The Los Angeles City Council announced it is launching a new public safety plan to combat crime. The training program will cost taxpayers $2.2 million, and will provide therapy, yoga, and healing circles to the more than 100 "community intervention workers" who "are exposed to high-trauma environments."
Project TURN (Therapeutic Unarmed Response for Neighborhoods) is intended to be an unarmed alternative to law enforcement intervention to combat crime and create gang prevention strategies. City Council public safety committee chair Monica Rodriguez told NBC's City News Service:
Community public safety workers are regularly exposed to high-trauma environments and providing comprehensive training and support, is an important principle of how our city will create transformational change and strengthen our public safety response and create a more equitable investment in a community-based public safety model (...) We want to avoid a crisis before we are in one.
Reducing police presence in neighborhoods
Rodriguez said that this new initiative will reduce police presence in the neighborhoods. The councilwoman argued that community intervention workers help prevent violence, as they are in charge of obtaining information from community members and handling criminal situations long before the police arrive.
The effectiveness of Project TURN will be determined in part by the continued success of community workers in de-escalation situations, according to Rodriguez.
Aqeela Sherrills, co-founder of the Community-Based Public Safety Collective, said that these people "know the terrain, they know the families.... And they will have more intelligence in terms of what's happening on the street than the police will ever have." However, they must be careful, as it is a job that involves a lot of risk:
At $40,000 a year, workers are underpaid for a job that involves a lot of risk and that mediation requires maintenance (...) That is why it is so important to incentivize practitioners in the neighborhoods.
