Cross-Sector Collaborations between Public Health and Public 
Safety 
May 2014 
Voiceover: Beat Intro
00:00	
This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing 
topics facing our nation.
Vonda Matthews
00:08	
Hello and welcome. My name is Vonda Matthews and, on behalf of the COPS Office, I'd like to thank 
you for joining us in the first in a series focusing on promising innovations and cross-sector 
collaborations between public health and public safety, with the goal to improve the overall health and 
safety of our communities. Joining us today we have Barbara Raymond. She is part of the 
management team at the California Endowment. She is the director of neighborhood policy. Thank 
you, Barbara, for taking the time for this important discussion on seeding change, how small projects 
can improve community health and safety.
Barbara Raymond
00:40	
Thank you.
Vonda
00:41	
A couple of questions, if that's alright. The first one is; the California Endowment is a private statewide 
health foundation with a mission to build a strong state by expanding the access to affordable, quality 
healthcare to underserved communities, improving the overall health of all Californians. How does 
encouraging partnerships with law enforcement fall in line with this goal?
Barbara
01:02
At the California Endowment we do have a mission that is focused on improving the health of all 
Californians. About three years ago, we undertook a new strategic direction with a program called 
Building Healthy Communities. The point of that program was really to acknowledge that health 
happens to us in the broadest sense of the word. Health is much more that happens at the doctor's 
office or even any diets we are undertaking at any moment in time. Our health really rests on a lot of 
things in our community, including the quality of the air that we breathe, the type of the school that 
you go to and what services it has available to you, the food and the exercise that your children get at 
school. It has to do with whether there's access to healthy food in your community.
We know also that it has to do with the violence or safety that is happening in your community or that 
your community seeks. When we went to these communities across California as part of this new plan, 
we went to 14 communities in depth. They spoke—we did a needs assessment process with about 
20,000 residents—they unanimously spoke up and said, "You know what, violence in our communities 
is our number one health issue. Before you want to work on any other health issues, you must 
address violence. We have to be safe. We have to have safe parks. We have to have safe places to 
walk and exercise and all those good things before we can really address all the other health issues 
and access points you might want to be addressing."
That was a little bit of a wakeup call. We had been aware, the California Endowment staff had been 
aware, that violence had been an issue. But when the residents and the people of California said that 
with such a strong voice, we really turned too and tried to understand what that would mean for a 
health foundation to start really, more intensively, doing work in that zone.
What we know about violence prevention is that police are really your first line of defense and, some 
would argue, are really critical when it's time. Police are already the folks that are out in the community 
with residents. We started looking at what police departments were doing across the State of 
California, who was doing interesting things in the field of prevention, who was taking what we would 
call a public health approach to the field, and started really exploring that area of partnership with law 
enforcement a lot more intentionally. 
Vonda
03:21
The next step, basically, is how did you encourage that public health and safety collaboration? I know 
that California did offer seed money to a number of small projects too, besides the one you found. 
Can you speak a little about why the California Endowment got involved in the idea of encouraging this 
kind of cross-sector collaboration?
Barbara
03:41
Well it's really thanks to leadership from the COPS Office that we started to think very explicitly about 
what are the intersects between public health and public safety and how could we encourage people 
to think more intensively about this, especially on the public safety side. Director Melekian, at the 
time, who is from California—we were in touch with him. He was doing some real visionary things to 
improve the field of policing. We ended up having a meeting in California with a set of police chiefs and 
a set of public health officials to talk about how those two fields overlap and intersect, and what value 
they might bring to each other.
Through that discussion, which was really very energetic, and sparked a whole lot of thinking, I think 
most of the chiefs really came away saying, "Yeah! This is a relief that people are framing this as a 
health issue. It's a relief to know that safety isn't entirely up to the police but that there are other tools 
and other partners to access in the work police are doing every day."
