Transit Agencies Try Decarceral Approaches to Improve Rider Safety

An alternative response team in Durham, North Carolina, responds to certain 911 calls instead of the police to help people in crisis. Now, it’s working to improve the ways it connects those people with social services afterward.

Durham’s alternative crisis response team of social workers, HEART, responds to 911 calls to mitigate conflict on their own or with the police. The program is designed to keep everyone involved safe while preventing a situation from escalating to violence.

Durham, North Carolina, instated an alternative crisis response program that dispatches social workers to respond to 911 calls about people in mental health crises. The team’s successes earned the support of an initially skeptical police department.

Some German cities have created voucher programs that subsidize the cost of taking a taxi for women who feel unsafe walking or using public transit at night. In Cologne, 1,500 vouchers were used within days of their release, and Munich has more than tripled the number of vouchers it provides due to demand.

Non-carceral emergency services offer an alternative option to calling the police for de-escalation and crisis resolution. These programs employ trained specialists, are consent-based, and can refer people to local services to help meet their needs or receive care.

The nonprofit Action Northeast Trust organizes youth ultimate Frisbee matches to strengthen social cohesion, promote gender equality, and foster peace among young people from different villages, ethnicities, and mother tongues in Assam, India.

The A Call for Change helpline is a hotline for abusers seeking help with stopping their violent behavior. The calls are confidential and anonymous and provide support and resources while also holding callers accountable for their actions.

Safe2Tell is a unified statewide system where students can anonymously report concerns or threats, since research shows other students often know about a threat before it is carried out. Teams trained in risk assessment intervene before an attack can happen by contacting parents, making a welfare check, and/or talking with students. The success of the system led to the adoption of similar programs in Oregon, Nevada, and Wyoming.

The Street Crisis Response Team program is an alternative to policing made up of first-responder teams trained in trauma-informed crisis management. These teams can be dispatched for non-violent mental or behavioral health emergencies in public spaces and focus on compassion and trust-building in the community to de-escalate crises. They can also transport people to hospitals, shelters, or places to receive other mental health interventions.

Groups like Parents for Peace and Life After Hate use former radicals to counsel people in the grip of right-wing extremism. Bombarded by pleas for help by families since the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, these groups use a series of meetings to help people examine the roots of their ideology, with an aim of helping them discover for themselves the irrationality of their hatred and other beliefs. While one researcher says the methods show signs of effectiveness, success is defined mainly in individual stories of change, in a hard-to-measure process of "personal and idiosyncratic" introspection.