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Commissioner Ellis Calls on Harris County to Invest Additional $4.5 Million for Effective Community Safety Strategies

By CNN

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    August 20, 2026 (Houston Style Magazine) — HOUSTON — In a county of more than five million people, public safety is never a one-tool job. Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis is making the case that keeping neighborhoods safe requires not only responding to crime, but investing earlier — before a behavioral-health crisis becomes an arrest, before neighborhood tensions become gunfire and before domestic violence turns deadly.

Ellis, alongside Georgetown Law’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety, has released Advancing Safer Communities in Harris County, a report recommending an additional $4.5 million for three community-safety initiatives launched in 2022: the Holistic Assistance Response Team (HART), RISE community violence interruption program, and domestic violence prevention and intervention programs. The additional funding would bring the proposed investment in the programs to $15.3 million.

For Ellis — a longtime civil-rights leader with more than four decades in public service — the philosophy is straightforward: good government should be smart enough to stop some emergencies from becoming emergencies in the first place.

“For too long, our public safety systems have been built to respond only after harm has already happened,” Ellis said, arguing that mental-health and substance-use challenges often require treatment rather than a jail cell. “We have four years of proof that these programs work. Now we have an obligation to make these programs permanent.”

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Harris County community safety leaders gather for the release of Advancing Safer Communities in Harris County, a new report highlighting the results of HART, RISE and domestic-violence prevention initiatives while calling for an additional $4.5 million investment to strengthen and sustain proven community-based safety strategies.
Ivonne Godinez

HART: Sending the Right Help
HART may be the clearest example of that approach. The program dispatches unarmed interdisciplinary response teams to nonviolent calls involving behavioral health, homelessness, substance use and other quality-of-life concerns. Harris County Public Health confirms that HART began in March 2022 and expanded throughout all Harris County Sheriff’s Office districts by 2025.

The newly released report says HART has now answered more than 31,000 calls, connected more than 5,000 residents to care, and freed thousands of hours for deputies and emergency medical personnel to concentrate on situations requiring their specialized response.

That is not about replacing law enforcement. It is about letting law enforcement do more law enforcement.

“Community safety cannot rest on law enforcement alone,” said Mariela Ruiz-Angel, Georgetown Law’s Director of Community Safety Initiatives and a report co-author. She emphasized behavioral health, crisis response and prevention as complementary tools that allow police to focus on situations where an armed law-enforcement response is truly necessary.

RISE: Interrupting Violence Before the Trigger Is Pulled
The county’s RISE — Relentless Interrupters Serving Everyone — program takes prevention directly into neighborhoods. Harris County’s strategic plan identifies RISE expansion as part of its objective to reduce violent crime, using trusted “credible messengers” to interrupt conflicts and defuse tensions before they escalate.

According to the new report, Cypress Station — where RISE was piloted alongside other public-safety interventions — experienced a 36% decline in crime, including a 48% decrease in family violence and 34% decrease in aggravated robberies during the first two years of the initiative.

Domestic-violence initiatives provide the third pillar. The report says county programs have assisted more than 5,000 survivors and children in safely leaving abusive situations while delivering more than 20,000 hours of therapeutic care to 1,000 families.

And then comes the taxpayer test.

The report estimates Harris County could save more than $5 million in detention and legal expenses if an expanded HART prevents 500 additional low-level jail bookings and RISE prevents seven gun-related homicides.

With Commissioners Court preparing to make Fiscal Year 2027 budget decisions, Ellis’ proposal presents a distinctly Houston-sized question: If prevention is working, can Harris County afford not to invest in more of it?

For a county accustomed to thinking big, $4.5 million could prove that sometimes the smartest public-safety investment is the crisis that never happens.

Community Health and Violence Prevention Services Website:
HarriPs County Community Safety Programs

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Kierra Lee
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Martian moon Deimos resembles a potato. A big asteroid strike may have shaped it

