Experts from the NYU School of Law Policing Project were back in Minneapolis on Wednesday, a year after presenting the city-commissioned safe and thriving communities reportwhich sets goals to improve crime response, prevention and restoration in the city.

The presentation before a Minneapolis City Council committee Wednesday was a data analysis of work the city has done that meets the report’s goals and also listed gaps that need to be addressed.

“What really surprised me is that we are doing some things right,” Community Safety Manager Amanda Harrington, Director of Design and Implementation, said in exclusive interviews ahead of the meeting of the municipal council.

“So that feels good, right?”

Much of the “Asset and Gap Analysis” update focused on efforts to divert as many 911 calls as possible to non-police services like 311, traffic control, animal control and the Behavioral Crisis Response (BCR) team.

This new analysis showed that the city is currently redirecting about 9% of its calls for service.

“It’s big. That’s something that really pleasantly surprised us,” shared Alex Heaton, director of public safety reimagining for the NYU Policing Project.

The goal over the next 10 years will be to double the number of calls returned to 20 percent, Harrington said.

When asked what the biggest gap needed to be addressed to achieve this, Heaton said: “I think the first thing we saw was governance. The question therefore arises: how does the city manage the process of creating security? How do they hold organizations accountable? How do they set their goals? How do we share information across organizations and, more importantly, how do we connect them together to create an ecosystem, rather than just a collection of projects and things that happen? »

The analysis also found that last year, BCR actually responded to 67% of the 911 calls it was assigned to.

Harrington said the remaining 33% of calls were missed primarily due to transportation and personnel logistics.

“The biggest problem is that we had ordered vans and because of the supply chain delay that everyone was facing, the vans hadn’t been delivered for a long time, so they just didn’t have staff or vans to ship them. to the rest of the calls,” she said.

“So they’re going to be able to respond quickly enough to respond to a lot more of the calls that were previously missed.”

“The idea here is that it’s long-term and sustainable, and that’s why we’re evolving the way we are,” Community Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette concluded.

“I think Minneapolis is on the right track to really becoming a national leader in this area,” Heaton added.

“So really building the foundation of community safety that exists externally, particularly within law enforcement.”

Council members were largely pleased and surprised to see the data analysis show progress, responding similarly to the city administration.

Among his recommendations to the city for the future, Heaton challenged the city to conduct regular evaluations of its calls for service and to take inventory of municipal services related to response, prevention and restoration.