Beyond the Badge: How American Cities Are Proving That Safety Doesn't Require Surveillance

The Premise That Built the Carceral State

For decades, American policymakers have operated under a singular assumption: that safety flows from the barrel of a gun, the click of handcuffs, and the shadow of a patrol car. This premise has cost communities trillions of dollars, millions of incarcerated lives, and an incalculable toll of grief and trauma — disproportionately borne by Black, Indigenous, and low-income neighborhoods. Yet the evidence for this model has always been thin. Crime rates correlate far more reliably with poverty, housing instability, and lack of access to mental health services than with police department budgets.

What happens, then, when cities decide to test a different assumption entirely — that safety is built through connection, care, and community resources rather than enforcement and incarceration? The results, emerging from cities willing to experiment, are quietly reshaping what is politically possible.

Eugene's Four-Decade Experiment: The CAHOOTS Model

The story most frequently cited by reformers begins not with a protest or a ballot measure, but with a 1989 phone call in Eugene, Oregon. That year, the White Bird Clinic launched the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets program — better known as CAHOOTS — dispatching teams of medics and crisis counselors to respond to non-violent emergency calls in lieu of armed police.

More than three decades later, CAHOOTS handles approximately 24 percent of all calls to Eugene's 911 dispatch system. In a recent year, the program responded to over 24,000 calls — and requested police backup on fewer than 150 of them. That is a police-required intervention rate of less than one percent. The program operates at roughly one-sixth the cost of a comparable police response, freeing municipal resources for housing support, addiction services, and youth programming.

Crucially, CAHOOTS does not merely divert calls. It builds relationships. Counselors return to the same encampments, the same doorways, the same individuals in crisis — offering continuity of care that a rotating roster of armed officers structurally cannot provide. The model demonstrates that the vast majority of what communities have historically labeled "public safety" crises are, in fact, public health emergencies requiring clinical intervention, not criminal enforcement.

Denver's STAR Program: Scaling the Vision

Inspired by CAHOOTS, Denver launched its Support Team Assisted Response program in 2020, initially deploying a single van staffed by a paramedic and a mental health clinician. The pilot program responded to calls involving individuals experiencing homelessness, mental health crises, or substance use — situations that had long defaulted to police contact, frequently resulting in arrest, hospitalization, or use of force.

The early data was striking. During its first six months of operation, STAR responded to over 700 calls without a single instance of arrest or need for police backup. Denver subsequently expanded the program significantly, adding additional vehicles and extending service hours. A peer-reviewed study published by researchers at the University of Denver found that STAR's implementation was associated with a measurable reduction in low-level crime in areas served by the program — not an increase, as critics had predicted.

Denver's experience illustrates a critical lesson for organizers: pilot programs, even small ones, generate the evidence base that shifts political debates. When skeptical city council members demand proof before committing to reallocation of police funding, communities that have already run controlled experiments hold a decisive advantage.

Oakland's Street-Level Accountability: Peer Responders and Violence Interrupters

In Oakland, California, the approach to reimagining safety has taken a different but complementary form. The city's Department of Violence Prevention funds community-based organizations that employ violence interrupters — individuals with direct lived experience of incarceration and street violence who are trained to mediate conflicts before they escalate to physical harm.

Organizations such as Advance Peace and Urban Peace Movement deploy credible messengers into neighborhoods where trust in law enforcement has been eroded by decades of over-policing and documented misconduct. These are not social workers arriving from outside the community. They are neighbors, former adversaries, people whose credibility derives precisely from the experiences that would disqualify them from law enforcement employment under conventional logic.

Oakland has also invested in mobile crisis teams capable of responding to psychiatric emergencies without police accompaniment. While the city's implementation has faced bureaucratic delays and funding battles — a reminder that institutional resistance is real and persistent — the infrastructure being built represents a fundamental reorientation of who is trusted to keep communities safe.

What Activists Must Demand: A Framework for Local Action

The programs profiled above did not emerge from the goodwill of elected officials. They were won through sustained, organized pressure from community members who refused to accept the premise that policing and incarceration were inevitable. For organizers working to replicate these models in their own cities, several strategic imperatives emerge from these case studies.

Demand disaggregated call data. Most police departments track what calls they respond to but do not publicly report what percentage of those calls involve violence, weapons, or any circumstance that genuinely requires armed intervention. Filing public records requests for this data — and publicizing the results — consistently reveals that the overwhelming majority of police contacts involve no threat of violence whatsoever. This data is the foundation of the political argument for alternative response.

Build coalitions across issue areas. The most durable campaigns for alternative response programs have united mental health advocates, unhoused community members, harm reduction organizations, and racial justice groups around a shared framework. Police abolition is not a single-issue fight. It is the connective tissue linking housing policy, healthcare access, substance use treatment, and racial equity.

Insist on community governance. Programs administered by police departments or embedded within law enforcement bureaucracies are vulnerable to co-optation and defunding when political winds shift. The CAHOOTS model, housed within a community health clinic rather than a city agency, has demonstrated remarkable durability across multiple administrations precisely because it maintains institutional independence.

Reject incrementalism as a ceiling. Pilot programs are beginnings, not destinations. The goal is not a slightly more humane version of the existing system. It is the systematic reallocation of public resources from criminalization to care — until the question "why would we send an armed officer to this call?" becomes genuinely difficult to answer.

The Architecture of Possibility

The cities profiled here are not utopias. They continue to operate police departments, maintain jails, and fall short of the transformative vision that abolitionists articulate. But within their experiments lies something profoundly important: empirical proof that communities can be safer with fewer police contacts, not more.

Every call that CAHOOTS handles without incident, every conflict that a violence interrupter resolves before shots are fired, every psychiatric crisis that STAR navigates without an arrest — each represents a brick removed from the ideological foundation of the carceral state. The argument that we have no alternative to policing is not a fact. It is a political choice. And political choices, organized communities have always known, can be unmade.