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Global Crises, Local Impacts: Strengthening Community Safety Through Collaboration Between Local Police, Social Workers and Healthcare Professionals

Publication Date:

18/11/2025

Content Type:

Event Reports

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community safetyGlobal CrisesGlobal Crises Local ImpactsHealth Care ProfessionalsLocal ImpactsSocial Workers

— 13 minutes reading time

This report provides a summary of discussions during the webinar and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Strong Cities Network Management Unit, Strong Cities members, event sponsors or participants.

Summary

On 18 November 2025, as part of its ongoing Global Crises, Local Impacts webinar series, the Strong Cities Network hosted a session on Strengthening Community Safety Through Collaboration Between Local Police, Social Workers and Healthcare Professionals. The series is part of Strong Cities’ Global Crises, Local Impacts Initiative, launched in late 2023 in response to growing requests from cities to provide support and peer learning as they try to navigate the local impacts of successive and concurrent global crises, including climate change, migration and the conflict in the Middle East.

The November webinar explored city-led prevention and response through coordinated, multidisciplinary approaches between police, social workers, and healthcare professionals. These collaborations help cities strengthen their violence prevention efforts as practitioners can identify and address, through comprehensive support, early signs of mental health and other crises that may escalate into violence if left unaddressed. Local police and city health and social services practitioners working as part of these multi-disciplinary teams shared lessons learned, good practices and challenges from their work in effectively navigating complex community challenges such as mental and behavioural health crises, homelessness and interpersonal conflict so as to improve community safety and well-being outcomes.

• Arlington (Texas, United States)
  • Lt. Kimberly Harris, Arlington PD Behavioral Health Law Enforcement Unit, City of Arlington (Texas)
• Columbus (Ohio, United States)
  • Anita Clark, Assistant Health Commissioner, Columbus Public Health
  • Chris Mayfield, Emergency Communications Center Manager, City of Columbus (Ohio)
• Mechelen (Belgium)
  • Ilias Marraha, Head of Social Prevention, City of Mechelen
• Peel Region (Ontario, Canada)
  • Feras Ismail, A/Superintendent, Peel Regional Police

Key Takeaways

• Trust is integral to successful cross-sector collaborations and is built through personal relationships, co-creation and joint decision-making and training with partners.
• Tension between disciplines is natural and best addressed by working collaboratively and in good faith to build mutual understanding and goals.
• Institutionalising programmes and partnerships is key to sustaining cross-sector collaborations and prevention work. This includes embedding programmes in standard operating procedures and securing political and funding support by engaging city leadership and community partners consistently.
• Establishing data protection protocols with collaborators can safeguard against privacy violations and ensure trust and institutionalisation in the information-sharing process.
• Demonstrating results through quantitative data, human stories and engagement with local elected leaders and other city decision makers can help secure structural funding for cross-sector collaborations oriented towards prevention.

Key Themes

Collaborations

City of Arlington (Texas) Police Lt. Kimberly Harris, who is also a licensed professional counsellor, has helped lead the city’s Behavioral Health Unit since its formation in 2021. She shared that the unit’s goal is to safely address behavioural health challenges through identification, intervention, referral and education. The unit includes specially trained Arlington police officers, a crisis intervention specialist, a community outreach officer and an intelligence and threat assessment officer. The team collaborates with area agencies, service providers, hospitals, community-based organisations and other stakeholders to promote trauma-informed, human-centred interactions with those facing behavioural health challenges.

Anita Clark and Chris Mayfield of the City of Columbus (Ohio) introduced two of the city’s alternative crisis response programmes: Right Response Unit and Mobile Crisis Unit. The former embeds a social worker from Columbus Public Health in the Emergency 911 call centre to triage calls, de-escalate crisis situations and help connect patients in crisis situations with appropriate resources. It started as a pilot in 2021 in partnership with the Columbus Police Department and Emergency Communications Center and operates Monday through Friday, 9:00 am to midnight. The latter pairs specially trained Columbus Police officers with Columbus Public Health clinicians to de-escalate and stabilise crises. Launched in 2015, the City took over the Mobile Crisis Response Unit from a partner organisation in 2021.

Feras Ismail, Superintendent at Peel Regional Police (Ontario, Canada) described the development of the region’s Countering Hate Committee, a collaboration with local government and more than 25 community partners and agencies focused on co-creating solutions to address the manifestations of hate and discrimination. The Committee brings together individuals impacted by hate along with service providers to develop presentations, training and resources to raise awareness and increase understanding of hate crimes and reporting. Initially launched under the leadership of the Peel Regional Police in 2023-24 with funding provided by Public Safety Canada, a second stream of funds – from the Government of Ontario – was recently approved for the next three years.

