as “cost efficient,” but several officials say that taxpayers likely won’t see a dime. Instead, resources will be spent on more dangerous threats to public safety.
“Harris County has spent more than $200 million in the past decade on more than 100,000 cases of misdemeanor marijuana possession,” Ogg said. “The endeavor has had no tangible public safety benefit.” Rather, the marijuana crackdown “has deprived neighborhoods of officers’ time that could be spent patrolling communities, jail beds that could be used for violent criminals, crime lab resources needed for DNA testing and judicial court time that could be spent bringing serious criminals to justice.”
Research shows that lenient drug policies such as this can result in lower recidivism rates. In Houston, it’s too early to tell. A person can retake the class repeatedly, so long as they are eligible. But prosecutors can also label someone a “serial offender” and argue to a judge for a stricter punishment.
For now, the district attorney’s office is riding (ahem) high. Since the program launched on March 1, almost 900 people have avoided jail time and law enforcement is focusing its attention on break-ins and violence assaults instead.
MORE: To Reduce Drug Use, These Members of the Criminal Justice Community Advocate for Legalization, Not Criminalization
Homepage photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.
Day Jobs for Panhandlers
Coming up with a unique, innovative way to solve a problem is great, but sometimes borrowing an existing idea is just as good.
The city of Tulsa, Okla., is looking to earmark $25,000 to fund a program that will combat panhandling by offering cleanup jobs and social services to people on the streets. It got the idea from a neighbor to the west: Albuquerque, N.M.
“Certainly, we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. We are shamelessly stealing the idea,” says Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum, a republican who was elected last December.
Tulsa’s version is a carbon copy of the Albuquerque program — even taking its name, “There’s A Better Way.” That city’s initiative began in 2015 and allocated $50,000 from the annual budget to hire 10 to 12 day laborers twice a week. They were paid nine dollars an hour for their work and given access to social service workers who could help them find more permanent employment.
The program achieved such wide success that its funding has been increased by nearly 500 percent.
With just under 400,000 residents, Tulsa has a significant homeless population. In 2016, between 6,000 and 7,000 residents lived on the streets. That number, while small in comparison to homeless populations in cities such as New York and Los Angeles, is noticeable in medium-sized Tulsa.
The visibility of panhandlers is worrisome to those in Tulsa’s business districts, says Bynum, and city residents want change. After Bynum’s election, his social media accounts were flooded with a Washington Post article about Albuquerque’s initiative.
Prior to adopting the Better Way program, Tulsa had proposed limiting panhandling by requiring those on the streets to apply for a license. Failure to do so or panhandle in a prohibited area would result in a fine.
But Bynum says that punitive measures wouldn’t address the root of why people panhandle.
Officials in Dallas and Portland, Maine, also have plans to implement There’s A Better Way in their cities.
America’s Youngest Mayor
During the 20th century, Stockton was a commercial hub between Sacramento and San Francisco. It had military installations and was regularly used as a Hollywood set. But when Michael Tubbs grew up there in the 1990s, gunshots whizzed in the streets and more than half of the city’s high schoolers dropped out before graduation.
Tubbs was raised by his mother, who had him at 16. In a high-school essay, Tubbs describes meeting his father for the first time at the age of 12. He was in chains and dressed in an orange jumpsuit at the Kern County Prison. “Why are you here,” Tubbs recalls asking.
His dad responded: “Prison is your destiny. From birth you are set up to fail. …You’re a black man in America, and it’s either prison or death.”
His father’s words have never left him. They settled in his core and drive his ambition.
In less than two decades he’s graduated from Stanford, captured Oprah Winfrey’s attention and worked at Google. Once a White House intern, he’s also famously set his sights on the presidency. In 2008, during Barack Obama’s first presidential bid, Tubbs met the then Illinois senator and recalls: “I looked at him, shook his hand and told him, ‘I’m next.’” Obama reportedly said, “Okay.”
