Evaluating Harris County’s Public Safety Ecosystem: Alternative Response and Community Violence Prevention Programs
Communities face complex challenges that affect both health and safety, including unmet behavioral and mental health needs, housing instability, economic hardship, and exposure to violence. These challenges often increase demand for emergency response systems, health care services, and the criminal legal system. Increasingly, public health agencies and community partners are working alongside traditional public safety systems to address these underlying conditions and create more effective pathways to safety and stability.
AIR and Decision Information Resources (DIR) partnered with Harris County Public Health's Division of Community Health Violence Prevention Services (CHVPS) to evaluate two innovative programs designed to strengthen the public safety ecosystem, connect people to support, prevent violence, and improve community well-being.
Alternative response and community violence intervention programs are important components of this broader public safety ecosystem. Rather than relying solely on enforcement-based approaches, these models connect individuals and families to care, support, and resources while addressing the root causes of crisis and violence. They also draw on trusted community expertise, including credible messengers, community outreach workers, peer specialists, and multidisciplinary response teams.
AIR and DIR's Partnership with Harris County
To better understand the role of these approaches in promoting community safety and well-being, AIR and DIR conducted comprehensive formative, summative, and cost evaluations of two Harris County programs:
- Holistic Assistance Response Teams (HART): An alternative first-response program that deploys multidisciplinary teams to respond to non-emergency behavioral health, homelessness, and quality-of-life calls and connect individuals to appropriate care and support.
- Relentless Interrupters Serving Everyone (RISE): A community violence intervention program that uses credible messengers and hospital- and community-based outreach to interrupt violence, support individuals at risk of violence involvement, and promote healing and stabilization.
Through this work, we examined:
- How public health and community-based safety programs are implemented in practice.
- Whether programs are reaching the people and communities they are intended to serve.
- How effectively programs connect participants to needed services and supports.
- The resources and investments required to operate and sustain these models.
The evaluations found that both HART and RISE support Harris County's public safety ecosystem. Together, they demonstrate how public health-led approaches can complement traditional public safety systems by connecting residents to care, reducing burden on emergency response systems, and helping communities address the underlying conditions that contribute to violence, instability, and emergency service utilization.
Our approach centers the voices of those most directly involved and affected, including program staff, implementation partners, and community members receiving services. By generating actionable insights, we aim to support Harris County's efforts to build safer, healthier communities and better align systems around community well-being.
