The Reimagining Justice in Cully pilot project is a partnership between Multnomah County’s Local Public Safety Coordinating Council (LPSCC), Multnomah County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal, the Native American Youth and Family Center, Cully neighborhood social service providers and residents, the City of Portland, and the Portland Police Bureau. The goal is to empower residents to craft a neighborhood alternative to existing law enforcement models for low-level crimes. The resulting community-driven approach will improve community safety, facilitate access to needed services, and increase trust between residents, governments, and law enforcement.
The project serves as an implementation pilot of LPSCC’s Transforming Justice (TJ) project, a three-year, human-centered effort involving justice and health system leaders, elected officials, providers, victims and survivors of crime, and individuals with lived experience. The project brings these people together to develop a long-term vision of a transformed public safety system.
The TJ process identified 18 core strategies to achieve a fully transformed justice system, four of which are directly related to the work of the Reimagining Justice in Cully pilot project:
- Across everything we do, use human-centered, community-led design.
- Allocate funds to the community to create place-based solutions to public safety.
- Deploy interventions that reduce harm and use the criminal legal system in a more limited way.
- Prioritize community-building between law enforcement officers and the neighborhoods they patrol.
Multnomah County received a $2 million federal Bureau of Justice Assistance grant to fund the pilot.
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