Evanston’s Reimaging Public Safety Committee is scheduled Tuesday to review what’s called a Shared Safety Framework developed by two San Francisco-based non-profit groups.
The groups, Californians for Safety and Justice and the Alliance for Safety and Justice, are projects of the Tides Center, a left-of-center non-profit that also funds the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.
The groups have developed a “Blueprint for Shared Safety” that calls for framing safety as a public health issue and lists 25 steps with goals including “braking the cycle of harm” and “making the system work.”
The groups say they seek to “replace prison and justice system waste with common sense solutions that create safe neighborhoods and save public dollars.”
To the extent that the model envisions reducing the number of arrests as part of the solution, Evanston police may already be getting with the program.
Arrests declined substantially last year from 2019 and appear to be on track for a further substantial decline this year.
Evanston Now reported last December that violent crime rose, while property crimes declined during the first 10 months of 2020.
A police spokesman was unable to immediately provide updated data this morning and said that a shift to a new National Incident-Based Reporting System by the FBI would make comparisons with prior year data difficult.
The Reimaging Public Safety Committee is scheduled to meet at 4 p.m. Tuesday on Zoom.