Hey, this is Will James. One thing we talk about in Lost Patients is how our systems for managing mental health care and our systems for managing crime have blended together. Police here in Seattle responded to nearly 10,000 scenes of people in crisis last year. One of the only remaining paths into Washington state's largest psychiatric hospital is through jail.

But some cities around the U.S. are trying to change that equation. They're trying to disentangle mental health care from policing, setting up new branches of emergency services that specifically handle mental illness, addiction, and homelessness. These changes have, not surprisingly, created some friction. We're talking in many cases about taking responsibilities away from police and giving them instead to unarmed mental health care workers —

I wanted to share a recent podcast series that tells this story. The team behind the podcast Tradeoffs has teamed up with the Marshall Project to put out a special three-part series called The Fifth Branch.

It tells the story of what happened when one city upended the way it used to handle emergencies and built a new branch of mental health specialists. Here's the first episode of the fifth branch. It's called Convincing the Cops, and it covers the origin story of a new community safety department in Durham, North Carolina, and the conflicts and challenges that emerged in those early days.

You can find all three episodes of The Fifth Branch wherever you get your podcasts.

The phone rings a little after 6, a sunny August evening in 2022. Police Chief Patrice Andrews picks up. One of my deputy chiefs said, so we have a barricaded person? The deputy tells Patrice the man had a history of mental illness. The family is worried he might hurt himself. They're asking officers to force him to go to the hospital. Officers are now camped outside the house. And the man is making threats. He said...

I'm not coming out. And if you come in, I'm going to shoot you all. The deputy tells Patrice a hostage negotiator is now on scene and he's about to call the SWAT team. And I said, well, wait, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let's hold on. Let's let's let's talk about this for a second. Patrice takes a breath. A cop for more than 20 years. She wanted everyone to take a breath.

Whether, you know, he would have shot an officer or officers would have shot him. I didn't, I don't have a crystal ball, but I tell you there were the makings in that for maybe it not to end well. Patrice knew what she wanted to do. I said, let me call Ryan.

Ryan Smith headed up a brand new department in the city, a radical experiment in public safety. Patrice knew the last people Ryan would send would be a SWAT team. Ryan would send a social worker. I'm Dan Gorenstein, and this is The Fifth Branch, a special series from Tradeoffs and The Marshall Project on what it looks like when one community dramatically changes how it responds to people in crisis. ♪

Police in America have shot and killed 1,939 people in the middle of a mental health crisis since 2015. That's 20% of all police killings in the last decade. One of every five.

Those numbers are helping fuel a movement. Cities like Denver, Albuquerque, Houston, Louisville, and New York have launched what are called Alternative Crisis Response Programs. Instead of armed police, a new generation of responders, EMTs, and social workers now handle 911 calls involving mental illness, addiction, or suicidal thoughts.

These programs have kept popping up as we reported on America's mental health crisis, and we wanted to know whether they're working. So about a year ago, we gave Tradeoffs producer Ryan Levy an assignment. Find a city doing this work. We wanted to find a place that experts thought could be a model for other cities. They needed to be serious about data and be willing to let me spend a bunch of time with them.

I talked to several interesting programs, New Orleans, Denver, Rochester, New York. In the end, we went with Durham, North Carolina and its holistic, empathetic assistance response team, what locals call HEART.

National experts were big fans. They did it the right way. Thinking, designing, assessing, researching, evaluating. And then they went to work. And Hart was willing to give us a lot of access. I interviewed their leaders. I knew that it would be hard. I knew that it would be messy. Dozens of their responders. Is there a level of risk in this job? There is.

Do I consider it an acceptable risk? I do. I rode along on 911 calls. Interviewed their critics. And met with people who called Hart in crisis.

Ryan and I agreed. It made sense to tell this story out of Durham. In the two years since the program launched, curious officials from 50 cities around the country have reached out to Hart with lots of questions. Over the course of three episodes, we're going to focus on a few of the biggest. How did Hart get off the ground? Does it keep people safe? How big should Hart be today?

Ryan will begin at the beginning, how Durham pulled off what many cities struggled to do, getting the police bought into a new way to treat people in crisis. From the studio at the Leonard Davis Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, this is Tradeoffs. You're going to hear from a lot of people I talked with during my five trips to Durham this year.

