What WVCC Offered to the City and What Community Can Help Fund

Our bid for a community response remained true to three key elements that define the community responder model. 1. We are dispatched for welfare checks, public assists, and other forms of support as an alternative response to Fire/EMS and Law Enforcement. 2. Services are consent based: we never take peoples’ rights away. 3. The alternative response is made up of a crisis worker/ peer and medic allowing teams to assess and provide care for the whole person.  

Our bold proposal to expand solutions beyond jail and hospital: Community Responders Offering Wellness and Safety (CROWS) plus Aftercare. The community responder team would respond to non-violent mental health and substance abuse and quality of life related crises offering an alternative to police and EMS 10 hours a day 7 days a week. WVCC partnered with Restored Connections Peer Center to deliver an aftercare team at 4 hours per day of peer-based case management and follow up, services that move well beyond a referral to a crowded waitlist, knowing that this combined access and expertise is what will move the needle for folks who struggle with substance dependency. This entire proposal would cost approximately 500,000 for the year. For an innovative community funded pilot, there could be less hours per week based on funding capacity and could still meet the needs for a non-enforcement, health care-based response. Funded outside of a city contract, services would be made available pre-911 and through another call-taking and dispatch system. These services would reestablish working relationships with other emergency response agencies as well as healthcare and housing partners to strengthen Eugene’s safety and wellness ecosystem. You can access the bid here, excepting our CV’s and letters of support.  

More Than Just a Good Idea 

Since Eugene’s model of community response hit the national stage in 2020, community response has gained enormous, formal traction. The State Council of Governments worked to define the community responder program to establish clear standards, accountability and a shared vocabulary for mobile behavioral health and crisis responses. The CSG’s Justice Center’s Expanding First Response Commission provides a toolkit to help states and local municipalities establish, fund and operate community responder programs. Communities across the nation have established programs modeled after Eugene’s, taking note of the cost-effective, common sense approach to community care that allows for a natural and appropriate model of support over police and enforcement. From a national lens, cities like Cleveland, Ohio are establishing a Bureau of Community Safety for unarmed, civilian-led response.  This additional branch of public safety is built on community trust and seated firmly in the knowledge that an officer’s presence on a call is the first tactical use of force available to police. Atlanta’s PAD, as a similar program, has built a dashboard so that its citizens can see how many calls could be addressed from a care-based frame. Evanston, Illinois is expanding its community response team, CARE, after handling close to 2000 calls in its first year and many communities across the country are doing the same.

Recently, WVCC was welcomed and presented on the model in Dallas, Texas at the International Co-Responder Alliance Conference. Even within the Co-Response world, community responders are seen as co-equal within public safety and a valid, essential piece of the puzzle. We take the time to share this with you because we feel it’s important to see the big picture and not be discouraged by the limited local political lens. While unfortunate, it doesn’t minimize the significance and efficacy of this model of support and its rightful place in public safety.  

Academically Rigorous Data 

As a community, we’ve seen a lot of local data around the impact of community response over the years, data which hasn’t been formally evaluated or verified. WVCC has been so lucky to be advocating for this model in a time when the University of Oregon’s Rori Rholfs, Claire Herbert and Nathan Burton have put out real, academically rigorous data about the diversion rates that show how community response has diverted thousands of calls from police. Their research is in the process of peer review and is publicly available here.

One of the most interesting findings of this study, the Overlapping-mandate Diversion Rate (ODR) quantifies the proportion of mutually answerable calls handled by the community responder team. They estimate that the ODR was at 50%, significantly reducing the police response call volume in this metric alone. In other metrics, they used a Substitution Diversion Rate (SDR) to look at calls that directly replaced police responses, estimating that 18% of calls that community responder teams went to directly replaced a police response.

Finally, they found that community responder teams actually prevented police calls for service. Using a Prevention-adjusted Diversion Rate (PDR), they found that calls for disputes, suspicious subject and assault calls all decreased when community response was available. This is data that we can’t ignore for so many reasons, including the large consideration that this service is so much less expensive than police. It’s difficult to reconcile this information with the choice the city of Eugene made to opt out of community response.  

Know Better, Do Better  

Having this insight as a backdrop to the decisions that WVCC makes has been critical in our design. It feels important now to bring in community to better understand the landscape and make informed choices about our collective future. Therefore, WVCC is actively convening local community organizations, mutual aid networks, and residents to absorb this information and to reflect on Eugene's ecosystem of care. Together, we hope to address existing gaps to launch a cooperative, community-sustained iteration of the CROWS program, one specifically equipped to support neighbors navigating housing insecurity, ICE terror, attacks on healthcare access, and other forms of systemic violence. 

As WVCC continues its work with Just Safe, we also continue in a cohort with visionary organizations across the country doing mutual aid, alternative crisis response, peer respite, and transformative justice. WVCC will channel this knowledge and momentum back into Eugene by offering specialized local trainings in crisis skills, stress self-attunement, and healthy boundaries for community organizations and youth. By staying connected at a national level, WVCC will always have its finger on the button of innovation and collaboration to ensure that Eugene has the right response for the right situation.