Reallocate the Police? A case of new financial innovation.

• Author: Marlowe, Justin
• Position: PERSPECTIVE

"Financial innovation" can be a genteel way of saying "a technical solution to a political problem." Large projected budget gap and no agreement on how to close it? A "scoop and toss" debt refinancing can help. Council wants a new fire truck but can't agree on how to pay for it? Make those dollars appear with a mid-year budget adjustment--and so forth. This type of innovation can clear a path to political agreement. But it can also allow elected officials to ignore structural financial problems that become exponentially worse with time. Today's state and local finance officials continue to grapple with the broader ethical and policy questions that surround this type of financial innovation.

But sometimes this chain of events is turned inside out. In other words, the political consensus presents a technical financial problem. What happens when a popular parks improvement can't be funded through a dedicated local capital projects sales tax? Or that state law won't allow a particular type of developer subsidy for a broadly agreed on and badly needed investment in a blighted, underserved neighborhood? The answer is often "find a way." And it's here that a different type of financial innovation happens. A recent experience with regional community crisis response illustrates this type of innovation in action, and how we might replicate it elsewhere.

The defund the police movement stoked some of the most contentious local political debate in recent memory. Leaders of and against that movement disagreed on basically everything. But they did agree on one key point: police are too often dispatched to situations they're not equipped to manage. This is especially true for emergencies rooted in substance abuse, untreated mental illness, developmental disabilities, and behavioral health concerns. An obvious solution is for social workers to accompany police--known as the "co-responder" model--or to "respond instead of police" as part of a "community responder" approach.

These alternatives to policing are appealing, but they require scale economies. Most municipal police departments receive enough calls to need co-/community responders, but not enough to justify a fully staffed, stand-alone responder team that offers round-the-clock coverage. Experts also point out that individual crises are rarely confined to a single community. All that suggests the community responder model is an excellent candidate for a regional approach.

That's precisely how leaders...