But there are three folks in particular I want you to meet. Patrice Andrews, I am the chief of police for the Durham Police Department. My name is David Prater. I'm a peer support specialist with the Durham Community Safety Department's HEART team. I'm Ryan Smith. I'm director of the Durham's Community Safety Department. Patrice, David, and Ryan stand out to me because they're the ones who best helped me understand why the city is transforming the way it responds to people in crisis, how they're doing it, and whether it's working out.

So you'll hear from them a lot throughout the series. They all told me that the story of Heart begins in late June 2020. Hundreds marched through downtown Durham. See us black people, let me tell you something, we are talented.

We've seen these protesters hit the streets here in Durham for almost 10 days now. Yes, there are some quote-unquote good cops, but if you're letting the bad ones keep doing what they're doing, you're just as bad. The protests here look a lot like they do across the country, following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Signs, chants, calls to reform the police —

Protesters paint the word defund in bright yellow letters on Main Street with an arrow pointing to police headquarters. A few blocks away, the word fund in the same crisp yellow with an arrow pointing toward the Department of Social Services. These protests spark City Hall to launch an independent review of Durham's 911 data.

They find that violent crime represents less than 2% of all calls. Trespassing, verbal disturbances, and mental health crisis calls make up much of the rest. So to respond to those calls, city leaders earmark $3 million in June 2021 to create the community safety department.

They tapped Ryan Smith to run it. This work, in part, is about helping people imagine something that they may not have imagined. This new agency gives Ryan a chance to solve an old public safety problem. Your house is on fire, we send fire. You're having cardiac arrest, we send EMS. There are shots fired, there is violent crime or criminal activity, we need to send law enforcement. But people call 911 for a whole bunch of other reasons.

And most of those reasons, because we haven't had another branch to sort them into, have gone to law enforcement. For decades, Durham had four branches of public safety. 911 answering the call, police, fire, and EMS. City leaders want Ryan to build a fifth branch, where 911 dispatches social workers and other mental health workers instead of armed officers. They give him 12 months, one year, to design this new branch of the public safety tree and convince his town that it'll be safe.

I think most communities are afraid that if they're sending social workers and others that someone's going to get hurt and killed. Unarmed response in the U.S. has actually been around for a while. The first programs to send mental health workers to 911 calls date back to the 1980s. 27 of the country's 50 largest cities have now launched or piloted alternative response programs.

To build his, Ryan talks with several of them, Denver, San Francisco, Albuquerque, and he learns how safe this work can be. This work, in part, is about helping tell the story of what this is looking like in other communities. These are the calls they're already sending these types of responders to. All the bad things that you're worried about, we're not seeing evidence of that. Ryan designs a program with four parts. Put a mental health worker inside 911, who will resolve some calls over the phone.

Deployed teams of unarmed social workers, EMTs, and people with lived experience to respond to nonviolent calls involving mental illness and homelessness. For crisis calls that involved the threat of violence, 911 would dispatch a clinician and a specially trained Durham cop. The last piece, HART teams would work with people to connect them to longer-term help after a crisis call. Ryan knows this is audacious. No other city he'd found had a model this comprehensive.

If what we're really doing is about, you know, sending the most appropriate response, then I want that to be available for as many people in as many moments as possible. To do that, though, Ryan has to figure out how to deal with this. I'm like, this is going to be a disaster. I said it is not going to go over well. A whole lot of officers in the Durham Police Department, like Sergeant Dan Leder there, see this new department as an attack.

Ryan understands their point of view. The idea of this new branch came from the defund protests. Based on what he learned from other cities, Ryan believes getting police buy-in gives the whole enterprise its best shot. One thing that I've noted is the inability to get law enforcement buy-in can lead to programs like ours being much smaller than they need to be or is warranted. A quick word about why Ryan seemed up to this challenge.

He's calm. The 45-year-old is quick to empathize and slow to anger. And behind his khakis and button-downs, Ryan has this quiet intensity to him, a spirit that just keeps pushing. Finally, and this is random, but it'll make sense in a minute, he's got a bird name. My bird name is Chickadee.

It's an important part of our identity in the department. Actually, everyone at heart has a bird name. Ryan's assistant director came up with the idea, a kind of department bonding thing. Ryan got Chickadee. Can you give me the short version of why Chickadee for you? Here, let's go. I'll read it to you. Ryan reads to me from a colorful printout. Chickadee's move in a small group.

It's taped to his office window in City Hall. Ryan is good at seeing problems and finding solutions.

