ANN ARBOR, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – In April of 2022, Ann Arbor’s city council voted on a resolution to direct their city administrator to develop an Unarmed Public Safety Response Program. The program is to be used to respond to non-violent and non-criminal incidents, including mental health events, using resources and partnerships with community service providers for the new program. Members of the response team would be directed to respond to these calls instead of the police department.

They also earmarked $3.5 million from federal stimulus funds to pay to establish the program.

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As part of the plan, an interim report was prepared by the city administrator and assistant city administrator and given to the council members at the end of December in 2021. The report said that in the calendar year 2020 there were a total of 39,172 calls for service through Metro 911 dispatched to the Ann Arbor Police Department, with 15% of those calls requesting mental health services.

After much research, they said, “What is clear from the broad scope of programs offered in many American cities is that there is no set model for how to structure an unarmed response program in your organization.”

They discussed recommendations that were made by CROS (Coalition for Re-envisioning Our Safety), a group of subject matter experts and community advocates. The staff of the city administrator did not participate in drafting the recommendations but they say that their “general recommendations do seem to be situated within the prevailing range of proposals presented in other American cities working on this issue.” Some of the CROS recommendations include having a 2-year (minimum) funded pilot that allows for quality design, implementation and evaluation and including a separate public phone number for calls.

As part of the city’s community engagement process, they did a community survey with residents to see what their priorities were for the program and how they thought it should operate. The results of the survey were to be given to the City Council for final recommendations for the structure of the program. An organization called the Public Sector Consultants (PSC), a Lansing-based nonpartisan research and consulting firm, helped to gather the input from the community.

The community survey, which was conducted with almost 600 Ann Arbor residents, yielded a whopping 92% public support response for the program itself but mixed responses on how the program should proceed.

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The first part of the survey was defining the assistance that should be offered. The most important priorities for the program, according to the residents, were chosen to be: mental health crisis (88%), suicide prevention/assessment/intervention (61.6%), assistance for individuals who are intoxicated/overdose (56.7%), homelessness assistance (56.2%), non-domestic-violence dispute resolution (27.6%), minor acts of juvenile delinquency (26.2%), and wellness checks (20.1%). Everything else was below 20%.

The community was not unified on how people should connect to the services with 30% saying they should call 911, 27% saying people should use “988” (the new statewide mental health crisis line) and 25% saying there should be a new standalone phone number for the city’s services. 9% said that “211” should be utilized which is used for confidential sources of local information.

There was no consensus on who should run the program either with the respondents to the survey disagreeing over if the services should come from a non-profit organization, a city department (not police) or a new city department.

Adding to this information will be opinions coming out of upcoming forums on January 9th, 12th and 19th across the city to discuss the options listed above that were presented to the residents in the survey.