Trust-Based Policing, Reducing Violence and Crime Through Unarmed Community Responders, Ukrainian Nurse Sings Lullabies to Wounded Soldiers
Inspiring News Articles
August 25, 2024

[Captain Emada] Tingirides, 50, is only the second Black female officer in Los Angeles to reach the position of Deputy Chief. Since September 1, 2020, she has been in charge of the Department’s new Community Safety Partnership Bureau (CSP). “It’s about trust,” Tingirides says when asked to describe CSP. “The community has to hold law enforcement accountable, and law enforcement has to hold communities accountable. We ask the communities what they expect from us, and we take their goals seriously.” CSP represents a major shift in L.A.’s notoriously hardline approach to policing. But there’s reason to believe it could stick — independent studies have shown that the CSP has increased trust in police, reduced violent crime and saved the city millions of dollars. Under the CSP concept, police officers are stationed in an area for at least five years. They become part of the community, attend neighborhood meetings, organize soccer tournaments, hand out “Donuts for Dads,” and “Muffins for Moms.” They work closely with gang intervention workers, social workers, non-profits and, most important, neighborhood residents. “I thought all cops were bad,” a nine-year old boy admits. But now, he says, he loves Community Officer Jeff Joyce, who started “Nicks Kids,” a soccer club for youths. “Our methods are unconventional, and we are adaptable,” Tingirides says. “Each neighborhood is different.”

Many sweeping attempts to reform policing have faltered. But one proposal that has taken hold across the country, and continues to spread, is launching alternative first response units that send unarmed civilians, instead of armed officers, to some emergencies. In Dayton, Ohio, trained mediators are dispatched to neighbor disputes and trespassing calls. In Los Angeles, outreach workers who have lived through homelessness, incarceration or addiction respond to 911 calls concerning people living on the street. In Anchorage, Alaska, trained clinicians and paramedics are showing up to mental health crises. Researchers have tracked over 100 alternative crisis response units operating across the U.S. Some distinguish between mobile crisis teams, which exclusively send clinicians to mental health emergencies, and community responder programs, which send civilians to a wider range of calls. The key tenets are that they can be the first response to an emergency situation and that they arrive without armed officers. There have been no known major injuries of any community responder on the job. Eventually, a large portion of current police work could be handed off to alternative responders. A 2020 review of 911 calls ... estimates that up to 68% of calls “could be handled without sending an armed officer,” according to a report by the Center for American Progress and the Law Enforcement Action Partnership.

People experiencing mental or behavioral health crises and addiction have often been subject to police use of force, arrest and incarceration. [There are] efforts around the country to change that. One of the most common new approaches ... are civilian co-responder programs, in which behavioral health specialists, often social workers, show up to certain emergency calls alongside police. These can include situations like suicide threats, drug overdoses, and psychiatric episodes. Typically, the officers on the team have special training in crisis intervention. Generally, these teams aim to de-escalate any crisis or conflict, avoiding arrest and solving the reason for the emergency call, especially if it’s a simple one. This week, the New Jersey Monitor reported that one call “for a welfare check on a woman with anxiety ended with the [state] trooper picking up her new cell phone from the post office and fixing a broken toilet” and the emergency call screener setting up her new phone. The Monitor also found that the program avoided arrests or police use of force in 95% of responses. The B-HEARD program in New York City, which is just three years old in a diverse city of 8.5 million, responded to roughly a quarter of mental health calls in precincts where it operated in the first half of 2023. Mental health calls make up 10% of all 911 calls in the city. In Denver, a study of the city’s STAR program found the alternative response model reduced low-level crime.

Not long after Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Oksana Sokhan found herself in an evacuation minibus, wedged between two stricken soldiers in the dark, as the vehicle tried to safely get away from the front line. She began singing Ukrainian lullabies to the wounded fighters, and stroking them as a mother would. Their anxiety eased. If she stopped the soothing singing for a moment, she saw their anxiety surge again. “I was surprised myself that it worked – surely it worked on a subconscious level for both of them,” recalls the nurse. Ms. Sokhan still laughs about that moment of serendipitous support with the lullabies in the minibus, and about how – after they had all arrived safely at the hospital – a nurse came out to report that one of the men was convinced his mother had been with him during the evacuation. Ms. Sokhan may be just one senior nurse, but she is emblematic of the legions of Ukrainian military medics devoted to preserving the lives of the country’s outnumbered forces. For years a member of the 128th Separate Transcarpathian Mountain Assault Brigade, she has seen a whirlwind of casualties at different points along the front line since Russia’s all-out invasion. “We want to save everyone,” she says. “Of course, it’s very important to see the results of your work, because when they come here” the soldiers are traumatized, in pain, “and when they leave ... they are already waving sometimes.”

