Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis is seeking to expand and centralize a trio of programs into a new department designed to alleviate strain on the county's overburdened criminal justice system.
Ellis' Community Safety Department would cost an additional $4.5 million next fiscal year - a modest request that comes at a precarious time for Harris County financially. While the county's budget is expected to top $3.1 billion, commissioners and budget officials are currently working to bridge a projected $181 million deficit for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, and have already approved cuts to other county programs.
The department would serve as an umbrella for the county's crisis-response, violence-intervention and domestic violence-support programs. All three have existed for several years but would expand within a new, centralized hierarchy.
The goal, Ellis said in an interview, is to boost programs that stop crime at the source.
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"For too long, public safety systems have been structured to respond only after a harm has occurred," Ellis said. "Where we fail to address the root causes of crisis and violence, such as poverty, people get trapped in the same cycle again and again. Families and entire communities suffer, and that suffering comes at a tremendous human and financial cost."
Ellis' proposal is a Houston spin on an idea recently adopted by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who launched the city's Office of Community Safety in March.
Ellis' fellow Democrats on Commissioners Court have generally been supportive of the programs that would form the core of the new department, but concerns about the viability of small departments and the bureaucratic load they add have been mounting in recent years. None of the other court members have publicly pledged to support Ellis' idea.
The county currently spends $10.8 million on the programs the new department would house. A report Ellis commissioned recommended growing that to $15.3 million in the coming fiscal year, then to an additional $18.2 million in fiscal year 2028.
But it's a model that experts and law enforcement officials say could save taxpayer money. More than half of the county's $3 billion budget is allocated to law enforcement, courts and the jail. Housing an inmate in the county jail costs taxpayers $105 per night and securing a conviction costs more than $2,000, according to estimates included in the report.
Coupled with indigent healthcare and legal costs, the report claims the department will more than cover the cost of Ellis' proposed investment.
Nancy Sims, a political science lecturer at the University of Houston, said any program that helps take pressure off of the county's criminal justice system is worth exploring.
"One of the most expensive items in public sector budgets right now is public safety," said Nancy Sims, a political science lecturer at the University of Houston. "Anything that will help shift those costs or lower them is a positive."
Roughly $1.4 million of the county's initial investment would go toward creating the new department, and the remainder would expand its core programs.
Among them are the county's Holistic Assistance Response Teams, which dispatches unarmed first responders to nonviolent police reports, such as those involving homelessness and mental health crises. Building on a similar initiative first launched by the City of Houston in the early 2000's, officials and experts have touted the program as an effective deescalation tool that also frees law enforcement to pursue violent offenders.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said there has been "a growing interest in alternative response models," like HART - a program he's watched grow from a small pilot initiative into a robust countywide service.
Not everyone in law enforcement views these programs as effective, said Jay Coons, an assistant professor at Sam Houston State University. But he said research shows they have utility when paired with traditional police.
"Responding together is the best of both worlds," he said. "This way, you can have a trained mental health technician that does the heavy lifting on a call, unless the situation calls for an arrest or use of force."
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The report Ellis commissioned recommends hiring 15 additional staff in the coming fiscal year: five additional two-person teams and five more support staff. The program could be expanded again the following year to nearly 100 employees and a total annual budget of $8.8 million should demand keep pace, according to the report.
The report also recommends expanding the county's violence interruption program, which embeds specialists in high-risk areas and hospitals with the goal of preventing revenge shootings and breaking cyclical patterns of violence.
The program currently has 20 staff members and a roughly $2 million budget. The report recommended allocating an additional $617,734 next fiscal year to fund nine more staff and supplies, along with a second investment of $761,712 the following year to bring its headcount up to 36 employees.
The final component is a $1 million allocation to a fund managed by the Harris County Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, which is distributed to local nonprofits or as direct assistance to victims of domestic violence.
Barbie Brashear, the coordinating council's director, said the funding would help determine whether effective but temporary programs become permanent.
"We have built and tested innovative approaches," she said. "Now we have to decide whether successful innovations remain temporary projects, or become part of how Harris County does the business and work of ensuring public safety."
The four Democratic members of Commissioners Court have consistently supported programs like the county's crisis intervention teams, but it's unclear if Ellis has the three votes needed to create the new department.
The court's Democratic majority has, since the 2018 Blue Wave that brought them to power, created a suite of new departments that have seen varying levels of success. The Office of County Administration, the Department of Economic Equity and Opportunity and several other small offices created since 2018 still exist, but others folded amid budget constraints and concerns about administrative burden.
Two departments - the Office of Justice & Safety and the Commissioners Court Analyst's Office - were both absorbed by the county administrator's Research and Analysis Division, which itself was eliminated in budget cuts last year.
The county administration office itself remains a point of controversy - Commissioner Adrian Garcia, a Democrat, joined Republican Commissioner Tom Ramsey last year in a short-lived bid to shutter the department, which serves as a centralized authority over the dozens of departments that report to Commissioners Court.
Garcia, who did not respond to a request for comment, said at the time he was concerned with what he saw as a bloated bureaucracy taking root in Harris County. Although Ramsey supported naming Erica Lee Carter county administrator earlier this year, he has opposed the department since its inception.
Ramsey also opposed the proposed Community Safety Department, a spokesperson said in a statement, arguing that some of its components overlap with services provided by the city of Houston and Harris Health.
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"Commissioner Ramsey does not support spending funds on creating more layers of county government or expanding programs that duplicate services already provided by the county and its partners," said Amery Reid, a spokesperson for Ramsey. "Harris County should be focused on affordability by prioritizing its statutory responsibilities, not adding more layers of government bureaucracy."
Commissioner Lesley Briones, meanwhile, said she supports investing in crisis response teams and violence interrupters, but did not say whether she wanted to create another department to house them.
"Every budget season, I've proudly advocated for HART, RISE, and domestic violence support services. The data is clear. These programs are producing measurable results, and should be scaled," Briones said in a statement.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said ongoing expenses associated with a five-year package of law enforcement raises may limit the court's ability to establish a new department.
"I am not sure that colleagues who have rushed through large expenses, like the police raises, without knowing where the funding would come from have left us enough room to fund community initiatives that prevent problems before they happen," Hidalgo said in a statement.
Commissioners will finalize the budget in September. Commissioners are expected to consider the proposed Community Safety Department during a meeting Sept. 8.
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This article originally published at Commissioner Rodney Ellis proposes $4.5M for new Harris County department focused on community safety.