Experts from the NYU School of Law Policing Project returned to Minneapolis on Wednesday, one year after presenting the Safe and Thriving Communities report commissioned by the citywhich set goals for improving the city’s crime response, prevention and restoration.

The presentation before a Minneapolis City Council committee Wednesday was a data analysis of the work the city is doing that meets the report’s goals and also listed gaps that need to be filled.

“The thing that actually surprised me was that we actually have some things that we do well,” Community Safety Director of Design and Implementation Amanda Harrington said during exclusive interviews before the City Council meeting.

“So it feels good, right?”

Much of the “Assets and Gaps Analysis” update focused on efforts to redirect as many 911 calls as possible to non-police services such as 311, Traffic Control, Animal Control and the Behavioral Crisis Response (BCR) team .

This new analysis showed that the city currently diverts about 9 percent of its calls for service.

“It’s big. It’s something we were really pleasantly surprised about,” said Alex Heaton, director of Public Safety Reimagining for the NYU Police Project.

The goal over the next ten years will be to double the number of forwarded calls to 20 percent, Harrington said.

Asked what the main gap would need to be filled to get there, Heaton said: “I think the biggest thing I’ve seen is governance. So: How does the city manage the process of creating safety? How do I hold organizations accountable? How do they set their goals? How do we share information between organizations and, very importantly, how do we link them together to create an ecosystem rather than just a bunch of projects and things going on?”

The analysis also found that last year, BCR actually responded to 67 percent of the 911 calls to which they were assigned.

Harrington said the other 33 percent of calls were missed mainly because of transportation and personnel logistics.

“The biggest problem is that we ordered vans and because of the supply chain backlogs that everyone was dealing with, the vans weren’t delivered for a long time, so they just didn’t have the staff or the vans to ship. on the rest of the calls,” she said.

“So they’ll be able to ramp up quickly enough to answer a lot more calls that were missed before.”

“The point here is that this is long-term and sustainable, and that’s why we’re moving the way we are,” concluded Community Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette.

“I think Minneapolis is on its way to really being a national leader in this space,” Heaton added.

“So really building the foundation of community safety that exists outside, especially law enforcement.”

Council members were mostly pleased and surprised to see the data analysis showing progress, reacting similarly to city administration.

Among his recommendations to the city, Heaton challenged the city to conduct regular assessments of its service requests and to take inventory of the city’s services related to response, prevention and restoration.