Public safety appears to be on the right track in both Redmond and Warm Springs.

Redmond recently announced its plan to build a new police station, while the Confederated Tribes at Warm Springs has received the OK to construct a new jail that will be up to federal standards.

Key to the Redmond facility is the addition of an “on-site mental health triage center,” according to a story by The Bulletin’s reporter Garrett Andrews.

That will be similar to the stabilization center that is operating adjacent to the Deschutes County jail and sheriff’s office, which has been a large success story.

A stabilization center is a holding facility for people who may be having a mental health crisis. In the past, those people would be dropped at the hospital emergency rooms and pretty much left to fend for themselves, not to mention the cost to the county for such services.

The Deschutes County Stabilization Center has been open for the last 13 months, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Since the center has been open, Andrews writes, 30 people have indicated to staff they would have killed themselves had the facility not been there.

The facility sees a daily average of nine people ranging in age from 6 to 93 years old. Most people come in during the day, though the center is busy throughout the night.

It’s no secret that Redmond is a fast-expanding city and needs to stay ahead of the population boom. The current station is 25 years old and used to house 36 employees. Today, the staff is up to 61 employees.

The addition of a crisis mental health facility really meets that need that police officers are often unqualified to handle. It takes the pressure off the officers and the hospitals.

Meanwhile, in Warm Springs, according to a story in the Madras Pioneer, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has agreed to fund a new jail on the reservation. It has been in dire need of renovation due to neglect.

“The straw that broke the camel’s back was COVID,” Bill Elliott, chief of the Warm Springs Tribal Police Department, said in the Madras Pioneer. Elliott describes the cinder-block, 51-bed jail as “a dungeon.”

Built in 1989, the structure has a primitive ventilation system. The department closed the Warm Springs jail permanently in August because individuals could not be isolated from the coronavirus.

But the jail has been closed on and off since 2017, according to The Pioneer. The reservation experiences frequent power outages, and the jail’s backup generator frequently fails. The troubled water system on the reservation made it unsafe to house inmates at the jail, and inmates and staff suffered through the summer of 2020 without air conditioning.

Elliott said the intent of the new jail is to have a facility that provides a safe environment for both inmates and staff and is capable of handling issues such as areas to contain possible outbreaks of contagious diseases. And it will be a place for the most vulnerable of the community’s population, providing access to mental health and other services to assist in options to incarcerations or rehabilitation.

Public safety is so much more than locking people up. These two projects show that the strength of a community is to demonstrate in how well it handles its most vulnerable.