If he can get Durham's police leaders on board, he thinks they can help him persuade all the skeptical rank-and-file cops. For the police chief to say, yes, this is good work, to me that was the dream. Can I make that happen? Turns out...

Ryan was lucky. Are you ready, Chief? Yes, ma'am. It's December 2021. I. I. State your name. Patrice Andrews. Patrice Andrews stands on stage at North Carolina Central University, the same historically Black school in Durham she'd attended 30 years earlier. And bear true allegiance. And bear true allegiance. To the state of North Carolina. Dressed in her Black ceremonial Durham Police Department uniform, she takes her oath, becoming the city's 33rd police chief.

There are a few things I want you to know about Patrice. She comes from an old Durham family. Her dad integrated city schools. She worked as a beat cop here for 20 years. But here's the most important thing. She's taking this job at 48 in part because she wants to reduce the harm police can cause. Patrice grew up hearing stories from her parents about the racism and harassment they faced. Law enforcement was an extension of an oppressive government.

I mean, just in a nutshell. Patrice worried as a Black woman what some people in the Black community might think about her being a cop.

Patrice's dad gave her some advice. You have to do the work. And if what you're trying to do is make law enforcement better, you're trying to make an impact, then you have to stay focused on that, not worry about how people view you as a Black woman in this field. Patrice determined all those years ago to be the kind of cop that would make everyone feel safe. She struggled sometimes, though, to find her identity in the uniform.

There were times where I knew that some of the force that I saw and participated in was excessive, right? But how do you call that out? How do you, it's very hard to call that out when you don't necessarily feel like you would be supportive.

and supported in doing that. That I will endeavor. That I will endeavor. To support. To support. As she prepares to become Durham's top cop, Patrice understands law enforcement's opposition to Hart runs deep. But she also understands firsthand how hard it can be for cops to respond to a person with mental illness. I remember responding to a call, and there was a woman that was seeing things in her home.

Patrice had been on the force for a few years by this point. She and her partner had driven to the home of a woman who had repeatedly called 911, saying there were intruders. It quickly became clear there were no intruders. She'd point to a lamp and she'd say, they're behind the lamp. And so we'd go over there and say, you're trespassed, you can't be here. Patrice and her partner hoped chasing these figures away, these figures only this woman could see, would bring her some peace. But she called 911 again.

And again. And we kept saying, you can't call us anymore for this. You know, we've told the people to get out of your home and they're out. You can't call us anymore. Don't call us anymore. She kept calling. We didn't know what to do. We didn't have the knowledge, the professional knowledge on how to work with someone that clearly was going through this.

A moment of crisis, the only thing we knew to do was take her to jail because for us, that was solving our problem. It felt so wrong. You know, you hear the word ick. It was the biggest ick, one of the biggest icks I've ever had in this career. Patrice never learned what happened to that woman, just that the calls stopped. I often wondered, did we harm her? Did we harm her mentally more?

In doing that, did it serve a purpose aside from our wanting her to stop calling 911? Patrice spent 20 years seeing the limits and the abuses of policing. I knew right from wrong, but I didn't necessarily know how to change a system that had seemingly always done it the wrong way and had gotten away with it.

She had learned change could come through policy, by becoming a supervisor, a leader, a chief. So help me God. So help me God. Congratulations, Chief. And now, she's ready to be that change. I am going to be unapologetic about saying, you're wrong, that's wrong, and, you know, we're going to fix this.

The ceremony ends, crowd thins. As she heads home, Patrice thinks to herself that Hart, this new unarmed public safety response, offers her, and really her whole department, a chance to do better. For cops to do their best work, and for Hart to do something different. We can do both. We can have a wonderful, professional police department. We can also have amazing public safety partners in Hart.

Now, she just has to convince a few hundred deeply skeptical officers. After the break, Patrice and Ryan Smith map out a plan to get rank-and-file cops bought in.

Is there more to this story? Help us tell it. We want to hear about your experiences with crisis response teams. What advice would you give to someone considering calling a response team for themselves or for a loved one experiencing a mental health crisis? Go to tradeoffs.org slash the fifth branch to share your story.

and join us for a virtual discussion on August 15th, where we'll answer your questions and share your insights. More information at tradeoffs.org slash the fifth branch.

