Chief Simon Pang on how San Francisco is transforming policing

Calls for reworking the way law enforcement operates and how it's funded have been heard across our country over the last year in response to numerous acts of police brutality. San Francisco was one of the first cities to actually change its policing model by removing officers from behavioral crisis calls and using unarmed specialists instead. Chief Simon Pang is the section chief of community para-medicine for the San Francisco Fire Department who has been leading its effort to build the “Street Crisis Response Teams” in the Bay area. “It increases our credibility.” Pang tells Ali Velshi that members of these teams are “the gold standard for trauma informed care. It's truly someone who has walked in their shoes before.”April 18, 2021