Police violence is an area of concern for many communities. Establishing public health-informed, alternative response programs—separate from law enforcement agencies—is one approach to reduce police violence and give communities a more diverse set of tools with which to respond to crises and support community health and wellbeing. Such programs have the potential to improve health outcomes, especially for communities that are disproportionately harmed by the police.

This episode of the Population Healthy podcast provides a rationale for developing and implementing alternative response programs to policing informed by public health principles of care, equity and prevention. We talked to two researchers from the University of Michigan School of Public Health Department of Health Behavior and Health Education to understand the research and data on alternative response programs.