I had the great opportunity to partner with Dr. Nick Crofts of the Centre for Law Enforcement and Public Health (Australia) to serve as the Guest Editor for a special issue of the Journal of Community Safety and Well-Being. The special issue, Envisaging Healthy and Safe Communities, shares lessons from a project we led that sought to document and highlight initiatives across the globe that are taking alternative approaches to promote health and safety.
Using Crafts to Find Common Ground – printmaking with veterans
David runs a nonprofit art organization, Frontline Arts, that uses craft, printmaking, and papermaking as a connective practice among veterans and also between veterans and other communities. It’s a way to find commonality in different yet familiar experiences, reclaim and tell personal stories, and build connection toward greater positive change.
Envisioning the Future: Police & Public Health
Happy to share a recent publication I wrote with colleagues for the Journal of Community Safety and Well-Being, a Canadian-based international journal founded on the principles of multi-sector collaboration. The piece details our current project to document practical examples from jurisdictions across the world of alternative approaches to solving entrenched social challenges and problems without relying upon a punitive and enforcement-led policing model
America’s recovery from COVID must include jails & prisons
s America struggles to claw its way out of the prolonged pandemic and looks to the incoming Biden Administration for a light in the tunnel, this light must shine on the crisis raging across American prisons, jails, and detention centers.
Police and Harm Reduction
Sharing the 2018 guidance document I wrote for law enforcement personnel around the world on practical steps they can take to advance public safety, public health, and public confidence, particularly in relation to drug enforcement. As overdose deaths, police violence, and public protests all continue to soar, this guidance has become even more important. There are other options to keep communities healthy and safe.
Police face backlash over virus rules. Enter ‘violence interrupters’.
Alternatives to police responses to community needs & conflicts are needed now more than ever.
But let us not stop with Covid. These & other approaches need to be invested in and prioritized now and in the future.
“Mexico Is Setting a Global Example on HIV Treatment” — But the president’s recent funding cuts to civil society organizations threaten to imperil their progress.
**Featured interview in this article by Anne Deslandes, published by Foreign Policy on November 13, 2019. Available here.** HIV in Mexico is once again a time bomb that will explode.” That’s how Aram Barra described the current trajectory of the immunodeficiency virus in the country at the International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science in Mexico City …
Book Launch—City of Omens: A Search for the Missing Women of the Borderlands – July 11 NYC
I am very happy to host this book launch and moderate the subsequent discussion with Dan Werb, Maia Szalavitz, and Dr. Patty Gonzalez-Zuñiga, and featuring Dan's new book City of Omens: A Search for the Missing Women of the Borderlands. Having visited and supported harm reduction and community safety work in Tijuana for the past several …
Public health programs are working to address drugs at the border — a wall won’t help
[*Originally published on January 31, 2019 by The Hill] In the center of the muddy courtyard beyond the plywood gate is a rusted-out car that three kids have turned into their playground. Outside, their mother and father meet with a pair of outreach workers. The man is an active heroin user; the woman hasn’t used …
Never mind the noise & lies calling for a border wall — Here are the daily actions saving lives along Mexico’s northern border
While President Trump & the White House made their political spectacle regarding the border wall, I was in Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, Mexico. I had been spending time with local, community groups who provide *harm reduction* based services & support for people who use drugs - especially people living on the street or in informal …