ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (NCC NEWS) — In June, the city of Albuquerque announced its plan to provide a third option for emergency dispatch called the Community Safety Department. As the city and department approach a budget and plan for the coming year, the department has already begun to prepare for the future. According to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services projections, New Mexico is likely to have a surplus of qualified social workers in the coming years, but that does not slow Albuquerque Community Safety Coordinator Mariela Ruiz-Angel from trying to prepare her organization for the future. Ruiz-Angel says the ACS has been working to partner with the local universities to make sure the experimental department has local applicants to fill the agency’s positions once it gets up and running.
“We want to make sure that we’re hiring our own people,” said Ruiz-Angel. “We are actually finalizing a memorandum of understanding with NMHU, New Mexico Highlands University, to start a pipeline. So they moved very quickly and started a new course for masters level social workers that is specifically around community crisis intervention.”
Social workers have been touted as essential to the new department’s mission, and it believes it has an effective way to retain social workers within the department. Social workers often quit because of pay, lack of work-life balance, but also because they thought they were being trained for something different than they are doing, according to Ruiz-Angel.
“What we would want to incorporate into this department, is to actually bring on social workers while they’re in their master’s level education to then give them some experience,” she said, “That’s how we’re going to be able to shape this department well, is to get critiques from social workers or up-and-coming social workers to say what are we doing or what we are missing.”
ACS plans to be up-and-running as soon as they get funding passed by the city council, but with the state budget process being pushed back, the city budget is delayed as well. Community Safety is already looking toward fall 2021 as their full opening, but a soft opening prior to that is expected with reallocated assets from other departments, according to Ruiz-Angel.