Welcome back. Tradeoffs producer Ryan Levy has spent much of the past year on the road, or on the phone, talking with people in cities that are trying to find new ways to respond to mental health crises. In Durham, and more than two dozen of the largest cities in America, that means sending unarmed social workers rather than police. And

As we heard before the break, cops have often been skeptical of alternative crisis response programs. Police Chief Patrice Andrews and Ryan Smith, the head of HART, hoped to chip away at those fears. A tall task. Again, here's Ryan. Cops were pissed. Nothing is ever 100%, but it was darn close. This was a bad idea.

Police Sergeant Dan Leder spent one Saturday in the fall of 2021 with some other cops at headquarters listening to Hart director Ryan Smith make his pitch. He was in a very tough spot. The director had to try to convince a bunch of cops that, you know, this is something you need to buy into. And, you know, it wasn't going over very well. Police Chief Patrice Andrews had started to notice Rankin filed a reaction to the new department.

Eye rolls, officers muttering about agendas, the woke generation. One senior officer asked Patrice, what's this BS about being defunded through heart? That's why Patrice had invited Ryan to these meetings, to come talk with every single patrol officer, hundreds of cops. She wanted to give them a chance to get into it. You had to break down perceptions. You know, you had to break down feelings and you had to create environments where people could speak openly and honestly.

The officers had plenty to share with Ryan. I said, I just want to make sure I understand. If there's a disturbance call and I'm around the corner, we have to wait for the clinician who's across the city. I did not think it was going to work. I thought it was a very bad idea. The cops had lots of concerns. Most of them came down to fear. Fear for residents, fear for their jobs, fear for the safety of the new responders. If they're going to deal with some of the same people that we've had to deal with,

Like, if we're getting assaulted, what's going to happen to them? Ryan Smith expected this big blue wall. In the meetings, he could feel the existential dread in the air. The city was hemorrhaging officers. 58 left the department between June 2020 and the end of 2021. 8% of their total staff driven away largely by the pandemic and the protests.

Sergeant Dan Leder said plenty of rank and file felt unfairly lumped in with the Minneapolis officer who murdered George Floyd. What did we do?

We're good cops. We didn't do anything wrong. Why are we having to go through this? First, there'd been that huge defund arrow spray-painted on the street, and now all this about new responders. Things are changing, and this is a train that is not stopping. No matter how much you don't want to do this, guess what? You're doing it. There was a lot of trepidation about, well, what is this going to mean for us? How is this going to affect what we've been doing for years? The cops were right. Hart was happening.

Ryan wasn't showing up for these weekly pummelings to cut some kind of grand bargain. He wanted officers to be prepared for this change and maybe earn a bit of goodwill. With police, we needed to build confidence that we could do this and not get someone killed. Point blank. But building that confidence, Ryan knew, was going to take time. That was true for community activists, too.

To convince them that HART was truly an alternative crisis response program, he co-hosted virtual town halls with the advocates and held smaller in-person focus groups in English and Spanish. It was clear to me that it had to be a very intentional effort. It had to be consistent. You weren't going to do it with a few words or small gestures. These steps, the town halls, the focus groups, the meetings with cops, this was Ryan trying to live up to his nicknames.

The Chickadee shows us how working in a cooperative team means more eyes and ears and fewer opportunities for predators.

Throughout the end of 2021 and the first half of 2022, Ryan Smith and Chief Andrews addressed rumors, tried to reassure officers. We just needed to make sure that our officers knew that this is not, we're not replacing you. You still have work that you need to do as a law enforcement officer. They used data to walk through officers' fears that Hart would put people in danger. Everyone's going to have that, well, I remember this time when this one trespass call happened.

ended in a gunshot and an officer was hurt. That's a valid thing. We name that and then we look at the data and put that into context that that happens on like less than 1% of 1% of the time. Ryan and Patrice agreed to ditch the plan to have the social workers and cops arrive on scene separately. And still, they were a long way from getting most rank and file officers bought in. On June 28th, 2022, Hart launched. Hello, Durham 911. Clinicians started answering 911 calls.

Unarmed social workers, EMTs, and peer support specialists jumped in vans and hit the streets. They respond to homeless people panhandling. How you doing, buddy? What's your name? People thinking about suicide. He acknowledged that he attempted to kill himself. Parents passed their breaking point. It's all screaming and hollering and throwing stuff and kicking stuff.

Sergeant Dan Leder listens to it all unfold on his police radio. Certain he's going to hear social workers screaming for the cops to come save them. That's not what he hears. So I'll hear these calls come out. I'll hear the corresponders or the heart team responding to it. And you don't see it come back. I mean, the call's been handled. Whatever it is they're doing, they're doing it right.

