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Experts outline pros and cons of housing Urbana’s community responder program under police, fire, health or nonprofit
Summary
Speakers described tradeoffs: police‑embedded programs can ramp up quickly but face background‑check and trust issues; health or fire departments and nonprofits offer alternative grant eligibility, benefits and community trust tradeoffs.
Urbana’s task force spent substantial time weighing which agency should operate a community responder program, hearing contrasting lessons from two practitioners who helped stand up response teams in other cities.
Anne Larson, formerly with Olympia’s crisis response unit and now at the NYU Policing Project, described Olympia’s path of contracting with a nonprofit at startup and later making responders city employees under the police department. "We did contract with an external behavioral health organization for about the…
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