194 [S3E41]: Rethinking "Public Safety" in Bloomington with the CAPS Commission

The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020 exploded into the national consciousness and raised many questions. One of the most important was: knowing that our society has plenty of biases, knowing that perception is reality for a great number of people, should we count on sworn officers alone to improve public safety?

In Bloomington, the city council approved a new commission to address that question. The Community Advisory on Public Safety (CAPS) Commission, approved in November 2020 and established in May 2021, was created to research and recommend evidence-based alternatives to traditional policing, including best practices anywhere in the world, for implementation in Bloomington. Their goal: to increase the safety of everyone in the community, especially those often marginalized due to race, disability, gender, sexual identity, or sexual orientation. 

Our guests today are Kamala Brown Sparks, a member of the CAPS Commission since its founding, and Councilmember Isabel Piedmont-Smith, a co-author of the ordinance creating the commission. We get into how the CAPS Commission differs from the long-standing Board of Public Safety, what initial conclusions the new commission came to, and how their work is going.