The way we view public safety needs to completely change. I believe, the first step is to defund the police departments and the second step is to invest that money into mental, social and health workers. These services need to be an integral part of public safety. There are some communities that are already working to implement this into society. For example, in Lane County, OR, there is an organization called CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) that is the mobile crisis and medic response team in the Eugene-Springfield’s Public Safety System. They cover crisis counseling; suicide prevention, assessment, and intervention; conflict resolution and mediation; grief and loss; substance abuse; housing crisis; and many other services.

Unfortunately, our society has not been accustomed to calling anything other than the police in a stressful situation. I was raised to call 911 if there was any sort of emergency, but I was never taught about the many other mental and social services I could call. These services were never as accessible to me as calling 911 was.

We have a great opportunity to make these services more accessible by putting these numbers into the Emergency Response feature of our smart phones. For example, if you have an iPhone and use the Emergency SOS feature it will call 911, instead of any other hotline. I'm calling on Apple, Samsung, LG, Google, Sony, Nokia and all other smart phone companies to include all mental, social and health hotline numbers in their Emergency Services. We can begin to use the police less, the more we make these services accessible!