Can prevention make communities safer while freeing police for serious crime? Harris County’s HART and RISE results make a powerful case for changing public safety.
Summary
Harris County has spent four years testing a different definition of public safety: prevent crises before they become arrests, shootings, jail bookings, or emergency-room visits. Commissioner Rodney Ellis now wants the county to stop treating the Holistic Assistance Response Team (HART), the Relentless Interrupters Serving Everyone (RISE), and domestic-violence interventions as temporary experiments and make them permanent parts of the safety infrastructure. The proposal seeks another $4.5 million, bringing the annual community-safety investment to about $15.3 million.
- HART sends the right professional to the right crisis. The county’s Holistic Assistance Response Team (HART) uses health and social-service professionals for appropriate calls involving behavioral health, homelessness, substance use, and other nonviolent crises. The county report says HART has handled more than 30,000 calls that otherwise could have required police or EMS.
- RISE attacks violence before retaliation creates another victim. The program uses credible messengers with deep community ties to mediate conflicts, reach people at highest risk, and connect residents to services. The county report says RISE has recorded more than 24,500 community engagements and prevented at least 150 violent incidents, with 34 additional potential acts interrupted between October 2025 and March 2026.
- The people doing the work explain why lived experience matters. RISE workers Samuel Jurado, Marcus McDay, and O’Quine Nickles described how community roots and personal histories create trust that traditional institutions often cannot manufacture. One interview snapshot cited 23,084 engagements, nearly 190 prevented violent events, 6,285 service linkages, and extensive hospital-based intervention.
- The neighborhood trends deserve attention without pretending one program caused every decline. The proposal reports that firearm-related homicides fell roughly 40%–46% from the 2021 peak across the five ZIP codes served by RISE, compared with a 37% decline across Houston. Cypress Station also experienced a 48% decline in family-violence crimes and a 34% decline in aggravated robberies since 2023.
- Ellis wants permanence, scale, and accountability. The report recommends expanding HART toward 24/7 operations, growing RISE in additional high-need neighborhoods, sustaining domestic violence assistance, improving data reporting, and eventually establishing a dedicated Community Safety Department.
Public safety cannot remain synonymous with punishment after the damage is done. Harris County has evidence that trained health responders, violence interrupters, survivor assistance, law enforcement, and emergency services can work as complementary parts of a single safety ecosystem. The government must spend more energy preventing human suffering and less money on processing its aftermath.
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Harris County Tested Prevention. Now It Must Decide Whether Prevention Deserves Permanence.
For decades, American politics has sold the public a cramped definition of safety. A crisis occurs, police arrive, somebody gets arrested, an ambulance rolls, a prosecutor files charges, and taxpayers pick up the tab. Politicians then call that public safety.
Harris County has spent four years testing something smarter: intervene before the crisis becomes a crime scene.
Commissioner Rodney Ellis is now asking Commissioners Court to invest an additional $4.5 million in community-safety strategies, bringing the annual investment to roughly $15.3 million. The money would expand HART, strengthen RISE, sustain domestic-violence interventions, and help institutionalize a model built around prevention rather than reaction.
HART demonstrates the premise clearly. Behavioral-health crises, homelessness, substance-use problems, and quality-of-life calls do not automatically require an armed officer. Harris County’s Holistic Assistance Response Team instead sends trained professionals to appropriate 911 calls. The county’s report says HART has responded to more than 30,000 calls, freeing law-enforcement and EMS personnel to concentrate on situations that actually require their training.
That is not anti-police. It is intelligent deployment of public resources.
RISE applies the same logic to gun violence. Relentless Interrupters Serving Everyone employs credible messengers—people who know the neighborhoods, understand the conflicts, and often possess lived experience that gives them legitimacy with people who will never open up to a uniformed stranger.
The interviews with RISE workers reveal what statistics cannot. These men do not parachute into communities with a clipboard and disappear. They know the streets. They know the families. They know what incarceration, violence, exclusion, and second chances look like. O’Quine Nickles explained that workers come from, or have strong ties to, the communities they serve, giving them the buy-in necessary to reach people before violence erupts.
The numbers reinforce their testimony. Harris County reports more than 24,500 RISE engagements and at least 150 prevented violent incidents during its first four years, plus another 34 potential acts of violence interrupted from October 2025 through March 2026. The workers themselves cited an updated operational snapshot—23,084 engagements, nearly 190 prevented violent events, and thousands of service connections—showing why the county should standardize and continuously publish its performance data.
The broader evidence supports the model while counseling against simplistic claims. Johns Hopkins researchers have found that Baltimore’s Safe Streets violence-interruption program has been associated with meaningful reductions in homicides and nonfatal shootings, though results vary substantially by location. A 2026 study found an overall association with a 42% decline in youth homicides and a 21% decline in youth nonfatal shootings across studied neighborhoods, but researchers cautioned that site-level effects varied and were not always statistically significant.
That nuance strengthens the case for investment rather than abandonment. Good public policy measures result in improvements for weak sites, expand strong ones, and refuse to confuse ideology with evidence.
The fiscal debate also matters. Harris County faces a projected $181 million budget shortfall, and some commissioners have questioned whether creating a separate Community Safety Department would add unnecessary administrative overhead. The Houston Chronicle reports that commissioners have generally supported programs such as HART and RISE even as support for a new standalone department remains uncertain. That scrutiny is legitimate. Every public dollar deserves accountability.
But austerity cannot become an excuse to protect expensive downstream systems while starving cheaper upstream interventions. The county report estimates that the proposed community-safety investment represents only a small fraction of law-enforcement spending and argues that prevention can reduce reliance on jails, courts, and emergency healthcare.
The choice is not police or prevention. The choice is whether government will use every effective tool available.
Harris County has conducted the experiment. Now it should refine it, rigorously measure it, fund what works, and make prevention a permanent pillar of public safety.
