Today, the Center for Policing Equity (CPE) announces the launch of Community Up, a dynamic resource to support communities interested in building equitable, effective, and holistic public safety systems for themselves. Offerings under this new line of programming aim to engage in knowledge sharing proactively, peer-to-peer support network development, and platform-sharing related to harm reduction and public safety redesign, specifically for community stakeholders. The program will create a consistent information stream that leverages our expertise in policy, community engagement, and public health to bolster grassroots work and strengthen the voice of community leaders in localities nationwide.
The first Community Up offering is the Mental Health Emergency First Response Community Roadmap—a comprehensive, action-oriented, interactive community roadmap that can be used to build or support mental health emergency response alternatives that don’t involve police response. The roadmap defines what alternative first response programs are, provides existing examples, provides insights on how to fund these programs, and outlines clear details on how to communicate to various stakeholders—community leaders, elected officials, and law enforcement—about the need for and implementation of these alternative first response programs.
“Community Up is intended to give communities the ability to influence true change in stagnant approaches to public safety that often perpetuate white supremacy. We emphasize that institutions should ultimately answer to communities and believe in the innovative and creative vitality innately present in the community,” said Keiana West, Senior Community Engagement Coordinator at CPE. “Our vision for the Community Up resource is to empower community efforts to create and shape systems and structures that equitably serve Black and Brown communities and reduce reliance on law enforcement and other punitive systems that do not address the underlying social inequities that contribute to crime and violence.”
Community Up is only the latest community-focused program created by CPE. Our Community Engagement team seeks to change that approach. Effective changes in public safety must be driven by communities, and we are honoring that by creating new materials that help changemakers.