Mace mess, housing and public safety top City Council’s priorities list
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The fix to the fix gets underway in August 2019 at Cowell and Mace boulevards. Owen Yancher/Enterprise file photo
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Fixing the Mace mess, creating a sanctioned camping site for the homeless and shoring up the city’s Housing Trust Fund are among the priorities the City Council on Tuesday directed staff to focus on over the next six months.
Those items are in addition to the city’s efforts to reimagine public safety by moving some duties out of the Davis Police Department as well as working with the county to create a Crisis Now model to respond to individuals in the midst of mental health or other crises. Two council subcommittees have been focused specifically on those efforts for several months and will continue to do so, city staff said.
Council to welcome Chapman; take up police reform
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The Davis City Council will bid farewell to one member and welcome another on Tuesday evening, and then turn to one of the more significant issues before them this year: policing and public safety reform.
At their last meeting, council members received a set of recommendations that included shifting non-violent service calls to unarmed personnel; decriminalizing victimless offenses and expanding crisis services for behavioral health emergencies.
More than 160 people called in during that Zoom meeting’s public comment period, with about 90 percent of commenters urging the council to move forward on those recommendations as well as the others put forth by a joint subcommittee.