Kurt August, MSW, is the Executive Director for the Division of Criminal Justice within the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Public Safety. His work involves overseeing a wide range of criminal justice reform efforts designed to safely reduce the size of the local jail population and promote racial, ethnic, and economic disparities across the criminal justice system. His primary focus has been in the diversion and deflection space to develop health-centered alternatives to arrest and incarceration for adults with complex unmet health needs that are having low-level police contacts in the community. For the past 10 years, Kurt has worked at the intersection of the law enforcement and behavioral health communities by piloting a pre-booking diversion program, an Outreach focused Co-Responder pilot which embeds behavioral health professionals with law enforcement to collaboratively address quality of life issues, Crisis Intervention Response Teams that pair behavioral health professionals with CIT Officers in unmarked police vehicles to address behavioral health calls that come in to the 911 Call Center in real time, and collaborated with the Philadelphia Police Department and the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disability Services to establish the first Behavioral Health Unit in the City’s history under the police department in December 2022. Kurt is a married father of two girls and resides in the Strawberry Mansion section of the City.
Kurt August, MSW
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