Norman panel discusses alternative policing programs

NORMAN—A crisis intervention program in Eugene, Oregon, that responds to mental health- related 911 calls garnered support this week from members of the Norman City Council's oversight committee and representatives from a group that supports police reform.

The committee met Thursday to discuss how to spend $630,000 cut from police department budget last month. The money is reserved for alternative community policing programs.

"We' re creating a culture- changing, nontraditional program here, and we shouldn't be going about it in a traditional or institutional way ," said council member Kate Bierman, who heads the committee and is backing the Oregon program.

Bierman said police are doing too much and can't be in two place sat the same time. She said officers often have to respond to mental health or substance abuse-related call sat the expense of crimes in progress.

"The allocation of resources to mental health responders would make the community safer and allow law enforcement officers to focus on the situations that they are professionally trained to deal with," she said.

Council member Stephen Holman said roughly 20% of calls that officers respond to are not for criminal activity and" would not require a person with a weapon to show up.""Our police are responding to a lot of things that they don't need to be responding to and there are often negative consequences that come with that ," Holman said. The committee heard from police Chief Kevin Foster and members of the group Norman Citizens for Racial Justice, or NC4RJ, which demanded reform in the days following the death of George Floyd, a 46- year- old Black man who was pin ned to the ground by Minneapolis police officers in May.

"This really does make a lot of sense as a starting place for talking about alternatives topolicing," said Sarah, a NC4RJ member who participated in the virtual meeting. "We are in a moment with the pandemic where we've started to see very significant mental health crises ... people are under a lot of stress. It's just so timely for us to be making this intervention, and I hope that it can be something that's really beneficial to the police department as well."

The group called on the council to de fund and demilitarize the department, demandin ga lt er natives that include dun armed mediation and intervention teams, decriminalization of poverty and nonviolent crimes, trans format ive justice programs and increased access to mental health services.

Last month, the council voted to cut the police department budget by $865,000 in response to those demands. The remaining $235,000 will be used to hire a team of auditors to monitor police overtime.