But for now, Tubbs is focused on his Californian city. The goals he’s set for himself as mayor are lofty: Lowering unemployment (8.3 percent in February 2017), raising graduation rates (82.6 percent in 2015), lowering violent crime (25 instances of murder between January and June 2016) and attracting a major philanthropic investment, like the $816 million Detroit received from the Ford Foundation and other donors to save its art museum.
“I’m tired of talking about where we’ve been. I’m more interested in talking about where we’re going,” Tubbs said at his victory party, “We have to mature as a community and start demanding solutions.”
But finding them will require deft political skill. The average Stockton resident earns $19,900 annually, yet the city has little ability to provide revitalizing social services, considering it’s still recovering after declaring bankruptcy in 2012.
Tubbs’s approach to government taps an innovation-based strategy much like the tech campuses in nearby Silicon Valley. He pilots small projects and relentlessly studies the data to determine what’s most effective for the lowest cost. He’s also investing in long-term fixes — rather than short-term patches that drained city coffers — so that the kids born today will have more opportunity than he did.
“I would say I’m solution-oriented. I don’t want to know how this can’t happen. Tell me how it can,” Tubbs says.
Some of his earliest efforts — ones he helped initiate as a Stockton city council member — have established Tubbs reputation as so-called “doer.” He closed liquor stores in South Stockton, opened a health clinic and worked with young people on community cleanup projects.
As mayor, however, he faces inherent challenges that come with the implementation of his early projects. For example, as a council member, Tubbs was a key advocate for distributing body cameras to Stockton’s police officers as a way of raising accountability. In August 2016 (prior to Tubbs’s mayoral election), a 30-year-old man named Colby Friday was killed in an officer-involved shooting. An officer’s body camera failed to capture the incident because it was not activated. A nearby security camera did record the event, and the district attorney has agreed to share that footage with Friday’s family.
In another incident, when Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted a city council meeting in February, Tubbs announced a five-minute break and abruptly left the podium, angering his one-time supporters. A month later, he tells NationSwell his number-one rule about politics: “It takes thick skin.”
During his 2016 run for mayor, Tubbs built his campaign around the idea of creating opportunities and stability for the people of Stockton. And it worked. He beat his opponent, Republican Anthony Silva, by almost 40 points.
Tubbs credits the young interns who canvassed and phoned banked for him with drumming up civic engagement in the city. In contrast to many of Tubbs’s childhood peers, these teens are some of the loudest voices in the ears of Stockton’s elected officials.
“My phone does not stop ringing, because the young people we’ve trained expect more from their elected officials,” says Lange Luntao, a Stockton school board member.
Michael Tubbs and his friends grew up believing they needed to leave Stockton to find opportunity and a better life. Once gone, few ever felt the need to return. Already, Tubbs is inspiring more of his young constituents to stay. With time, perhaps others from his own generation will return.
Editors’ note: A previous version of this article stated that the Colby Friday incident was reportedly captured on a police officer body camera. NationSwell apologizes for the error.
Want to Run for Local Office? 6 Things to Know
Whether inspired or angered by the recent presidential election, people who never before considered running for mayor, their town’s council or the local school board are putting their names on the ballot for the first time.
Thinking about running yourself? NationSwell recently spoke with several candidates to learn more about the process.
1. Mentors are really, really important.
Running for office is particularly daunting for first-time candidates. One mistake can sink your candidacy before you ever get your name on the ballot. “There are forms you have to fill out by particular dates. There are signatures that have to be collected and mailed in and postmarked by a certain date,” says Emily Peterson, a candidate for town council in Parsippany, N.J.
Lean on others who know what they’re doing — former candidates, your local political party, campaign managers or others familiar with the process. “People jump in and work as hard as you [do] to get you elected, even if they just met you a week earlier,” says Chance Mullen, a candidate for the village board of trustees in Pelham, N.Y.
2. Money makes the political world go ’round.
A record breaking $7 billion was spent on the 2016 presidential and congressional elections. While you need significantly less to run for local office, raising money is essential. New Politics founder Emily Cherniack says that candidates vying for a position on town council or school board will need anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000, excluding races in California and Texas. In those states, local politics is big business, and candidates might need considerably more (think: $1 million or even more).