As Head of Social Prevention at the City of Mechelen, Ilias Marraha shared collaborations between social workers, non-governmental organisations and local police in the social prevention space. Following terror attacks in nearby Brussels in 2016, the city and national governments began prioritising the prevention of radicalisation and violent terrorism. Working with partners and youth, collaborators began to see the similar dynamics behind radicalisation to extremism and recruitment to a criminal environment. This resulted in programmes and efforts focused on prevention and intervention among youth and adults. These efforts include small committees that include police and social workers who together share intelligence and make action plans to move individuals at risk to safer environments that offer opportunities to make improvements in their lives.

Overcoming Challenges

Speakers agreed that although establishing trust among partners was the most difficult challenge, it proved to be the most integral aspect to successful cross-sector collaborations. In the Peel Region, for example, police used several strategies to develop relationships and establish trust in the development and implementation of the Countering Hate Committee. During the committee’s first meeting with community partners, police leadership acknowledged that, due to past experiences, there was likely inherent mistrust of police. They began with an acknowledgement of past harms done and shared their goal of breaking down silos and co-creating solutions together, symbolised by a blank whiteboard, demonstrating commitment to co-creating solutions. During several months of meetings, the committee hosted sometimes difficult and vulnerable conversations on the impacts of global crises locally and personal experiences with hate and discrimination. Over time, these exchanges helped build personal relationships and trust amongst collaborators. Six months into committee meetings, other community groups heard about the work being done and reached out to join as collaborators. Police were further able to exhibit trust in their partners by ceding leadership of the initiative to two community groups and staying engaged as active participants in the committee. Understanding that trusted messengers play a crucial role in community outreach and trust, the committee decided that community partners, rather than police, would go into communities to deliver education, training and encourage reporting. This strategy allowed the committee to gain community trust and support.

In Columbus, collaborators required time and proof of success before trust was firmly established. For the Right Response Unit programme, call takers and dispatchers are trained to transfer calls with a mental health nexus to clinicians who are better suited and trained to assist individuals in crisis. However, when the programme initially launched, call takers and dispatchers were hesitant and, at times, even refused to transfer calls to clinicians, concerned that they could be held responsible if an incident escalated and the clinician was not equipped to handle the call. As a result, for the first year of the programme, leadership focused on building trust between call takers, dispatchers and clinicians. Using the marble jar theory of trust, Anita Clark explained how staff in the unit built trust gradually, through small, consistent actions, akin to adding marbles to a jar. Unit leadership also built trust by clarifying roles and responsibilities on both sides and providing a better understanding of how staff could utilise each other for help. In addition to processing emergency calls, clinicians were also engaged in the additional role of debriefing, especially emotional or difficult calls with dispatchers and call takers after the fact. This helped foster trust within the team and allowed staff to better understand the value clinicians could bring in their roles. Leaders also established quarterly meetings with alternative crisis response programme teams to review and discuss barriers and successes.

Lt. Harris echoed the importance of investing time in fostering relationships and mutual understanding in the trust-building process. She emphasised that rather than approaching the work of the Behavioral Health Unit from two separate disciplines (i.e. law enforcement and mental health), which may cause tension, police and clinicians should work together to bridge gaps in understanding and expertise. An early strategy in the unit’s operation was pairing a police officer with a clinician who is both open to moderating between their two cultures. Witnessing the success of these officer-clinician pairings, the unit was able to attract additional staff and continue to grow the programme. The unit’s leadership also began utilising these pairings to help fill an information and education gap within the two sectors. Clinicians were directed to help train healthcare agencies and hospitals on how to best assist and communicate with law enforcement. And police officers instructed their agency’s partners on how they can better support clinicians as they connect residents with mental health supports.

Mechelen’s Ilias Maraha also underlined the importance of creating a culture of trust, which is especially hard to maintain due to high turnover in the sector, through multiple strategies in Mechelen. These include forming strong relationships and a shared language early to ensure effective communication. Police officers and clinicians in Mechelen review real-life case studies and discuss each sector’s process in prevention and response. They also engage in regular training on emerging issues impacting community safety and assess how both sectors can collaborate to address them. The collaborators also host weekly case table meetings (and a separate bi-weekly meeting solely focused on youth) with frontline workers, sharing information and updates on cases involving mental health concerns. A monthly meeting brings together stakeholders from the police, justice system and social services to better coordinate client needs and services. Social workers and police officers also contribute to emergency and intervention plans for clients in need of additional and closer government support.

