The Safe, Clean and Healthy Salem initiative is a community-led and City-supported strategy to improve safety, livability and cleanliness in two areas of Salem experiencing higher volumes of requests for police support and emergency medical response: Downtown and Northeast Salem.

These two areas experience a higher volume of calls for support from the Salem Police Department and Salem Fire Department than other areas of Salem.

Key efforts of the initiative include:

• Safe
  • Funding two additional Homeless Services Team police officers to expand coverage to seven days per week to better connect people living unsheltered in our community to available services and shelter. The Homeless Services Team officers provide proactive policing and have familiarity working with unsheltered populations
• Clean
  • Expanding cleaning services in high-response areas to further improve health and safety from four to seven days each week, to provide more consistent sanitation and hygiene efforts in public areas The Clean Salem Team works in response to community reports to ensure health and livability of our outdoor spaces
• Healthy
  • Piloting the Salem Fire Department Community Health – Co-Response Model, that deploys integrated teams consisting of a paramedic, EMT and mental health clinician to incidents involving emotional disturbances, overdoses and other health emergencies, while also conducting proactive outreach to prevent emergencies before they occur 
    
    

2025 Community Satisfaction Survey 

Results from the September 2025 Community Satisfaction Survey rank homelessness and public safety as the top two issues facing the City. The survey captured residents’ impressions of safety and livability, including:

• During the day, most residents feel safe in all parts of the city, and nearly all feel safe in their own neighborhoods. Daytime safety is high across all areas of the city.
• Residents have mixed feelings of safety at night. Most feel unsafe in north/northeast Salem and downtown at night.

Salem Police report the most calls in Downtown and Northeast Salem and Salem Fire notes those two areas as having the most medical calls.

As a result of ongoing community engagement on the issue, the survey results and calls for service, the City County approved a supplemental budget investment of $626,000 on Oct. 13, 2025.

2026 Community Satisfaction Survey

From February 2026, key findings related to safety and livability included:

• Residents’ feelings of safety at night improved in all areas of the city between September and February. The greatest increase is in North/Northeast Salem, where the total sense of safety increased by 8 percentage points.
• Daytime safety stayed consistent with sentiments in September. Nearly all residents continue to feel safest in their own neighborhoods.
• Residents continue to rate the livability of their own neighborhoods the highest. Residents rate the livability of Downtown (+6 percentage points), West (+4), and North/Northeast (+3) Salem as slightly better than in September.
• 8 in 10 residents surveyed reported visiting downtown in the past month. Those who have visited downtown continue to feel safer there during the day and at night than those who have not visited.

Cross-Sector Collaboration

Bloomberg-Harvard City Leadership Initiative

As part of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, the City was encouraged to apply for a year-long partnership around a key priority area. With a priority on public safety, the Mayor selected Salem Police Deputy Chief Brandon Ditto and Courtney Knox Busch, Assistant City Manager and Director of Strategy and Engagement, to participate as the senior leaders on behalf of the City of Salem.

Salem, along with 11 other cities, was selected for the Collaboration track from this ninth Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative cohort.

The intent of this work is to build cross-sector collaboration around public safety — more specifically, a pilot that brings together multiple perspectives (resident, business, service providers, those with lived experience) around downtown public safety and livability.

Bloomberg-Harvard was in Salem Oct. 7 and facilitated a cross-sector collaboration kick-off session. We are communicating with participants and are preparing for the next steps, likely regrouping in January. We hope to engender collaboration and build momentum toward a shared vision and outcome.

With the framework for this cross-boundary collaboration in place, we will expand to engaging northeast Salem area residents, businesses, service providers, and those with lived experience to improve safety and livability in northeast.