“Your ability to fundraise is a catalyst for many organizations supporting you and endorsing you,” says Pierre Gooding, a democrat running for city council in Harlem, N.Y. “How much money you have in your coffers drives how much money you can get from organizations moving forward — it’s very important to show financial viability.”
You’ll also want to hire a treasurer to manage your campaign’s finances and determine budgets. Doing so could cost you a couple hundred dollars a month, but it will free up valuable time and keep you from blowing your entire budget on campaign buttons and yard signs. A candidate should exert her energy talking to constituents at meet-and-greets, not on opening a bank account, obtaining an EIN number or navigating state campaign-finance laws.
3. Reach out and text someone.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are all low-cost platforms you can use to engage and educate your constituency. Use your personal accounts as a springboard to launch your campaign page.
Go beyond traditional posting, though, and think about how you can leverage technology to boost your campaign. Los Angeles school board candidate Nick Melvoin is using Venmo to collect small dollar contributions from like-minded millennials; in New Jersey, Peterson is doing the same via GoFundMe and is drawing donations from people who live outside her town.
Digital startups such as Hustle, Crowdpac, NationBuilder and RunforSomething can also help fuel and educate your political campaign.
4. Walk the walk. And talk the talk.
We may live in a tech-driven world, but all the candidates NationSwell interviewed say that old-school campaigning methods are still effective: hold meetings, engage in conversations with community members, go door-to-door, have meetups at local cafes.
When out on the trail, don’t let complaints, chitchat or stories “about the way things used to be” dominate the conversation. “Listen to their concerns, but be able to talk to them so they can get a better feel of where you’re going with your position and what you want to see accomplished,” says Forty Fort, Penn., borough council candidate Amy Craig, a republican.
5. Rehearse, but be prepared to go off script.
Practice what you want to say. Make sure your ideas translate clearly into goals. “Constituents are looking for a leader and looking for a voice, so be that voice,” says Gooding.
At the same time, however, be flexible and able to articulate why you’re taking a given position. “Your own thinking is most likely going to be the most persuasive,” explains Mullen.
6. Rise above.
In local elections, it’s particularly important to maintain a sense of respect at all times. (After all, your next-door neighbor might be your opponent.) “We’re all benefiting from the same community services,” says Peterson. “Trash collection, policing and the crosswalk being painted…that is the stuff that shouldn’t be partisan.”
The best way to remain above the fray? Keep your rhetoric community-centric and have town pride in mind at all times.
Can Big Data Prevent Unnecessary Police Shootings?
In September 2016, Keith Lamont Scott sat in a parked SUV outside an apartment complex in Charlotte, N.C. As he rolled a joint with a handgun at his side, police officers arrived to serve someone else a warrant. What happened next — a confused and unplanned altercation with the police…multiple warnings to drop his gun…the screams of Scott’s wife who filmed it all…and shots that killed him — is the kind of policing incident data scientists are now trying stop with so-called early intervention systems.
Their aim: to identify which officers might be at risk of unnecessarily pulling the trigger in a high-adrenaline situation as a result of prior events they might have experienced.
“We don’t want officers to feel like they’re being tagged because they’ve been bad,” says Crystal Cody, technology solutions manager for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. “It really is an early intervention system.”
To be clear, early intervention systems are not new. For years, police chiefs have paged through documentation of officers’ personal and professional histories to help identify cops who might need to be pulled off their beat and brought back to headquarters. Charlotte, where mass demonstrations raged in the city’s central business district after Lamont’s death, will be among the first cities to use a version that utilizes machine learning to look for patterns in officer behavior. If its approach of data collection proves to be successful, other police departments will be able to feed their stats into the model and procure predictions for their city.