The conversation was so alive that we thought, "Oh wow, we don't want this to end." We want to 
see—there seems to be a lot of energy around this.  Maybe if we put what we call mini-grants into the 
mix, we could start to seed some of the ideas that we were hearing in that original discussion. We 
offered a set of mini-grants to the police departments that were participating that day. I think that 
seven or eight departments, across the country but mainly in California, took up the offer for those 
grants. Each started to kind of do a version of what they thought was a public health-public safety 
collaboration.
Vonda 
05:16	
What have been some of the results from those pilot projects and the collaborations so far?
Barbara
05:20
One of the things that we really talked about was the need to look at your data much more carefully. 
It's a little bit like the SARA model in policing, actually. Public health professionals really think about and 
understand the fact that, if we want to understand an outbreak of disease, for instance, you have to 
look at the data, you have to look for patterns, you have to look for sources, you have to look for 
things that really give you a very detailed, concrete understanding of what the problem is. Not like a, "I 
think I understand this problem," but, "Oh yes, absolutely, people were at this pharmacy or this eating 
establishment, etc."
That's one of the underlying premises of the idea of using the public health model in policing. Several 
of the sites—and I'll talk about Milwaukee for a moment—really embody the idea that our data, as dry 
as that sounds, can actually bring our problems to light in a way that we can address them in a much 
more effective way. They have something they call a homicide review board that you can apply to any 
type of crime. They have interdisciplinary teams who come together on a regular basis. They sit down 
and they say, "OK, let's look at a crime type or we could also equally look at a location where this is 
happening, and let's understand everything about this problem."
One of my favorite interventions that they came up with, that's true in a lot of cities—there was a 
situation where girlfriends were carrying guns for their boyfriends. When Milwaukee realized that, 
they designed an intervention where they went to beauty shops and they passed on the information 
to the women who worked in the beauty shops to communicate with the girls getting their hair done 
saying, "Hey, what's going to happen to you if you're carrying these weapons? All these other bad 
things are going to happen and you really can't do that." They really saw some great effects just from 
that simple education effort.
Vonda
07:09
That's great. Are there other elements or pilot projects that look especially promising?
Barbara
07:14	
Another favorite of mine is right here in California, in East Palo Alto, with Chief Ron Davis. Ron really 
took this to heart in a way that we had no idea someone would do. He has a lot of interesting issues 
going on there. They have a high violent crime rate, despite being a rather small town. In the case of 
East Palo Alto, because it's a small geographic area, they're actually able to saturate the whole 
geographic area with the top modern technology. Instead of just using it to go after the fact and try to 
solve shootings or crimes, Ron had the smart idea, "Why don't we look at the shots-fired data, which 
was much more prevalent than the shots-called-in data, and get a much, much cleaner, 
comprehensive idea of what was really happening." They looked at two parks in those hot zones—
they looked at the hot zones, of course—they looked at two parks in those hot zones where the most 
shots were fired and said, "Hey, we can re-legitimize these parks. Why don't we put police out with 
community members doing something?" They coined this great term "Fit Zone," so they added a 
health element in this way as well. They went out and they walked and they had scooters and bicycles 
and skateboards and even those Segways, and they go out on a regular basis. I think it's every Tuesday 
night, let's say. Uniformed and plainclothes police are out with community members. They connect 
them up with clinics, health clinics, and community health outreach workers, and all sorts of other 
services. Mainly, their purpose originally was to just take back the space for legitimate purposes. It has 
been overwhelmingly popular in all sorts of trust-building, police legitimacy, amazing outcomes from 
that effort.
Vonda
08:57
That is interesting. In the new publication just out from the COPS Office, that [issue] might have been 
mentioned. In fact, Seeding Change: How Small Projects Can Improve Community Health and Safety, 
which does describe a second roundtable on a series of topics sponsored by the California 
Endowment, the COPS Office, and the Center for Court Innovation. You're quoted as saying, "Great 
things are happening in public health and public safety collaborations, but they haven't yet made the 
leap into the mainstream." Now that a number of projects have started, like the ones you mentioned, 
thanks to the seed funding from the California Endowment, what do you see as the next steps on the 
ground and in policy circles?
