Big change coming to public safety in Durham. How could it affect police, 911 calls?

This story was updated at 10:55 a.m. April 30 to include City Council member Mark-Anthony Middleton’s comments.

Two community groups are pressuring Durham city leaders to divest from the police as part of coming changes in public-safety policy.

Durham Beyond Policing and Durham For All, a group co-founded by Mayor Pro Tem Jillian Johnson, met on Zoom this week to launch the 10 to Transform campaign.

Their campaign calls for moving 10% of the Durham Police Department’s staffing budget to the Community Safety Department, a new department city leaders are expected to formally announce with the city manager’s upcoming budget proposal.

City Council members are “very excited” about the new department, Mayor Steve Schewel told The News & Observer in an interview.

It is part of a greater effort to change how Durham protects its residents.

“We all know, from what we see around the country, that we need policing that is never discriminatory and never over-polices communities of color. And we need policing that is effective in battling violent crime,” Schewel said. “And we can have both of those things, so we must have both of those things.”

Along with the new department, Durham plans to launch pilot programs in the coming months to provide alternative responses to 911 calls, like sending unarmed clinicians to calls arising from a mental health crisis.

The initiatives arrive as the police department is going through a change in leadership; City Manager Wanda Page is searching for a new police chief to replace Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis, who leaves for Memphis in June. On Thursday, the city announced Deputy Chief Shari Montgomery, 22-year department veteran, will serve as interim chief.

The DPD also has 71 vacant positions, police spokesperson Kammie Michael told The News & Observer. The vacancies represent 13% of the overall force.

Page will present her recommended city budget May 17. She would not say if funding for the new department would come from the police budget.

“I am not at the point today to pick out exactly where all resources are going to be moved around from, in order to do what I am what I am putting up,” she said Thursday. “I will tell you that I am working on that.”

“And certainly, any department that has resources that can be better used someplace else in the current period — we’re going to be looking at those resources to move first, before asking the council to create new resources,” she added.

On Friday, after the first version of this story was published online, Council member Mark-Anthony Middleton told The N&O he had not known the city was planning a new department.

He looks forward to hearing more about it, he said, adding he supports having “a robust menu of responses as a government, which includes unarmed responders.”

“I was just surprised to read that we were going to be announcing the creation of a new department, and that the council was excited about it,” Middleton said. “I can’t be excited about something I didn’t even know anything about.”

10 to Transform Campaign

Shanise Hamilton, an organizer with Durham For All, sees the vacant police officer positions and the new city department as an opportunity.

At the virtual gathering, she said the city should send social and health care workers to crisis calls instead of police. She called for a new approach to traffic safety that doesn’t involve armed officers.

To explain why the group’s demands are important, she named Black people across the country killed by police or who died under their watch: Daniel Prude, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland and others.

“We want to get our people the help that they need, when they need it. We already know that people of color are already skeptical as hell when it comes to calling the police for anything,” she said. “So we need to provide our community with the support or resources that we actually need, without the added fear and anxiety.”

Over 170 people joined the Zoom launch. City Council member Pierce Freelon performed a song to celebrate “life and death and transition” in honor of Michelle Gonzalez-Green, an artist who recently died

In addition to the city’s police budget, Durham For All and Durham Beyond Policing want county leaders to shift 10% of the Durham County Sheriff’s Office budget toward human services departments.

Community safety initiatives

Durham Beyond Policing successfully lobbied to get the Community Safety and Wellness Task Force off the ground last year.

The task force consists of experts across different fields appointed by city, county, and school board leaders, who brainstorm new public safety initiatives beyond policing and the criminal legal system.

The City Council earmarked $1 million as a “down payment” toward the task force’s recommendations last summer, and the group met for the first time Wednesday evening.

Council members Javiera Caballero and Johnson joined the virtual campaign launch about 30 minutes in and answered questions about the city’s budget process. County Commissioner Nida Allam also attended.

At the gathering, Caballero said the new Community Safety Department will house the programs city leaders will implement in the coming years, as well as oversee the $935,000 Durham is spending on Bull City United, a local violence interruption team.

“I think this is a really strategic way to make sure that we have what we need to make the alternatives to policing successful in Durham,” she said.

A liaison, funded by the nonprofit FUSE Corps., will act as a bridge between the Community Safety and Wellness Task Force and the new department, Page told The N&O.

Alternative responses to 911 calls

The advocacy groups’ requests are in line with some of the City Council’s planning.

In February, council members met with Renee Mitchell and Brian Aagaard from RTI International, a nonprofit research institute based in Durham. The researchers studied over 948,000 calls for service at the DPD from October 2017 to October 2020.

They suggested council members consider changing how the city responds to calls about drug use, mental illness, traffic accidents, and other issues.

About 480,000 of the DPD’s service calls came from residents calling 911, according RTI’s data. The other half were police-initiated.

Here’s what they found with the citizen-initiated calls:

▪ At least 98% did not lead to an arrest.

▪ About 3% involved a violent crime or sex offense, based on what was described in the initial call.

▪ 13% were traffic related, including reports of abandoned vehicles, car accidents, and hit-and-runs.

▪ 12% responded to an alarm. Many of the calls come from business-owned security systems automatically notifying the police after an alarm has set off.

A total of 174 out of all 948,000 calls resulted in the use of force.

The city is working on new pilot programs based on the researcher’s recommendations. The initiatives are a work in progress, with details still being work out. But one pilot will develop a more comprehensive approach to defining and tracking mental health-related calls, Page said.

Schewel said the Fraternal Order of Police in Durham supports the idea.

“They want to be able to concentrate on doing the important jobs that police officers need to be doing, focusing their expertise and their time on fighting violence,” Schewel said.

The FOP did not respond to an email from The N&O requesting an interview.

This story was originally published April 30, 2021 at 5:50 AM.