Biomimicry is grounded in the concept that nature, with its 3.8 billion years of evolution, has already solved many of the problems we grapple with today. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. Rather than designing new technology from scratch, scientists and engineers often look to nature for inspiration. In its approach, biomimicry involves three essential aspects: Emulating natural forms, mimicking natural processes, and imitating ecosystems. Nature operates under specific principles: it runs on sunlight, uses only the energy it needs, fits form to function, recycles everything, rewards cooperation, banks on diversity, demands local expertise, curbs excesses from within, and taps the power of limits. By aligning our technologies and practices with these principles, we can create not only innovative but also sustainable solutions to our challenges. Architects and engineers are designing buildings that mimic termite mounds, which maintain constant temperature despite external fluctuations. This biomimetic approach reduces energy consumption for heating and cooling. The self-cleaning properties of lotus leaves have inspired a whole range of products. The microscopic structure of a lotus leaf repels water and dirt particles. Today, we have self-cleaning paints and fabrics based on this principle. The bumps on the fins of humpback whales, called tubercles, increase their efficiency in water. Applying this concept to the design of wind turbines has led to blades that produce power more efficiently. Corals can heal themselves by producing an organic mineral in response to physical damage. Scientists have mimicked this process to create a type of concrete that can "heal" its own cracks.

The average American today spends nearly 90 percent of their time indoors. Yet research indicates that children benefit greatly from time spent in nature; that not only does it improve their cognition, mood, self-esteem and social skills, but it can also make them physically healthier and less anxious. “Outdoor time for children is beneficial not just for physical health but also mental health for a multitude of reasons,” says Janine Domingues, a senior psychologist in the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute. “It fosters curiosity and independence. It helps kids get creative about what they can do … and then just moving around and expending energy has a lot of physical health benefits.” [A] 2022 systematic review found that time outdoors can improve prosocial behaviors, including sharing, cooperating and comforting others. Research has found that nature can be particularly helpful for those who’ve had adverse childhood experiences. Such experiences can include growing up with poverty, abuse or violence. One 2023 study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology looked at how making art in nature affected about 100 children in a low-income neighborhood in England. Their confidence, self-esteem and agency all improved. For all these reasons, it’s important for even very young children to have access to nature where they already are, says Nilda Cosco, a research professor.

It sounds like a scene from a Spielberg film: an injured worker undergoes an emergency amputation, performed by one of her colleagues, allowing her to live another day. But this is not a human story – it is behaviour seen in ants. While it is not the first time wound care has been seen in ants, scientists say their discovery is the first example of a non-human animal carrying out life-saving amputations. Surprisingly, the insects appear to tailor the treatment they give to the location of injury. “The ants are able to diagnose, to some extent, the wounds and treat them accordingly to maximise the survival of the injured,” said Dr Erik Frank, from the University of Lausanne. Writing in the journal Current Biology, Frank and colleagues report how they cut Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus) on their right hind limb, then observed the responses of their nest mates for a week. “Nest mates would begin licking the wound before moving up the injured limb with their mouthparts until they reached the trochanter. The nest mates then proceeded to repeatedly bite the injured leg until it was cut off,” the team wrote. By contrast, no amputations were observed for the nine ants with injuries on their tibia, or lower leg. Instead, these ants received only wound care from their nest mates in the form of licking. “It is another example of an adaptation in the lives of social insect workers in which workers help each other to work for their colony and to help their colony,” [Prof Francis Ratnieks at the University of Sussex] said. “Such as when a worker honeybee makes a waggle dance to direct a nest mate to food, or when a worker sacrifices its life in defence of the colony, or here where workers amputate the limbs of an injured or infected worker.”

Ever since a 71-year-old Brazilian man rescued a struggling penguin, he's been receiving regular visits from his feathered friend. Joao Pereira de Souza, a retired bricklayer, lives ... just off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. In 2011, he spotted a starving Magellanic penguin drenched in oil on the beach near his house. Naming the penguin Dindim, Pereira de Souza fed him every day until he was strong enough to leave, according to a video from the University of Rio de Janeiro. But the penguin refused to go. Pereira de Souza decided to row a boat out into the water and drop Dindim off to encourage him to swim home. But when he rowed back to shore, he found the penguin waiting for him. "He stayed with me for 11 months and then, just after he changed his coat with new feathers, he disappeared," Pereira de Souza told TV Globo, a Brazilian TV network. Magellanic penguins regularly swim thousands of kilometres a year to breeding spots on the coast of Argentina and Chile. From time to time, penguins show up in warmer Brazilian waters. Many of Pereira de Souza's friends thought that when Dindim finally left, that was it for the human-bird friendship. But a few months later, Dindim returned and found Pereira de Souza. He visits for about four months, a ritual kept for the last five years. "He arrives in June and leaves to go home in February, and every year he becomes more affectionate," Pereira de Souza told TV Globo. De Souza appears to be the only person who can get near Dindim. If others try, he pecks them or waddles away.

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