What To Read This Week
1. The Momentum Keeps Growing For Mobile Crisis Response Units.
Dozens of localities have turned to mental health professionals to respond—often instead of law enforcement—to mental health-related calls for service. For example:
Denver STAR Program Poised To Expand—Again. Despite ballooning last year to 13 units, Denver’s much-lauded mobile crisis response team—the Support Team Assisted Response, or STAR—only had the capacity to respond to 20% of the city’s nearly 40,000 eligible calls for service each year. To ensure that Denver residents are “getting the right response at the right time,” the city council is poised to once again increase its investment in the program.
Three Cities Launch New Programs:
The 911 emergency dispatch center in Springfield, Illinois, “will become one of the first in Illinois to send trained clinicians to mental health crises instead of police” in the wake of a new statewide pilot project that “requires emergency responders to refer mental health calls to a new service that can dispatch a team of trained clinicians.”
Eight hours to the East, in Cleveland, Ohio, a new one-year “mental health crisis response program” will deploy five teams of health professionals to respond to calls for service “instead of a police officer.”
A crisis stabilization clinic in rural Sebring, Florida, has launched a new mobile crisis response team to “go to people’s homes, into the schools, the courthouse and jails, [and even] to the Winn Dixie parking lot… [to] talk to anyone about their crises” and connect people to longer-term treatment through the stabilization center where the team operates.
Why are mobile crisis units catching-on? Here’s what Rick Sweets, the Deputy Police Chief in Fairbanks, Alaska, told the local PBS station:
“Law enforcement officers aren’t the right people to respond to most mental health crises [and] jail is not the place to do mental health work … we’re throwing a law enforcement fix to something that needs a doctor level.”
Today, a mobile crisis response team operates around the clock in Fairbanks, and regularly “resolves calls without police or hospitalization involvement.” The team then follows-up with the person who needed help within 48 hours of the initial crisis to connect them to additional services.
The program counts Deputy Chief Sweets among its biggest fans. That’s for two reasons:
Police officers are no longer forced to get people in the throes of a mental health crisis “involved with the justice system when all they really needed was mental health support”; and
The Fairbanks Police Department is “severely understaffed [and needs] to focus its resources on problems that truly do need a police response.”
2. New Polling Reveals Robust Support For Mobile Crisis Response Units.
Safer Cities recently conducted a national survey of 2,400 registered voters to gauge public support for mobile crisis response units, which are “composed of healthcare experts, including licensed clinicians, who respond to 911 calls instead of police officers for most issues related to mental health crises, substance abuse, or homelessness.” Here are the results:
80% Of Voters Say “Mobile Crisis Response Units” Are “Effective” At “Making Your Community Safer.” We asked registered voters: “How effective do you think mobile crisis response units are as a method of making your community safer?”
By a 65 percentage point margin—80% to 15%—voters view mobile crisis response units as “effective” as opposed to “not effective.”
These results also reflect broad bipartisan support, including 89% of Democrats and 72% of Republicans who say mobile crisis response units are effective.
The Most Effective Arguments In Favor Of Mobile Crisis Response Units. We provided participants with “a few statements about the effectiveness of mobile crisis response units,” and then asked them to tell us “how convincing, if at all” each of those reasons are “for implementing mobile crisis response units as a public safety policy.” Here are the three most persuasive arguments:
+72% Net Effective (86% to 14%): “Police officers often show up with sirens blaring, bright lights, and firearms. They also are trained to use their authority to control a situation. These work in a home invasion, for example, but can backfire when dealing with people in acute mental crises because they further escalate the situation.”
+70% Net Effective (85% to 15%): “Medical professionals know how to recognize signs of acute mental illness, de-escalate fraught situations involving mental illness and get people in acute mental health crises the help they need. Police officers, no matter how compassionate and skilled, simply don’t have this level of medical expertise and training.”
+66% Net Effective (83% to 17%): “Letting medical professionals handle mental health-related calls for service lets police officers focus on more serious public safety threats like solving robbery, rape and murder.”
When Forced To Choose, Voters Prefer To New Public Safety Dollars To Mobile Crisis Units Than To Hiring More Police Officers. In addition to exposing participants to a variety of arguments in favor of mobile crisis response units, we also exposed participants to an equal number of arguments in opposition to spending more money on these programs.
After participants heard arguments for and against, we asked: “Knowing what you know now about mobile crisis units, if your city or community was looking to invest additional funding to make your city safer, would you prefer that they … spend the additional funds on mobile crisis units to address community safety [or] spend the additional funds on hiring more police officers to address community safety.” Here are the results:58% = “Spend the additional funds on mobile crisis units to address community safety.”
34% = “Spend the additional funds on hiring more police officers to address community safety.”
