Experts from the NYU School of Law Policing Project were back in Minneapolis on Wednesday, a year after Dr. Antonio Oftelie of Harvard University presented the city-commissioned Safe and Thriving Communities report, which laid out goals for improving crime response, prevention and restoration in the city.

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

“The thing that actually surprised me was that we actually have some things we’re doing right,” said Officer of Community Safety Director of Design and Implementation Amanda Harrington during exclusive interviews ahead of the City Council meeting.

“So that feels good, right?”

A big part of the “Asset and Gaps Analysis” update centered around efforts to divert as many 911 calls as possible to non-police services like 311, Traffic Control, Animal Control and the Behavioral Crisis Response (BCR) team.

That new analysis showed the city is currently redirecting roughly 9% of its calls for service.

“It’s big. It’s something that we were really pleasantly surprised about,” shared Alex Heaton, the Director of Reimagining Public Safety for the NYU Policing Project.

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

Asked what the primary gap is that would need to be filled to get there, Heaton said, “I think the number one thing that we saw is the governance. So it’s: How does the city manage the process of creating safety? How do they hold organizations accountable? How do they do goal setting? How do we share information between organizations, and really importantly, how do we tie them into each other to create an ecosystem, rather than just a lot of projects and things that are happening?”

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

Harrington said the other 33% of calls were missed primarily due to transportation and staffing logistics.

“The biggest issue is we had ordered vans and because of the backlog in the supply chain that everybody’s been dealing with, the vans didn’t get delivered for a long time, so they just didn’t have the staff or the vans to dispatch to the rest of the calls,” she said.

“So, they’re going to be able to be able to ramp up pretty quickly to respond to much more of the calls that were missed before.”

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

“I think Minneapolis is on track here to really be a national leader in this space,” Heaton added.

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

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

Among his recommendations to the city going forward, Heaton challenged the city to conduct regular assessments of its calls for service and take inventories of city services related to response, prevention and restoration.