500 Lives Campaign
Missouri
St. Louis community violence intervention program.
Strong Reform Potential
This initiative shows strong predicted outcomes across most impact dimensions. Minor gaps in political feasibility or implementation complexity are the primary risk factors. With adequate resourcing and stakeholder alignment, high success probability.
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 shows meaningful projected impact for Missouri. It addresses core systemic drivers with evidence-supported mechanisms, though targeted improvements to its weakest dimensions would significantly increase effectiveness. As of 2020, this initiative is actively operating 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).