“How Do We Scale A Non-Police Emergency Response Program?” 

Later this summer, Berkeley, California will launch its new Specialized Care Unit—an unarmed mobile crisis response team that will be dispatched 24 hours a day / 7 days a week to most mental health-related 911 calls for service in the city. Unlike other programs in the Bay Area—and other cities across the country—the SCU team “will be able to enter private residences” which presents more opportunity to ensure that the person in crisis gets the care they need. 

The Specialized Care Unit itself is great, but we’ve included it in Safer Cities this week because of two different reports—one from Stanford Law School; the other from the city of Berkeley— produced in conjunction with the exploration and launch of Berkeley’s SCU. Both reports explore the burgeoning standards and practices that lawmakers must consider when establishing a new behavioral health first responder program. 

1. Stanford Law School’s Mira Joseph authored the report on scaling a non–police emergency response program that covers a range of granular issues from “establishing a standardized set of best data-collection practices [to] make a data-driven argument to various stakeholders and the public” to the “experimental and operational reality of learning how to run and operate a pilot.” The report doesn’t aim to definitely resolve these issues—or even to provide a playbook for lawmakers—but it helps to identify core issues worth considering and highlights relevant programs that have chosen different paths on various key decision-points.
2. The City of Berkeley’s Health, Housing & Community Services Department published a 54-page report on the development of their Specialized Care Unit that gives an extraordinarily detailed and rare peek under the hood of the kind of effort that goes into creating and deploying a successful behavioral health responder team. From 911 call center integration, to types of calls that the unit is best equipped to handle, to staffing and training, as well as granular detail on importance of uniform and vehicle design, the report is a must-read for lawmakers and researchers interested in building these programs.