Make Good Decisions About Police and Public Safety Budgeting.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne
• Position: HOW TO

Local governments need a way to reach good decisions about police funding. The traditional local government budgeting system--take last year's budget and make changes around the margins--is not up to the task for several reasons:

* The traditional approach is based on historical precedent. It tends to freeze past practices in place. It does not provide a way to thoughtfully reexamine what is working well and what isn't and then make changes accordingly.

* Relying on historical precedent can reduce conflict because it reduces the amount of possible change, but the question of police funding seems to have reached a point where conflict is inevitable. That conflict can either be constructive or destructive, and the traditional budget process does not provide good outlets for constructive conflict.

* The traditional budget process works best in times of revenue growth because distributing new revenue is less controversial than deciding what to cut or how to reallocate funding--but we're currently facing revenue declines and demand for a departure from past practices.

* Decisions are largely driven by professional staff, with little input from the community. Less than half of people have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the police,1 which means that the experts within the police department may not enjoy the same legitimacy they once did.

Clearly, a better approach than the traditional budget is needed, and, fortunately, one is described by GFOA's Financial Foundations for Thriving Communities [gfoa.org/special/ financial-foundations]. It is based on a Nobel Prize-winning body of work about how to make good decisions on shared resources, like a local government and its budget. This article is based on the Financial Foundations research.

Establishing a long-term vision

A long-term vision defines a community's common desire for a better future. This common vision brings people together and provides the cohesion needed to move forward. The vision is where a consensus is formed among elected officials, staff, and the public that the local government should think about [and budget for] public safety differently.

It has been said that a problem well-defined is a problem half-solved. The long-term vision must define the police and public safety issues that local government and the public will work together to address. Defining these issues as just "annual budget" or "police" issues might close off the potential for thinking longer term and more creatively about how to deal with homelessness, street and domestic violence, and other "public safety" issues that have been assigned to police--and where there might be different and more cost-effective solutions available.

A local government must ask what long-term policing and public safety goals are important to its community. Achieving these goals may be too much to try for in one annual budget [especially one already complicated by revenue shortfalls]; attempting to do so would be like trying to design and build an airplane while in flight. A long-term vision creates the space for better decisions and provides the basis for an orderly approach to carrying out these decisions over successive annual budgets.

Street-level violence provides a visceral example of why a long-term vision is needed. There has been much talk about finding alternatives to traditional policing for this problem. One proven alternative is Cure Violence [cvg.org], which sees community violence through the lens of epidemiology: Violence is like a disease, and the spread can be stopped by intervening with the carriers. The program trains community members to recognize signs of impending violence in their neighborhood, along with ways to intervene and de-escalate. The optimal location for this program is in a public health department because it needs to be staffed by career employees with expertise in public health; it also frames violence as a disease and treats it accordingly. But if a city even has a public health department, it probably isn't up to the task of administering the program. As a result, Cure Violence is sometimes treated as a "special project" in the mayor's office, which leads to another problem: Community violence will not be eliminated during the term of office of any mayor. An ongoing effort is needed to keep the "disease" in check. It needs an institutional home to survive changes in political office holders and deliver the sustained effort needed to have a lasting impact.

Police departments need a long-term vision as well. For example, the "Memphis model" of critical incident training blends social work skills with policing to create more cost-effective responses to disturbances by people who are mentally ill. A long-term plan can be used to start a program like Cure Violence orthe Memphis model as a special project and provide the path for transitioning it to a long-term, institutional capability.

A long-term vision should not be limited to policing and public safety. Public safety is influenced by factors such as unemployment and poverty, segregation, social relationships, and mental illness. Therefore, governments should develop a true community vision that addresses the quality of life and economic issues that citizens care about. Many of these issues are interrelated with public safety, so a broader vision will support both better public safety and a stronger financial foundation for local government and a thriving community.

The core capabilities of traditional police are enforcing the law and applying force when needed. While these capabilities have their place, they are not the best answer to all public safety concerns. A broader vision helps a city's department managers look beyond their own interests. In addition, being able to put departmental interests aside opens up new possibilities to make better use of resources and to work together for better public safety and other community goals.

Long-term planning for police and public safety

Policing and public safety are complex topics. Local governments must bring together a diverse representation of stakeholders to have a conversation about the vision for public safety, including members of the public--especially those who may have had negative experiences with police or who have been historically marginalized. Stakeholders from these demographic and geographic communities will have different views and lived experiences than the budget staff when it comes to the police. They will likely have different preferences for how policing and public safety services are delivered. These views must be part of the conversation if we're to reach resource allocations that are fair and meet the community's needs.

This conversation must also include the police themselves. We must recognize that police may have views that differ substantially from those of the general public. For example, surveys have shown that approximately 70 percent of police officers thought the deaths of Black people in encounters with police officers were isolated instances, compared to 39 percent of the general public. Approximately 30 percent of police officers thought these deaths were a sign of a broader problem, compared to 60 percent of the general public. (2) Although police officers may see the world differently than much of the public, they have expertise that can help inform better approaches to public safety. Without the support of the police, reform efforts will likely flounder, and attempts to allocate resources in a new and better way will face a bumpier road.

Police might be eager to participate because a new vision for public safety could in fact have positive outcomes for them. For instance, the roles and responsibilities of police have come to include many tasks that are best classified as social work, (3) but police have not received the training and resources to be successful in these expanded...