Barbara
09:35	
I think that the trick is always to go from what starts being an idea that a certain number of people are 
holding to an idea that does kind of make its way into the mainstream and to be known. I think it takes 
a combination of variables and efforts. We are trying to bring the ideas of public health and public 
safety to the field more intentionally, through conference panels at IACP, at PERF, at the different 
conference—Major City Chiefs, and COPS—of course, the COPS annual conference. We're working to 
encourage more sizable funding from other government agencies as well as ourselves. We're pitching 
other funders on this concept. We've had a lot of good reception to it. We can get more 
demonstration projects and more robust projects on the ground. You always need the evidence to be 
able to prove the concept and be able to say that other folks should be able to take this up as well.
We're working on the academic front, so to speak, and having articles in journals and other places 
where that audience can beef up this issue. The public health code has talked about violence as a 
public health issue for a really long time, for several decades, anyway. I think that the police and 
criminal justice folks haven't been as quick to understand the public health implications or the way that 
there are tools in things like public health crises that you could use for better policing. It's my bias to 
think that the police have a lot of great ideas so we're hoping that that side of the equation starts 
talking more and more about all the tools that they need to drop in to help them be most effective.
Finally, on the policy front, we work both in California with local jurisdictions and cities to understand 
what these approaches can do. We're encouraging partnerships between health departments and 
police departments. The COPS Office is, of course, working nationally with the Center for Court 
Innovations to talk to national policymakers as well about how you could incentivize funding streams 
and other things to support work like this. 
Vonda
11:36
We appreciate all your efforts along those lines. What are the challenges of encouraging any 
innovation that requires professionals to go beyond their fields of expertise and how can those 
challenges be met?
Barbara
11:47	
I guess I would say that I might argue that asking police to look at a problem from a public health 
perspective—which is to really understand the problem and then tailor the solution to the problem 
and then check on what you did—is really very much fundamental to police work. We don't do it all the 
time in the field of policing but it is, in my experience, the best examples of policing come from really 
getting a broad understanding, if you're trying to eliminate street-level, you know, an open-air drug 
market or other pervasive neighborhood and community problem. That's exactly what they did in East 
Palo Alto. They said, "Hey, wait a minute, what does my data show me? I'm going to that place and I'm 
not just going to put uniformed bodies on the street. I'm going to do something creative here. I'm 
going to do something new and, hopefully, get a new response."
In this particular case, I think that it's the highest form of policing and that many police officers and 
certainly police leadership is capable of thinking in this way. I think for me the challenge comes from 
just getting so busy and needing to do your daily work and how do you take a step back and think of 
something from a fresh perspective and say, "Hey wow, let's really improve community safety here if 
we just kinda tweaked our approach."
Vonda
13:01
I agree. And, again, your seed funding, I think, has really made a difference in allowing those people 
the resources to take that kind of fresh approach and your encouragement has been appreciated. Is 
there anything else you'd like to add?
Barbara
13:12	
I'm thrilled to see the COPS Office taking up these kinds of things. There's such a critical need for the 
voice and the national leadership that you all are providing. I just really want to thank the department 
for continuing to do work in this area. Policing always can be improved. Having the leadership come 
out of the national office is really critical.
Vonda
13:36
Well thank you, Barbara. We really appreciate you sharing your time and expertise with us and for the 
efforts that you're making out there, not only what you're doing but encouraging others to make a 
difference to make communities safer and healthier.
Barbara
13:48	
Thank you.
Voiceover: Beat Exit
13:50	
The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice, COPS Office. The COPS 
Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, 
developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems.
Voiceover: Disclaimer
14:07	
The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official 
position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, 
products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. 
Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.