In an in depth Q&A with Shelterforce, Mona Mangat, LISC’s vice president of safety and justice initiatives, discusses why safety and justice work is crucial for the community development field, what it can look like on the ground, and the challenges of working toward authentic criminal justice reform.
The excerpt below was originally published:
Community-Police Partnerships After George Floyd
By Miriam Axel-Lute, Shelterforce
Shelterforce spoke with Mangat about why she feels safety and justice work is crucial for the community development field, what that can look like on the ground, and navigating the fraught waters around criminal justice reform.
This interview has been edited for length and to provide additional context to some remarks.
Miriam Axel-Lute: Give us a little introduction to the work of your program.
Mona Mangat: The essence of our work is helping community-based organizations and local partners, which very often includes some form of law enforcement—mostly police departments, but very often sheriff’s offices, prosecutors, and, in certain places, working with judges and the court systems. We design collaborative/place-based strategies to address crime, to advance justice efforts, and to build not just safe communities, but vibrant, equitable communities.
Our focus is supporting problem-solving approaches to crime and criminal justice reform changes that are led by community-based organizations, and primarily community development organizations. Resident-led engagement is critical to this work.
Particularly in the summer of 2020, what we found is those communities that had deep partnerships with the police departments were able to navigate the protests and the uprising in a very different way, where they could still communicate with one another. We had a lot of examples of cities within our network that faced tough decisions.
What we found is partners chose to stick with those law enforcement partnerships. They chose to have boundaries, and they asked for systems change at the local level. But we didn’t see any of our locally based partnerships walk away from funding that required them to be at the table with law enforcement.
We also found that the work that we have been supporting resulted in an increased focus and expansion of programs like violence interrupters and street outreach workers. During COVID-19, it was remarkable to see the switch to how valuable they were, that those street outreach workers and trusted community ambassadors were needed for so much—guidelines for vaccines and connecting to resources, masks, trying to engage with the city on next steps, or working with youth that were no longer in school. We just found the model to be so valuable during the summer of crisis, both in response to the murder of George Floyd, and the pandemic. They were so resilient. Talking about safety and criminal justice work can often be so challenging at the community level, because there’s so many years of distrust, and the dialogues are just so real. They became really valuable partners for things outside of safety in a time of crisis.