Responding to a number of stressful calls is highly correlated with leading to an adverse event, says University of Chicago data scientist Joe Walsh. He points to the widely seen video of the North Texas cop tackling a black girl at a pool party as an example. Earlier that shift, the officer had responded to two suicide calls.
When used as intended, experts say these intervention systems should reduce instances such as this. Police departments are advised to have them, but they aren’t required by law. Historically burdened by poor design and false positives, agencies nationwide have largely discredited theirs and let them languish. According to a Washington Post story last year, Newark, N.J., supervisors gave up on their system after just one year. In Harvey, a Chicago suburb, management tracked only minor offenses (like grooming violations) without notching the number of lawsuits alleging misconduct. And in New Orleans, cops ridiculed the ineffective system, considering it a “badge of honor” to be flagged.
“I think a lot of [police departments] give lip service to it because it’s important to have one, but they don’t really use it,” says criminologist Geoffrey Alpert.
In Charlotte, where the force is reputed to be technologically savvy, the internal affairs division built an early intervention system around 2004. It flagged potentially problematic cops by noting the number of use-of-force incidents, citizen complaints and sick days in a row. Analyzing those data points, 45 percent of the force was marked for review. “It was clear that [the warning system] over-flagged people,” Cody says.
At the same time, the simplistic method failed to identify the cop working a day shift with three use-of-force incidents as more at risk than an officer with the same record walking the streets of a tough neighborhood at night.
Charlotte is now giving the system a second try via a partnership with young data scientists affiliated with the University of Chicago’s Center for Data Science and Public Policy. The new version assigns each officer a score that’s generated by analyzing their performance on the beat — data that most police departments are reticent to hand over to researchers.
After crunching the numbers (more than 20 million records, to be exact), the officers that are more likely to fire their weapon are, not surprisingly, those who have breached department protocol or recently faced particularly intense situations on their beats, says Walsh, the data science team’s technical mentor. So far, this 2.0 version has improved the identification of at-risk cops by 15 percent and has reduced incorrect misclassification by half.
It’s important to note that the databases are not meant to be used as rap sheet of an officer’s performance — nor are they to be used as a disciplinary tool. Conceptually, if the system is effective, it will flag a potential crisis before it occurs and help keep officers safe. NationSwell reached out to the Fraternal Order of Police and the Police Benevolent Association in North Carolina, but neither responded to requests for comment.
“We look at the results in context of the history of that officer, where they work and what behaviors they’ve had in the past before we say, yes, this looks like a valid alert. We’re still giving humans the ability to look at it, instead of giving all the power to the computer,” says Cody.
Charlotte residents, for their part, expressed optimism about the system. “We think it’s important to have some type of outside audit,” says Robert Dawkins, state organizer for the SAFE Coalition NC, a group focused on police accountability.
The department isn’t promising the system will be a perfect solution, and it’s well aware it has plenty of jaded officers it needs to persuade. But as the system continues to gather new data — finding out which cops it overlooked or overreacted to — the model’s accuracy should improve, Walsh says. With man and machine taking a more rigorous look at the data, both law enforcement and citizen will be better protected.
MORE: 5 Ways to Strengthen Ties Between Cops and Citizens
Emergency Dispatch Technology Enters the 21st Century
“I need help,” a woman in Waterloo, Iowa, texting for help from her cell phone. “My boyfriend wont [sic] leave my house.” A dispatcher at the Black Hawk Consolidated Communications Center sent two police officers to her house, then typed back, “does he have any weapons, has he assaulted you or anyone else?” The woman only had time to press a few keys: “Not now no.” Sixteen minutes later, the boyfriend was in handcuffs, in violation of a judge’s no-contact order.
Black Hawk County is the nation’s first call center to embrace 9-1-1 texting technology. The simple yet effective I.T. upgrade is particularly valuable for citizens with a physical disability that impairs their hearing or speech and for hostages and victims of domestic violence that need to communicate discreetly, says Judy Flores, administrative supervisor at the call center.
“It’s really about the person who needs the help,” says Flores. “[Dispatchers] being able to answer those calls and get a proper response to them is a life-saving measure. And saving a life is well worth it.”
