Safer Cities provides coverage and analysis on innovative efforts to deliver more safety for our cities and our country.

Los Angeles Study Finds The City’s Mobile Crisis Response Program Is “Address[ing] Critical Mental Health Emergencies” And Allows “LAPD More Time To Focus On Traditional Law Enforcement Efforts.”

For The L.A. Times, Libor Jany reports on the city’s recently published new study on its mobile crisis response program which deploys “teams of licensed clinicians, social workers, community workers and therapists who work in pairs, responding to calls around the clock, seven days a week.” In its pilot year, “the program handled more than 6,700 calls… [and] already saved police nearly 7,000 hours of patrol time by freeing them up for other tasks.”

Safer Cities recently spoke with Albuquerque's Community Safety Department to get an update on how the ACS is working. Here are three takeaways from our interview.

A working paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research evaluates the impact of the mobile crisis response program by examining a program that had been running in Eugene, Oregon, which dispatched unarmed mental health professionals to 911 calls involving behavioral health and social crises. Researchers concluded that the program “reduced the likelihood that a call resulted in an arrest… [due to the team’s] role in de-escalating tense situations and resolving incidents without coercive measures…[and that] crisis response teams play an important role as a complement to the police” in a city’s public safety infrastructure. The full report is worth your time, but here are three key takeaways: