Starting next month, the District of Columbia will divert some 9-11 calls concerning mental health from police to alternative first responders. “Under a new pilot program, 911 operators will instead send unarmed teams of behavioral health experts and peers to the scene. The move was recommended last month by the city’s police reform commission, part of local and national efforts in the wake of George Floyd’s killing to reduce violent contact between the public and law enforcement. We want to make sure we are not making “something more of an event by sending a uniformed officer there if they are not needed,” Cleo Subido, interim director for the Office of Unified Communications said. In “some kind of a situation where there’s a distrust of law enforcement, or distrust of the fire department, or of strangers,” she said, sending police “could be doing a disservice.” But D.C. officials say that the aim is better service, not police reform. Subido likened the change to a program that started four years ago to divert some calls about relatively minor physical ailments to registered nurses: “This really mirrors that.”
Ezra Klein interviewed James Forman Jr., professor of law at Yale Law School and the author “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” to “explore the political and psychological dynamics that rising crime produces. We discuss the toll of living amid both street and state violence; what the crime wave of the ’70s and ’80s did to Black politics; the causes of the “Great Crime Decline”; the extent to which policing and prisons actually reduce crime; why we should think of violence the way we think of pandemics; the Black community’s complex views of policing; the three-pronged approach liberals should take to safety.”
The New York Times looked at the effects overturning or further undermining Roe v. Wade could have on abortion access, during a week when Texas passed a 'heartbeat' bill that would ban the overwhelming majority of abortions: “A post-Roe United States isn’t one in which abortion isn’t legal at all,” Caitlin Knowles Myers, an economist at Middlebury College and a co-author of the research, said in our earlier report. She obtained and analyzed the new data for The New York Times recently. “It’s one in which there’s tremendous inequality in abortion access.” Today there is at least one abortion clinic in every state, and most women of childbearing age live within an hour’s drive or so of one, the analysis found. If Roe were overturned, abortion would be likely to quickly become illegal in 22 states. Forty-one percent of women of childbearing age would see the nearest abortion clinic close, and the average distance they would have to travel to reach one would be 279 miles, up from 35 miles now. As distances to clinics increase, abortion rates decline, research shows. Women who can’t afford to travel to a legal clinic or arrange child care or leave from work for the trip are most affected. Also, remaining clinics would not necessarily be able to handle increased demand. A study from a different research team on the effects of abortion clinic closings in Wisconsin showed a similar relationship between increased drive times and the number of abortions performed at clinics.”