As the Chicago Sun-Times’ Fran Spielman reports, a Chicago city council committee approved a sweeping measure this week that would:
“create an alternate response system that relieves police officers of responsibility for handling the mental health emergency calls they dread, investing in community care by raising the pay of mental health professionals and dramatically increasing funding for Chicago Department of Public Health…”
This proposed mobile crisis response system is a key piece of a broader plan known as the “Treatment Not Trauma” measure. What we’re focused on in this newsletter is the framing of the measure, because, when it comes to support from the public and the lawmakers who represent them, how policies are framed can matter as much as the substantive details contained within the policy.
To that end, the newsletter Notes on Persuasion recently covered two studies that tested the effectiveness of various slogans on support for mobile crisis responder programs including “treatment, not trauma”. The other slogans tested include: “care, not criminalization”; “care, not cops”; “police can’t do it alone”; and “fully fund public safety.”
The studies—“an in-survey Randomized Controlled Trial and a max-diff design”—are described in much more detail in Notes on Persuasion. However, the bottom line is that the “treatment not trauma” slogan—though not the best performing slogan—increased support for the ballot measure in both studies. From the original newsletter:
- The RCT Study: The “police … can’t do it alone” message was the top performing message, increasing support for a hypothetical ballot measure by 4 percentage points relative to the control group … Notably, this is the top performing message across every sub-group (age, gender, race, ideology, 2020 presidential vote). Meanwhile, “Treatment, not trauma” and “fully fund public safety” are neck-and-neck as the second and third best performing messages…”
- The Max-Diff Study: As with the in-survey RCT, “police…can’t do it alone” was the best performing message (indeed, again, it was the top performing message across every sub-group). “Fully fund public safety” beat out “treatment, not trauma” [, which finished third] by a four percentage point margin.
- Takeaway: “‘Police … can’t do it alone’ is worth testing as a slogan for any campaign pushing for a mobile crisis response program. ‘Treatment, not trauma’ and ‘fully fund public safety’ … are [both also] likely to increase support for establishing a mobile crisis response program.”
Here are the full results.