By CNN
(CNN) — Mars has two tiny moons that lack a confirmed origin story for how they came to orbit the red planet — but new research may explain some of the mysteries surrounding outermost satellite Deimos.Named for the son of the Greek god Ares, Deimos, which means dread in ancient Greek, is a small, lumpy rock shaped like a potato. Ares is also known as Mars in Roman mythology.The moon is about 14,913 miles (24,000 kilometers) from the Martian surface, and orbiters have observed it since the 1970s — including a recent flyby of the European Space Agency’s Hera mission in March 2025. Hera is en route to study the aftermath of NASA’s DART mission that intentionally crashed a spacecraft into a small moon orbiting a larger asteroid.Orbital imagery has shown that unlike its heavily cratered sibling moon, Phobos, which means fear in ancient Greek, Deimos is much smoother — and covered in a perplexing layer of dust and rubble called regolith.Deimos, which is about 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) in diameter, also has an identifying feature, a 6.2-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) impact basin at its southern pole, which resembles a dramatic dip similar to those seen in mountain ranges. Scientists have long questioned what created the crater and led to the dust layer.By comparing Hera’s flyby images with impact simulations, the authors of a new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy suggest that one large single asteroid impact reshaped Deimos, resulting in the moon’s dramatic polar crater and global dust layer.The study offers a prediction that could be tested by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Martian Moons eXploration mission, known as MMX, which is expected to launch by the end of the year. The mission aims to capture unprecedented, detailed observations of both moons to help determine how and when they formed and even return samples collected from Phobos to Earth.“Our study provides important, concrete predictions for this Japanese MMX mission,” said lead study author Dr. Sabina Raducan, science program manager at the International Space Science Institute and a senior fellow at the Free University of Brussels. “This gives MMX a clearer picture of what its instruments — and ultimately the sample collection — can expect.”One giant impactThe researchers began by creating impact scenarios for Deimos using a computer code called the Bern Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, or SPH.This code, developed at Switzerland’s University of Bern over two decades, is designed to simulate collisions between asteroids, comets and planets, and analyze the impact by looking at millions of individual particles involved in each scenario.This breakdown enables researchers to understand the different variations and factors at play during an impact, such as the density, gravity and compositional strength of the rocky bodies.“We carried out about a hundred simulations — each one took about a week,” said Raducan, who is also one of the chairs of the Impact Physics Working Group for the Hera science team.The size, velocity and angle of impact for the asteroid that might have struck Deimos varied in each simulation, as did the moon’s internal structure. Then, the team compared the data from its simulations with Hera’s up-close observations of Deimos.The researchers zeroed in on the most likely scenario of an asteroid measuring about 1,050 feet (320 meters) across striking Deimos at a 45-degree angle, creating the south pole crater and the dust layer.The impact released a large amount of debris across Deimos’ lumpy surface, effectively covering many of its surface features by as much as 656 feet (200 meters) — and making it appear much smoother than Phobos.“Our simulation thus shows that a single impact was sufficient to decisively shape the current landscape of Deimos,” said study coauthor Dr. Martin Jutzi, senior researcher at the University of Bern’s Division of Space Research and Planetary Sciences.“The impact was violent enough to redistribute material globally, but not so strong that it would have shattered the moon.”Outlines of ancient craters can still be seen beneath Deimos’ dust layer in the Hera images. If Deimos were more solid, shock waves from the impact would have resonated through the moon and disrupted or even erased surface features. Instead, Deimos’ fractured interior dampened the force of the impact, according to the study authors.The authors did not include a suggestion of when this ancient impact occurred on Deimos, only that it must have happened well after the moon formed.A mysterious originScientists have long questioned whether Phobos and Deimos are rocky chunks that an impact blasted away from Mars, or if they are space rocks that the red planet’s gravity captured.The observations and computer models suggest that Deimos’ internal structure is highly porous, making it more like rubble-pile asteroids — groups of space rocks loosely held together by gravity — than like Earth’s moon.“But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Deimos is actually an asteroid. It could also have formed from material ejected during impacts on Mars,” Raducan said.The MMX mission is expected to collect data that could definitively solve the mystery of Phobos and Deimos’ origins, as well as provide a window into the early history of our solar system when the gravity of the largest planets caused space rocks to crash into planets as well as one another.The mission will arrive at the moons in 2027, spend two years mapping Phobos and selecting a landing site for sampling before backing away to observe Deimos. A sample from Phobos is expected to be dropped off on Earth in 2031.Interest in Deimos and Phobos is growing as more orbiters capture imagery of the enigmatic moons, said Dr. Terik Daly, planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Daly was not involved in the study but is a member of the Science Working Team for MMX.“The paper outlines a viable model for Deimos’ unusual shape, building on longstanding questions about its origin and evolution,” Daly wrote in an email. “Like many modeling studies, there are assumptions that future observations will need to test and Japan’s Martian Moons eXploration mission is expected to make observations that could provide an opportunity to evaluate ideas presented in the paper.”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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