City officials, local businesses, and the Albuquerque police department are partnering on a plan to help make downtown safer.

Mayor Tim Keller announced the creation of Downtown TEAM, which stands for targeted enforcement, action, and monitoring. The initiative, according to a KOB report, is a public-private partnership, where businesses share the cost of police protection for not only their own establishments but the entire neighborhood.

“It’s going to start after the Fourth of July, but downtown all of a sudden is going to be a very different place,” Keller said in making the announcement. “We are going to treat downtown, essentially, like a neighborhood that has an acute crime problem.”

APD Police Chief Harold Medina said “TEAM” is similar to the APD’s overtime program, which allows individual businesses to pay for police protection, but provides extra manpower to deal with neighborhood crimes such as stolen vehicles, traffic violations, and even harassment, according to KOB.

“Once we start this, it’s going to be very hard to get away with what people are getting away with downtown,” Keller said, adding the city has raised $90,000 for the program. “The city is going to step up and help downtown. But downtown has to take control of their own future too “

One downtown business owner hopes the new approach works. “If we could get more people down here and improve our business because then we’ll have more money to spend and help out financially in that regard,” Rich Baca, owner of Bourbon & Boots told KOB.

Medina said there should be enough officers looking to participate in the program and hopes there will be enough funding to get through the summer. “Across this country, every downtown district has gone through some kind of fear or horrible incident,” Medina told KOB. “That’s why we want to make sure that we’re putting additional resources out here to make sure that people can come out here and feel safe at the end of the night, and that there are resources here to protect individuals.”