The BulleTin • Friday, april 23, 2021 A5
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Reimagining
policing needs
flexibility in funds
I
t’s not fair to ask police to do things they are poorly equipped
for. Rushing out to a 911 call about a suicidal subject with
police is much better than nothing.
But if you were to reimagine pub-
lic safety, it’s easy to imagine the bet-
ter response for that call and many
others would be to send a team that
includes a trained mental health
professional.
The Bend Police Department al-
ready has a community response
team that includes a mental health cli-
nician who goes with police on some
calls. Deschutes County has a Mobile
Crisis Assessment Team, or MCAT,
made up of mental health workers
who can respond to crises. And there’s
also some very encouraging news
about MCAT, as The Bulletin’s Gar-
rett Andrews reported in Thursday’s
paper. MCAT is going to pilot a pro-
gram to have it respond to 911 calls
from suicidal subjects. County 911
gets about three of those calls a day. If
it works, it could be expanded to in-
clude other kinds of calls.
Reimagining policing also in-
volves reimagining funding for pub-
lic safety. The state grant to enable
Bend’s program was for five years.
We would hate to see that program
end. And if MCAT is going to ex-
pand, that will take money, too, per-
haps $300,000 a year.
House Bill 2417 could be key. It’s a
bill to provide $10 million in match-
ing grants to cities and counties to
do the type of work Bend’s program
and MCAT can do. But as originally
written, the bill would not have done
much good for Central Oregon. It
was written narrowly to promote the
CAHOOTS model in Eugene.
The CAHOOTS program deserv-
edly has been in the national spot-
light as one model of using a team
to be the first responders to people
in crisis because of mental health,
homelessness and addiction. It uses
a medic and a crisis worker with
mental health training. Not police.
Reimagining policing also involves
reimagining funding for public
safety. The state grant to enable
Bend’s program was for five years.
We would hate to see that program
end. And if MCAT is going to
expand, that will take money, too,
perhaps $300,000 a year.
And it works.
But HB 2417 specified that the
grants were for teams that included a
nurse or emergency medical services
provider and a crisis worker. That is
the CAHOOTS model. Bend’s pro-
gram would not qualify. MCAT’s
team would not, either.
The bill also required that to qual-
ify for grant funding that a city or
county must have a sobering facility,
one shelter facility for every 65,000
residents, one crisis respite center
and law enforcement willing to help
— or equivalent services. That could
mean many communities across the
state would not be eligible for grants,
including Bend and Deschutes
County.
The bill was amended in early
April to be more broad. But it
doesn’t appear as if either Bend’s
program or the MCAT program
would qualify, at least as they are
currently set up. The city and the
county should not have to set up
completely new programs. The
grants should enable them to build
on what they already achieved, not
start over or compel them to incor-
porate something new into their al-
ready excellent work.
HB 2417 is due for some more re-
imagining in the Legislature.
Change in water rights
feels wrong to some
O
regon’s water law is — on one
level — about who was first.
So when there is not enough
water for everyone to get their water
right, people who have more senior
water rights get first dibs.
They can make a “call” to re-
ceive water. Users with junior water
rights get shut off until senior water
rights are satisfied, as the issue was
summed up for legislators.
The law now allows an automatic
stay, enabling junior water right
holders to prevent their water from
being shut off. As the Capital Press
described, that’s been an issue for the
Klamath Tribes. When it has issued
a call, by the time the litigation is re-
solved the irrigation season is over.
Junior water rights holders have
been able to get their water.
House Bill 2244 as amended
would speed up the process of re-
solving the automatic stay in nar-
rowly written circumstances.
This bill has been a debate about
Oregon water law. So it does not sat-
isfy everyone. For instance, some
farmers are worried it may hurt their
ability to irrigate. And it may, but
it seems to be on track to pass the
Legislature.
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor
Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are written by Richard Coe.
Embrace the community responder model
BY DEBBIE RAMSEY
Special to The Washington Post
W
hen I served the Baltimore
Police Department, I per-
formed a lot of unexpected
jobs. A parent once called emergency
services because the school crossing
guard did not show up to work, so
I filled in for the morning. Another
time, I was an animal control officer,
because a squirrel had found its way
into a man’s basement. I also once
acted as a utility company represen-
tative when a woman was alarmed
about her power being turned off.
And I can’t count the times I was sent
to manage people living on the street
and was expected to fill the role of so-
cial worker.
I managed to perform most of
these jobs reasonably well, and the
residents of my city were grateful. But
none of these situations required a po-
lice response. Every time I took one
of these calls, I was “out of service,”
meaning that the department could
not send me to investigate serious, vi-
olent crimes.
What’s more, police are not better
situated than anyone else to handle
these calls. In fact, we’re often worse.
Having an armed officer show up to
nonviolent, non-urgent situations is
bad practice because an officer’s pres-
ence alone may be enough to escalate
a problem unnecessarily. And the bur-
den of this risk falls on some of our
most vulnerable neighbors and loved
ones: People with untreated mental
illnesses are 16 times more likely to be
killed during a police encounter than
the average civilian.
What we really need to respond ef-
fectively to each call are community
responders.
Under the community responder
model, 911 operators direct behav-
ioral health calls to a team of unarmed
professionals such as social workers,
mental health professionals, medi-
ators and “credible messengers” —
people with strong local ties, usually
those who have overcome the same
issues facing their clients.
A recent report titled “The Com-
munity Responder Model: How Cities
Can Send the Right Responder to Ev-
ery 911 Call,” co-authored by the Law
Enforcement Action Partnership and
the Center for American Progress,
makes the case for this new approach.