And the call doesn't come back again. Much to Dan's surprise, these new teams seem to be doing just fine. But there was still a bunch of skepticism and suspicion. Some officers would swoop in and respond to calls meant for Hart. Others would ignore orders to wait for Hart before engaging with a scene. This lingering pushback from officers frustrated Chief Patrice Andrews. She wanted them to see that Hart could make their jobs better, safer.

Which brings us to that August night in 2022. Heart's been live for less than two months when Patrice gets the call about that barricaded man making threats. He said, I'm not coming out. And if you come in, I'm going to shoot you all. The commander outside the home is proposing a SWAT team. At that moment, Patrice knows busting down the door could lead to violence, exactly what she wants to avoid. So she gets Ryan on the phone. I said, look, this is what I have.

I know that you all are done working for the day. And is there any way that someone can go out? She called me and I told her that I would reach out to Abbott. Abbott is one of our clinical managers. So I get the call from Ryan.

I was with my children. I had just picked them up from school and we were headed home. I knew something was going on because it was after hours. Hart, in the early days, shut down for the night at 5. I got home, got my children settled, let my husband know kind of what was going on. And then I called Chief Andrews to get a little bit more information and details on the situation.

Patrice tells social worker Abida Bediako, cool the temperature down. Convince the man to go to the hospital. Abida's done this job for 20 years. She lives for moments like this. Some of the officers were already like, yeah, he's not really going to talk to you. But you can try. And I smiled because I'm like, OK, I'll try. The five foot one social worker digs in.

She calls the barricaded man's father. Dad tells her that his son has been hospitalized before. Abana calls the man. He was just angry. And so...

Her calls keep getting interrupted. Dad calling son, son calling dad. Up and down the street, Abana paces. Abana on the phone keeps repeating herself.

You're okay. Let it out. It's fine. And we're going to be with you. After Abana guesses about an hour of calls, the man relaxes. She gives officers the thumbs up. Officers eye Abana like, oh my goodness. He let officers come and search his room to make sure that, you know, he was okay. The man cooperates. He asks Abana, can I stay tonight? Go to the hospital tomorrow?

Abana calls Chief Andrews. Abana said, well, he's not a danger to himself. He is intoxicated. Let's give him a moment. Let's check back in with him. And so we went about it a different way. The next day, Abana drives the man to the hospital. A police escort follows. The man checks himself in. Crisis averted. This was a huge moment for the Young Department. The idea that Hart was useful to cops was spreading.

Patrice saw it. Officer said, oh, so we can call them for this is great. This is great. So that means that we don't have to do this. We wouldn't have to do that. And they can help us. Sergeant Dan Leder saw it, too. When I'm wrong, I'm the first one to raise my hand and say, you know what? I was wrong. These people are going to help you. They're going to make your job and your lives on this job easier. For Ryan Smith, this incident captured what he'd been saying to officers for the last year.

Most people do not think that story can end with that person just walking out without any handcuffs on, with no use of force, and be transported to hospital because he has threatened to hurt officers and hurt himself. The idea that a different type of response might be successful there is hard to imagine. For Abida, the story of the barricaded man is important because it's so unremarkable. I'm a social worker, so this is what I do.

Hart has now responded to more than 15,000 911 calls. Cops in Durham, people in Durham, no longer have to imagine what their new branch of public safety can do. They're seeing it every day. Tradeoffs producer, Ryan Levy.

We've always seen the fifth branch as bigger than the story of just one city. That's why we've partnered with another nonprofit newsroom, The Marshall Project, which reports on our criminal justice system. While Ryan Levy has devoted a lot of time to Durham's HEART program, Marshall Project staff writer Christy Thompson has interviewed researchers, advocates, and other leaders in the field to get a more national perspective on the alternative crisis response movement.

At the end of each episode of The Fifth Branch, Christy will join me to put that show's theme into a broader context. Today, again, we're talking about buy-in. Christy, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So Ryan Levy shared a stat with me that when Heart first launched, just 37% of Durham police officers thought Heart would be helpful on mental health calls. Now, that's 66%.

We know the cops around the country are skeptical about programs like HEART. How are other cities, Christy, trying to get them on board?

Yeah, I talked with people at the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, also known as LEAP, which is an organization that works with cops and prosecutors and correction officials who are interested in criminal justice reform. And they said, like in Durham, officers really do seem to be getting on board once they're able to see what these programs can do in the field and how it can free them up to work on more serious calls.

