When a person calls 911, whether about “a person shouting at a bus stop or a child who refuses to go to school”, there now are community responder teams in dozens of cities across the country who are supposed to be handling those calls. Yet, how frequently those teams are actually dispatched swings wildly across jurisdictions.
A major driver of these fluctuations comes down to how the call centers that dispatch first responders are structured and operate, according to a new joint report from the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, the Center for American Progress, and the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law.
The upshot for policymakers is that a corollary for creating a mobile crisis response team—or any community responder unit—is to tackle at a granular level how the team will be dispatched: Without careful planning, it is likely that call centers will “default to dispatching a police response” for calls intended for unarmed responders, which “undermines public safety by diverting resources away from serious and violent crime while neglecting the underlying needs that drive people to call 911 to begin with.”
To provide a jumpstart for policymakers, the report inventories the three most common dispatch structures—911 call center-led dispatch, embedded professional-led dispatch, and external hotline-led dispatch—and outlines the “benefits and challenges” for each approach. For example:
- The 911 call center-led dispatch. Simply providing 911 dispatchers with screening questions to determine whether a community responder team is the right fit could be the system that most “efficiently handle[s] high numbers of calls,” but 911 dispatchers are used to sending out police officers to every call and therefore “must overcome hesitancy to send out unarmed responders, which requires thoughtful training, clear protocols, and support for an already overtaxed workforce.”
- Embedded professional-led dispatch. Adding “skilled professionals in 911 call centers to engage with callers directly or assist call takers with the decision of deploying community responders,” infuses more expertise into the decision of whether to send a community responder team and “[s]ometimes, the embedded professional can avert an in-person response entirely by counseling the caller over the phone.” On the other hand, “transferring calls to an embedded professional also adds an extra step, which can slow down the process” and, while “embedded professionals generally specialize in speaking with a person in a mental health crisis or their family member.”
- External hotline-led dispatch. “911 call centers identify eligible calls and forward them to an external hotline, which handles call-taking and responder dispatch … This model enables the public to avoid calling 911 and instead reach a center better tailored to their specific situation.” However, people need to know the hotline exists in order to call it, and it can be extremely difficult and expensive for localities to raise awareness. Moreover, while “the external hotline operators also often possess the expertise to provide phone-only responses for certain issues,” these “hotline-based service providers tend to be more specialized and are therefore hesitant to handle a wide set of call types” and “are unlikely to operate 24/7”.
The report also explores ways to mitigate the challenges that each of the three dispatch models present. Consider, for example, the problem that under the 911 call center-led model dispatchers almost reflexively send police officers instead of community responders to calls that could be handled by the latter team:
“Call takers have spent their careers sending non-fire and nonmedical calls to the police. They know that most calls are relatively innocuous, but they have learned to be risk averse …Cities can help change call takers’ habits by creating opportunities for call takers to get to know responders so that they can become comfortable trusting responders and understanding their skill sets. [For example,] In Dayton, 911 call center staff became significantly more comfortable with the [city’s] Mediation Response Unit program after joining them for ride-alongs. Program staff can share information with the call center staff about successful outcomes when community responders provide meaningful support and connections to care.”