Researchers analyzed 911 call data
from eight large cities, finding that
the majority of emergency calls were
low- or medium-priority safety issues
— those related to low-risk mental
health, drugs and homelessness and
other quality-of-life and administrative
complaints, such as neighbor disputes
and minor traffic accidents. Research-
ers concluded that many of these calls
could be safely diverted from police to
people who were better suited to pre-
vent and respond to crime.
The Law Enforcement Action Part-
nership and the Center for American
Progress estimate that community
responders could address 21% to
38% of police calls for service, while
an additional 13% to 33% could be
handled behind the scenes and with
proper call screening. The CR model
has great potential to ease tensions
between police and civilians, partic-
ularly in low-income communities
and communities of color that are
over-policed for minor issues and un-
der-policed for serious crimes.
With more police resources avail-
able, officers could focus on building
trust with community members. And
without the distraction of every non-
criminal nuisance and quality-of-life
issue in our precincts, we would have
the capacity to more thoroughly in-
vestigate violence and make arrests
that take predators off the street.
The CR model would be perfect in
my home city of Baltimore. There’s a
perception that Baltimore’s violence
is beyond fixing and that not enough
people are doing anything about it,
but our residents care deeply. They do
not trust police to create safer streets,
and public resources are scant.
I’m the founder and executive di-
rector of Unified Efforts, a community
nonprofit that provides children with
peaceable solutions to local problems.
We train the next generation to handle
serious neighborhood issues like gang
disputes, as well as everyday matters
like squirrels in basements and miss-
ing crossing guards at schools. If Bal-
timore had a CR program, the young
people served by Unified Efforts could
go to school for social work, train as
community responders and get mean-
ingful employment.
There is no single magic solution
that will repair police relationships
in our communities, and no single
solution for reducing crime. But I
am confident in the community re-
sponder model because the evidence
shows that the appropriate responders
for low-level crimes and noncriminal
problems are not, in fact, police. The
CR model creates a comprehensive
health and safety service network that
police, public health experts and com-
munity members can all get behind.
e e
Debbie Ramsey served for 12 years with the
Baltimore Police Department, retiring as a
detective. She is the founder and executive director
of Unified Efforts, an organization that engages
youth in conflict resolution, and a representative
of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, a
nonprofit group of police, prosecutors, judges
and other law-enforcement officials working to
improve the criminal justice system.
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As satellites proliferate in orbit, telescopes go dark
BY ADAM MINTER
Bloomberg
F
or millennia, humans have
peered into the night sky hoping
to divine their place in the uni-
verse. Telescopes and other technolo-
gies allowed them to look ever deeper.
Now that age-old custom is running
up against a very modern threat: sat-
ellites.
More than 3,300 operational sat-
ellites are in orbit, according to the
Union of Concerned Scientists. As
global demand for broadband and
other services soars, that number
could exceed 100,000 in the years
ahead. This has scientists worried:
Satellites reflect sunlight, causing
bright trails across the night sky,
which in turn can impede crucial ob-
servations or corrupt astronomical
data.
Without government action, the
rise of satellite constellations could
soon make ground-based telescopes
all but unusable — affecting every-
thing from the study of the stars to
the search for dangerous near-Earth
objects.
Astronomers have long had a
fraught relationship with technology.
Tensions date to the 19th-century gas
lamp. Cheap lights improved public
safety, enabled factories to keep longer
hours and allowed for the emergence
of nightlife. But by the mid-1800s, big
cities were so well lit (and so polluted)
that astronomers were losing sight of
the dimmest stars. In response, they
tended to decamp for remoter pas-
tures. When the countryside lit up,
too, they pushed out to the world’s last
dark places, such as the remote des-
erts of northern Chile.
Even those outposts weren’t entirely
free from interference, and research-
ers had to learn to filter out (for exam-
ple) radio and television signals. But
bigger telescopes and better technol-
ogy still allowed them to scan the cos-
mos effectively.
In 1997, Motorola Solutions Inc.
made that task more difficult when it
launched the first of dozens of com-
munication satellites in a “constella-
tion” around the Earth. Now operated
by Iridium Communications Inc., the
array provides global voice and data
coverage. But its powerful transmitters
also interfere with the bands of radio
spectrum allocated (under interna-
tional agreement) to scientific instru-
ments like telescopes. That interfer-
ence is growing worse every year, as
more and more satellites come online.
SpaceX has already launched more
than 1,300 satellites for its broadband
network, called Starlink, and has been
authorized to send up nearly 12,000
in total. OneWeb plans to have some
7,000 in orbit in the next few years,
while Amazon.com Inc. wants to
launch 3,236. Meanwhile, China is
preparing for two constellations with
a combined 12,992 satellites.
Last year, dozens of researchers
from around the world met virtu-
ally to study the risks these launches
pose. Results are being presented this
week at the Committee on the Peace-
ful Uses of Outer Space at the United
Nations. Their conclusions are grim:
“The situation for astronomy is reach-
ing a point of no return from contin-
uous interference with observations
and loss of science.”
Fortunately, SpaceX and OneWeb
have publicly recognized these dan-
gers. SpaceX, in particular, is working
with astronomers to “darken” its sat-
ellites so that they have less impact on
observatories. But even if both com-
panies devise reasonable solutions,
there’s no assurance that their com-
petitors (public and private) will do
the same.
As a start, bodies such as the UN
should be raising the alarm and
studying possible solutions to this
problem. Existing agreements for div-
vying up radio frequencies could be
a starting point for new talks on mit-
igating satellite risks. Governments
should also create satellite-licensing
agreements that require companies to
protect essential scientific efforts. And
operators should follow SpaceX’s lead
in reaching out to scientists and incor-
porating their needs into technology
designs.
There’s no going back to the dark
nights of our ancestors. But with some
foresight, policymakers should be able
to ensure clearer skies into the future.
e e
Adam Minter is a Bloomberg columnist.