One thing that they said was really important is that the messenger really matters here. You know, if somebody from within law enforcement, like you had in Durham, is able to pitch this program, that goes a long way. I'm curious, Christy, have you found any places where a lack of buy-in from law enforcement has stifled or even shut down a program?

That's actually a more complicated question than it seems. I think that skepticism from law enforcement has slowed down maybe in multiple places the expansion of these programs. But it's hard to say exactly how big of a challenge that has been because people are inclined to talk about the success and not focus on the struggle when they're still trying to gain more support for these programs.

Something that I did see in my reporting and in local reporting across the country is that police unions can be a limiting factor in the expansion of these programs. So I live in Seattle, and here our crisis response teams are primarily sent out alongside police officers. Part of that is because it was specified in the Seattle police contract that these responders would not be replacing police officers on certain calls. What about community activists?

Hart director Ryan Smith was worried about losing their support if Hart seemed too close to law enforcement. Is that a concern that you've heard in your conversations?

Absolutely. You know, that's why some programs, they've chosen to be housed inside the fire department. Or, you know, in Albuquerque, they've chosen to create an entirely separate public safety agency. But, you know, even then, these teams are being mostly dispatched by 911. But a lot of people are still really wary of calling 911. And that's why in some places like Atlanta, for example, they've decided to use 311 for people to call to send out their responders so that they

Even if a crisis responder can't come, the caller has the discretion to say, I don't want to be transferred to 911. And they're never going to get a police response that they didn't consent to.

You talk about 9-1-1, and we call this series The Fifth Branch in part because Ryan Smith was so adamant that 9-1-1 was just as important a partner as the police, maybe even more, because every single call Hart responds to involves 9-1-1. Absolutely. Absolutely.

What experts were telling me was that the part that we have not talked enough about is getting buy-in from these dispatchers. And they are the gatekeepers, right? They're the ones who decide whether to send these teams out. I talked to one former dispatcher who said the motto was, when in doubt, send them out, them being cops. That's really what they've gotten used to.

In Chicago, they're sending out a regular update to dispatchers with the outcomes of the calls that they send people to, to say, hey, you sent our care team and this person got connected to services. I've heard of other cities who invited dispatchers on ride-alongs so they can actually see the teams in action. So they're all ways that they're trying to get

the fourth branch, 911 dispatchers, on board because I think they can really be the missing piece of the puzzle in these programs expanding as much as they want to and having as big of a presence as they could have within a city.

Final question. I know there's some lawsuits out there that are raising the issue of whether buy-in, as we've been talking about it, will even really matter going forward. Can you tell us a little bit about these lawsuits? Yeah, there's two ongoing lawsuits right now that claim that to keep sending armed police to a mental health crisis is actually a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

And the Justice Department has said similar things as well. They've been investigating policing in places like Louisville, Kentucky, in Minneapolis, and most recently in Phoenix. And they've found that those police departments were discriminatory against people with mental health disabilities by the way cops were responding to people in crisis.

So we're in a really interesting place right now where so far cities have been adopting these programs voluntarily, but it seems like there might be increasing legal pressure for them to have some kind of response like this available. Christy Thompson, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us on Tradeoffs. Thanks for having me. Next week, does Hart make Durham a safer place? A lot of the calls...

What happens when a social worker shows up on the scene instead of a cop? 911 calls are unpredictable and Hart's first responders are on the front lines. Is there a level of risk in this job? There is.

Do I consider it an acceptable risk? I do. Is heart making Durham a safer place to live? Part two of The Fifth Branch drops next Thursday. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dan Gorenstein. You're listening to The Fifth Branch, a special series from Tradeoffs and The Marshall Project.

The Fifth Branch was reported by Ryan Levy with help from Mark Maximoff and edited by Kate Cahan. Our partners at The Marshall Project include Christy Thompson and Manuel Torres. The Fifth Branch is supported in part by Just Trust and the Sozoze Foundation. For a full list of credits, visit our website, tradeoffs.org slash the fifth branch.

Thanks also to all our listeners who helped to support our work, including Naomi Fenner, Lee Moss, and James Wong. Our media partner is SideFX Public Media based at WFYI. Tradeoffs is supported in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Arnold Ventures, West Health, the California Healthcare Foundation, and the National Institute for Healthcare Management Foundation.