SAFE-T Act – Safety, Accountability, Fairness
Illinois
Comprehensive reform including cash bail elimination and police accountability.
Exceptional Impact Potential
AltReform's model rates this initiative in the top tier for predicted reform impact. It scores highly across recidivism reduction, racial equity, cost-effectiveness, and political feasibility. This type of reform, when fully implemented, has historically delivered measurable system-wide improvement within 3–5 years.
Policing Reform Context
The front door of the criminal justice system.
Policing reforms address use of force, accountability, and the criminalization of poverty and mental illness. With 25–50% of police calls involving mental health, shifting to co-responder or alternative dispatch models reduces arrests, improves outcomes, and saves municipal costs. Effective reforms pair policy change with community oversight mechanisms.
Impact, Operations and Cost
This reform has demonstrated strong projected impact in Illinois, scoring in the top tier of AltReform's evaluation framework. Programs of this type and quality consistently outperform the status quo on recidivism reduction, cost savings, and racial equity outcomes. As of 2021, this initiative is enacted into law and accumulating outcome data.
Policing reform initiatives restructure how law enforcement agencies respond to specific situations, particularly mental health calls, low-level offenses, and community relations. Co-responder models pair officers with licensed mental health clinicians for appropriate calls. Crisis Intervention Teams provide specialized de-escalation training. Use-of-force policy reforms set binding standards with accountability mechanisms. Community oversight boards provide civilian review of complaints and policy recommendations.
Co-responder programs cost between $800,000 and $2 million annually for a medium-sized city, compared to the downstream costs of unmanaged crisis response including hospitalization, prosecution, and incarceration. Use-of-force policy reforms are largely administrative in cost, typically under $200,000 for training updates and policy revision.
Policy adoption and training deployment typically requires 6 to 12 months. Co-responder program launch, including hiring and training, takes 12 to 18 months. Measurable impacts on use-of-force incidents, arrest diversion, and community trust scores are typically available at 18 to 24 months.
- →Up to 70 percent reduction in use-of-force incidents in mental health call contexts when co-responder models are used
- →50 percent diversion of mental health calls away from arrest outcomes
- →Improved community trust scores in areas with active oversight structures
- →Reduction in officer injuries during mental health-related calls
Similar Reforms in Other States
Data Sources
Program data sourced from state legislative records and the National Conference of State Legislatures. Impact metrics from Bureau of Justice Statistics, RAND Corporation criminal justice research, Vera Institute, and The Sentencing Project. AltReform scores generated by our ML model trained on 20+ years of state-level reform outcomes. Statistics are the most recent available (2021–2024).