Information Sharing

Speakers shared how having information sharing protocols in place can help protect confidentiality, enhance coordination of services and ensure legal compliance.

• The City of Columbus engaged their City Attorney to help ensure its alternative crisis response programmes remained compliant with relevant patient privacy regulations when coordinating with its public health and other partners.
• The City of Mechelen also ensures sensitive data protection by limiting information sharing to must-know information.
• The Peel Regional Police and Arlington Police Department established information-sharing Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) with their programme partners to facilitate a more complete understanding of clients and cases and ensure better coordinated support and outcomes.
• To better connect residents with services, the City of Arlington’s Behavioral Health Unit developed a Behavioral Update Card (BUC) to serve as a simple communication device which includes relevant information on individuals when partner agencies or police in nearby jurisdictions encounter them.

Programme Sustainability

To ensure sustainability, speakers noted how they have worked with colleagues in their city to institutionalise programmes and partnerships and secure structural funding. For example, Lt. Harris highlighted the importance of gaining internal and external buy-in that extends beyond individual champions who lead the current programme. She shared that the Behavioral Health Unit has continuously worked to secure this support by building and expanding community partnerships, implementing separate uniforms for staff to ensure broader community acceptance and communicating programme results to internal and external stakeholders beyond quantitative data. She added that MOUs with programme partners and local government funding also helped to ensure the unit’s sustainability.

Ilias underscored the need to report programme success stories in addition to quantitative data in order to secure and sustain political and funding support. He also underlined the importance of local government leaders advocating for funding support in higher levels of government. 

In Columbus, Anita and Chris have used an online data dashboard to share success stories with state and regional government entities and include community voices in decision-making surrounding the programmes to help ensure that political and funding support for the efforts can be sustained. In addition, Mayor Andrew Ginther has approved additional funds for the expansion of a civilian team that will work alongside the Mobile Crisis Unit and a community advisory team will also be established to aid in the continued development and refinement of the city’s alternative crisis response programmes.

Feras Ismail shared how the Peel Regional Police embed programmes like the Countering Hate Committee in the PRP’s standard operating procedures, directives and guides to ensure continuity of services and sustainability. The PRP also actively lobbies on behalf of CHC partners by co-creating data, co-presenting to stakeholders and providing letters of support to ensure they get the resourcing they need. The PRP also leverages social media to share the committee’s work and success with the public. To date, the committee has provided over 150 presentations to 8,000 residents and hosts a yearly symposium with the support and participation of local government leadership and the committee’s funder, Public Safety Canada (PSC). Superintendent Ismail noted that PSC was so impressed with the committee’s community engagement and demonstration of success at the last symposium that they approved an additional three-year funding stream.

Next Steps

This event was the latest in a Strong Cities webinar series for mayors, city representatives and other local stakeholders for timely discussion and exchanges of approaches around Global Crises, Local Impacts. On 18 June 2026, Strong Cities will host a webinar on Cross-Sector Collaboration in Secondary Violence Prevention, presenting a new Guide for US Cities, Law Enforcement and Mental Health/Social Work Providers, which was developed by a group of graduate students at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs in collaboration with Strong Cities.

Please sign up for Strong Cities Network’s mailing list to receive invitations for upcoming webinars and other events.

Additional Resources

• Sixth Global Summit: Secondary Prevention through Whole-of-City Collaboration, Strong Cities Network (January 2026)
• City Leadership in Partnering with Local Communities for Social Cohesion: Ten Considerations for Mayors and Local Governments, Strong Cities Network (Updated February 2026)
• A Ten-Step Roadmap for Enhancing City-Led Support for Community-Based Programmes to Address Hate and Extremism, Strong Cities Network (Updated February 2025)
• National-Local Cooperation: Opportunities and Lessons Learned for Secondary and Tertiary Prevention, Strong Cities Network (Updated July 2025)
• A Toolkit for Cities: Building a Multi-Actor Local Prevention Framework, Strong Cities Network (updated October 2025)
• A Guide for City-Led Response, Strong Cities Network (Updated February 2025)
• A Guide for Cities: Preventing Hate, Extremism & Polarisation (see Navigating Difficult Issues), Strong Cities Network (Updated April 2025)
• A Guide for Mayors: Preventing and Responding to Hate, Extremism & Polarisation, Strong Cities Network (Updated March 2025)

Contact Information 

For more information on this event, the webinar series, or the Global Crises, Local Impacts initiative, please contact our team at [email protected]. 

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