Denver Mayor Mike Johnston will launch a new office within city government focused on neighborhood safety — one that will be independent from the city’s police force and its safety department.

The Johnston administration’s plan, announced Monday, calls for creating the Denver Office of Neighborhood Safety at no additional cost to a city that already has had to make some tough budget decisions in 2024 to support its response to the migrant crisis. The city will transfer several existing safety programs to the office.

The concept of a community safety office is one that minority communities and progressives have pushed for since at least the George Floyd racial justice protests in 2020. But criminal justice reform advocates are already questioning if Johnston’s approach will bring meaningful change to the city’s public safety approach if it simply shuffles responsibilities within the same structure.

Over the next eight to 12 weeks, the city will relocate 65 city positions from the Denver Department of Public Safety to the umbrella of the new office. Officials also will transfer an estimated $11 million of already-allocated taxpayer money, Johnston said during a news conference outside the Boys and Girls Club location in the city’s Park Hill neighborhood.

“We believe that in order for these programs to be most accessible (and) most community driven … they should be built with an eye every day towards equity,” Johnston said.

He said the office’s key functions will include taking over management or oversight of:

All city youth safety programs.
The Office of Community Violence Solutions, which works with federal, state and local partners to reduce violence in the city.
The Assessment, Intake and Diversion — or AID — Center, which serves as a central connection point for people who need help accessing a variety of public safety and supportive services.
The city’s oft-praised STAR program, which stands for Support Team Assisted Response. It dispatches medical and mental health professionals to emergency calls that might not warrant a police response.

The neighborhood safety office will be housed within the city’s Office of Social Equity and Innovation.

Ben Sanders, the city’s chief equity officer and director of that office, said one of his first steps in standing up the new office would be convening a community advisory board to oversee and provide feedback on those efforts.

Johnston’s description of his hopes for the future of the STAR program under the new office echoed why many public safety reform advocates long have pushed for this change in Denver.

That program aims to remove armed police officers from situations where their presence might escalate rather than calm conflicts. The STAR program instead dispatches medical professionals to certain calls, such as when someone is having a mental health crisis but is not threatening the safety of others.

“One of the things we’ve heard in the past is we think we can actually increase the utilization of STAR programming if community members know they can access it without having to go through a traditional 911 or traditional police line,” Johnston said.

Among supporters of the idea of creating a neighborhood safety office are City Council members Shontel Lewis and Sarah Parady, who last fall co-sponsored a rejected budget amendment that would have freed up $500,000 for that purpose.

Administration officials are scheduled to brief members of the council’s Safety, Housing, Education and Homelessness Committee on the new approach Wednesday.

Lisa Calderón, the progressive criminal justice reform advocate who placed third in last year’s mayoral race, said she planned to be there.

Calderón is a leading member of the Denver Task Force for Reimagining Policing and Public Safety, formed in the aftermath of the 2020 Floyd demonstrations. She and fellow task force member Robert Davis briefed council members in February about their plans to create a community-led office of neighborhood safety and violence prevention that would operate with independence from the administration.

The task force held a separate launch event for that initiative Monday and accused Johnston of co-opting and watering down the concept.

“We do not see the city as a solution to what is harming us, because the city is part of what is harming us,” Calderón said. “And it’s as if the mayor’s administration doesn’t trust the community to come up with our solutions and get behind us and support it.”

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