Researchers from Cornell University, the Austin Police Department, Integral Care, and the University of Texas recently published a study in Psychiatric Services Journal examining Austin’s Embedded Mobile Crisis Outreach Team, or EMCOT, the city’s much-lauded program that deploys trained mental health professionals to behavioral health emergencies and is embedded directly inside Austin’s 911 call center.
Using more than five years of 911 call data, researchers compared over 16,000 behavioral health-related calls that were transferred to a clinician with more than 4,000 similar calls that arrived when clinicians were unavailable. Researchers found that embedding behavioral health professionals in 911 centers produced “important public health and public safety benefits,” reducing involuntary detentions, arrests, and officer time on scene. Researchers concluded that the model works largely because clinicians can resolve many behavioral health crises without a police response and dispatch mobile crisis teams when needed.
The study highlights three significant impacts of embedding clinicians directly into 911 call centers:
- Emergency Detentions Fell By More Than 40%. Researchers found that clinician involvement reduced the likelihood of a peace officer emergency detention by 43.2%, averting more than 300 involuntary detentions over the study period. Calls handled by clinicians were significantly less likely to result in a detention than similar calls that arrived when clinicians were unavailable. The authors concluded that embedding clinicians in 911 “significantly reduced the likelihood of involuntary detentions.”
- Likelihood Of Arrest Fell By 37%, While More People Were Connected To Care. Researchers found that embedding clinicians reduced the likelihood of arrests by 37.5%, a change which was directly tied to the embedded clinicians, as researchers noted, “the mechanism underlying these estimated program impacts was… related to the clinicians’ success in resolving eligible calls [on the phone or through dispatching mobile crisis response] without the need for a police response.”
- Thousands Of Police Hours Were Redirected To Higher-Priority Calls. The study found that clinician involvement reduced average officer time on scene by 50.2%, averting an estimated 6,994 hours of officer time. Researchers concluded that the program produced “important public health and public safety benefits” and estimated it ultimately prevented “approximately 7,000–13,500 hours of police officer time at the scene of nonviolent, noncriminal behavioral health-related incidents.” The result, they found, enabled officers “to focus on higher-acuity public safety calls” while behavioral health professionals handled crisis-related calls.