Durham’s New Vision for Public Safety

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When Durham established its Community Safety Department in July 2021, it was just over a year after George Floyd’s murder sparked a national movement to defund police departments. 

At that point, reform efforts were breaking against the rocks of rising crime, and the Durham City Council’s plan to eliminate vacant police positions to fund this new effort became a flashpoint in acrimonious fall elections, as The Assembly previously reported. 

But the department inched forward, launching its flagship program—the Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team, or HEART—last June. Among other things, the program dispatches unarmed responders to low-risk 911 calls that police once handled. 

There is no other like it in North Carolina.

HEART is still in a pilot phase, with its teams covering only a third of the city for about half of the day. But the program has already diverted more than 2,000 calls—about seven per day—and Durham officials seem to see it as an unequivocal success. 

There’s no longer a debate about whether it should grow. As City Manager Wanda Page prepares to propose her budget to the city council on May 15, the question is how big, how quickly—and how to pay for it. 

A citywide, 24/7 expansion would likely require at least tripling the department’s $4.8 million budget, no small lift for a fast-growing city with pressing needs, yawning economic disparities, and a stubbornly high murder rate. 

Reporter Jeffrey Billman embedded with HEART teams to learn about Durham’s public safety experiment, one that cities and researchers across the country are watching carefully. 

Durham’s New Model for Public Safety

The city launched its unarmed emergency response team amid a fierce debate over policing. Now the program is poised to expand, but how much depends on what leaders are willing to pay for it.

These programs have gained widespread support, even from law enforcement. But it remains to be seen whether that detente will continue as they grow and begin to compete with police departments for limited resources. 

“There’s a strong consensus that the current system is really not adequately meeting the needs of residents in crisis,” said Gabriela Solis, the Alternative 911 Emergency Response project leader at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Government Performance Lab. “Also, for the most part, we’ve seen that the police chiefs or sheriffs we’re working with, they understand that they don’t need to be the default response to a lot of calls.”

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The Brief

A bill the state House passed last week could make it easier for law-enforcement officers caught lying in one jurisdiction to get a job in another—without any clear way for the hiring agency to find out about past misconduct. 

Currently, local prosecutors can issue so-called Giglio letters, which indicate that they’ve discovered information about an officer that undermines their credibility as a witness. Officers who can’t testify often struggle to get jobs—which is why police refer to them as “death letters.” 

In 2021, for example, a deputy in the Clay and Cherokee County sheriff’s offices sued the district attorney, saying his Giglio letter meant he could “no longer obtain employment as a certified law enforcement officer.” That lawsuit was dismissed in February.

“Giglio” refers to a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the government must give the defense any evidence that could impeach the credibility of a witness. In 2021, the General Assembly established a database that tracks law enforcement officers who have received Giglio letters.

The database is off-limits to the public. But the law requires those who receive or issue a Giglio letter to notify the N.C. Sheriff’s Education and Training Standards Commission and the N.C. Criminal Justice Education and Training Standards Commission, which regulate training and certification. 

If an officer leaves one agency and goes to work for another, these commissions must inform the new agency and the local district attorney about the letter. The law also established an appeal process. 

But the bill that passed in the House would do away with the database. Without it, there would be no formal way for a new agency or DA to find out about an officer’s Giglio letter—which, in turn, means defense attorneys might not receive information about the officer’s credibility the Supreme Court required 51 years ago. 

Defense attorneys expressed skepticism in 2021 when a database was first proposed. 

Alex Charns, a Durham defense attorney, told The N.C. Watchdog Reporting Network that prosecutors will avoid issuing Giglio letters despite evidence of misconduct. He said he has worked on several criminal cases where a Giglio letter was not issued despite clear indications that an officer lied or misrepresented something in a report. 

“So if we’re not getting it now, how is a database that’s going to be incomplete, lacks transparency, and is secret going to help the matter?” Charns said. “It won’t.”

The bill is now in the Senate’s rules committee. It’s not clear when the full Senate will take up the bill. 

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