Counties in Nebraska, Michigan, and Colorado, among others, also receive texts. In Black Hawk County, text requests are exceedingly rare. Yet administrators expect they’ll get more in the years ahead, as a younger generation that predominately relies on texting needs help. Already, they find that many suicidal individuals prefer typing to talking.
While texting is helpful in some situations, dispatchers still prefer the old-fashioned phone call. “Voice is still the best way. There’s a lot of things you can’t pick up from a text: the background noises, hearing the inflection of a voice, telling if someone’s crying,” Flores says. And texts don’t come with a location, unless the person explicitly provides an address. Flores’s advice: “Call if you can; text if you can’t.”
NationSwell Council Members React to President Trump’s Congressional Address
In his debut before both houses of Congress, President Donald J. Trump used traditional rhetoric to reveal his administration’s legislative goals for the coming year. Promising drastic increases in defense spending and replacement of crumbling infrastructure, Trump also spoke about his bold plans for American manufacturing, public education, the coal industry and tax reform.
Here, NationSwell Council members detail how to move forward on these areas of focus.
[ph][ph][ph][ph]
One on One With the Police
Ikeem H., a 23-year-old from North Philadelphia, grew up selling dope to pay for food and clothes. One day, when police “blitzed” a well-known corner for dealing, he ended up in cuffs. Marked with a criminal record, Ikeem asked that his last name not be used to protect his privacy. He says officers routinely pinned drugs on him. They told him to shut up and tossed him in patrol cars.
“They messed up my life,” Ikeem reflects. “And I honestly would never forgive ’em. So, I don’t even really like talking with cops.”
At least, that’s what he said before sitting down to share pizza and chat with officers attending a meet-up hosted by a Pennsylvania nonprofit which focuses on rebuilding trust between police departments and minority youth. The organization, Pennsylvania Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC), trains Philadelphia cops to empathize with inner-city youth. Its seminars aren’t a certain fix to rebuilding trust between police and the communities they serve, but data collected from DMC and other case studies around the country, suggest they are making a difference.
These open conversations are happening across the country. In New Jersey’s suburbs, a teen asked a detective, “Do you guys think we’re good kids?” Cops shared tips about dealing with online harassment and dating violence in Seattle. Orlando participants role-played a traffic stop before reviewing citizens’ rights during the encounter.
Ikeem volunteered to attend the Philly meet-up. Within hours, he gained a new understanding for police officers’ duties. “It’s more we can do on our side, ya know: hear ’em out first, know that they doin’ [their] job,” he says, explaining that cops often aren’t looking to make arrests; rather, they’re sent to unfamiliar locations to respond to 9-1-1 calls.
These types of meet-ups, which are formally known as “facilitated dialogue,” also appear to be associated with a drop in crime. After forums in a Boston public housing complex, violent crime in that neighborhood decreased substantially, dropping 31 percent between 2009 and 2010. Drug offenses also plunged 57 percent over a three-year period.
Nationally, the number of juvenile arrests decreased 50 percent from 2005 to 2014. Researchers believe that these forums may be a contributing factor for the drop in crime.
Meet-ups are designed to breakdown negative perceptions of both cops and kids. Stereotypes can get in the way of keeping communities safe, says Rhonda McKitten, who helped develop and expand DMC’s program across Philadelphia and into Connecticut and Florida. Police “don’t have the relationships that are going to help them get information,” McKitten says. “And young people … are not going to be able to go to them when they need help.”
But lucky for law enforcement, it’s easy to spread the impact of these meetings. After a decade of watching the interactions, Jay Paris, director of Youth Link, an organization that runs similar programs in Boston, estimates that only about four dozen kids need to attend the forums to rebuild trust with the police in a specific neighborhood.
Sometimes, the payoff can be even greater. Ryan Rivera, a North Philly twenty-something who’s attended multiple DMC forums over the years, has a new life goal: “To become a Philadelphia police officer.”