Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Mental Health And Police Violence: How Crisis Intervention Teams Are Failing

    More than 2,700 police departments in the U.S. have crisis intervention teams aimed at responding to mental health crises with fewer arrests and less violence, but the death of Daniel Prude in Rochester police custody offers clear lessons in the shortcomings and misuse of the CIT model. A lack of adequate mental health services across the country, coupled with superficial training of the police, too often means a police response to a crisis will not de-escalate the situation or lead to meaningful help for the person in crisis. A recent study found CITs have not shown they will lower violence.

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  • Police have shot people experiencing a mental health crisis. Who should you call instead?

    Daniel Prude's death in police custody illustrates a common flaw in how police respond to mental health crises, but reform advocates disagree on whether to improve police training or bypass police almost entirely. Mental health crises make up a large share of police calls, jailings, and fatal police shootings. Most police training on mental health responses is limited to 4-12 hours. Some departments put at least some officers through crisis intervention training. But critics of police-focused responses prefer non-police response teams, in use in a few cities.

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  • How Formerly Incarcerated Firefighters Are Getting the Jobs and Pay They Deserve

    The Fire and Forestry Recruitment Program serves as an intermediary between formerly incarcerated people trained as firefighters and the agencies they seek work from once they have been released from prison. California has long used incarcerated firefighters in its wildfire-fighting work, paying them poverty wages and then usually denying them the jobs they're trained for outside prison. FFRP has helped more than 100 such people find jobs, using training, certifications, and job-searching help. Its services are in high demand as a lower prison population coincides with record wildfires.

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  • NYPD Study: Implicit Bias Training Changes Minds, Not Necessarily Behavior

    After all 36,000 New York Police Department officers took required training in recognizing implicit racial bias, more officers understood how racism may increase officers' aggressiveness but there was no evidence that this awareness translated into a less racially disparate outcome in the numbers of people stopped and frisked. Since the protests of police bias that started in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, most states have imposed mandatory implicit-bias training on police. NYPD's study is a rare measurement of the effects such training can have.

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  • In Safe Hands: First complex heart surgery at Reddington Hospital a huge success despite COVID-19

    A partnership between a Nigerian hospital and a cardiac interventionist group is helping to "bridge the gap in availability of quality cardiac and critical care services" for patients who are in need of care. Although the system was first tested unexpectedly during the coronavirus pandemic, it has shown early success in building and training local specialists to complete cardiac surgeries.

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  • The coronavirus gave them jobs — and a new lease on life

    Finding gainful employment after incarceration is hard in the best of times, but during a global pandemic it's even more challenging. A Los Angeles nonprofit, Chrysalis, has been able to place the hard-to-employ job seekers in hotels that have been leased by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to house people experiencing homelessness. Chrysalis typically prepares people for permanent jobs but also finds transitional roles such as some of the positions that have been filled in the 38 hotels under lease by the city.

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  • Can Prosecutors Be Taught to Avoid Jail Sentences?

    A nonprofit consulting firm, Prosecutor Impact, advances the cause of reducing incarceration and related reforms by helping reform-minded elected district attorneys confront one of the greatest obstacles to change: their own staff's opposition. In Columbus, a two-week curriculum educated front-line prosecutors about local services that can serve as problem-solving alternatives to punishment. It also taught them about poverty's challenges and engaged them in dialogue with prisoners, to make them more open to alternative approaches, which a local defense lawyer says was successful.

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  • Gun Violence Left a Mark on His Childhood. He Says People Like Him Should Lead Efforts to Reduce It.

    The South Central Leadership Academy was started in Los Angeles by a college student who believes that gun violence survivors like him should lead the community response in finding solutions to violence. Its first year of paying more than a dozen student survivors to learn community organizing skills succeeded in attracting funding to expand to Nashville, Baltimore, and Atlanta. COVID-19 put the latter two expansions on hold, but LA and Nashville continued with well-attended classes learning remotely. Founder Marco Vargas hopes to turn this startup into a national network of youth leadership academies.

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  • The Junk Science Cops Use to Decide You're Lying

    When "junk science" forms the basis of the training curricula used by for-profit companies in the business of teaching police interrogation techniques, it can produce mistakes leading to false confessions and wrongful convictions. A number of vendors rely on practices long proven ineffective and debunked as myths, such as relying on interpretations of body language, eye movement, tone of voice, and other physical cues to claim evidence of deception. Genuine evidence-based interview techniques exist that should be used in making police training more professional.

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  • Mental health training for cops is working in Tucson. Can we bring it to Philly?

    Tuscon police use a combination of training and expanded resources to resolve mental health crises by putting people in the hands of mental health professionals, an approach that in 2019 diverted nearly 4,400 cases away from arrests and jail. All police officers take a required 12-hour mental health first aid class, and most go through another 40-hour crisis intervention training. A specialized team gets more extensive training to handle court-ordered interventions, emphasizing patience and humane treatment. A 24/7 Crisis Response Center serves as an intake desk to decide what help people in crisis need.

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