Eugene, Oregon’s mobile crisis response program, CAHOOTS—or Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets—has served as the chief demonstration project for lawmakers trying to wrap their heads around how a clinician-led mobile crisis response team would look and operate. Yet, unlike many of the programs that CAHOOTS inspired, for three decades CAHOOTS itself was housed within the Eugene Police Department. Now, Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick reports for the Register-Guard, CAHOOTS is moving to the city’s fire department: “The switch wasn’t motivated by one particular reason, Eugene Springfield Fire Chief Mike Caven said, but ‘a whole whirlwind of things’ including “recommendations from a recent outside evaluation of the city’s alternative response practices, and the fire department’s intent to shift toward an integrated health care model.”
