Law Enforcement Leaders Champion Civilian Response Teams

1. In San Francisco, elected leaders have invested in multiple unarmed first responder teams that handle calls related to mental health, substance use disorder, and homelessness across the city. 

Earlier this month, researchers at NYU’s Policing Project published a report, finding that the city’s efforts are “displaying positive results” and praising the city’s “invaluable” work and “consistent innovation.” 

For example, “San Francisco’s … Street Crisis Response Team …. fields around-the-clock units specializing in trauma-informed responses to behavioral health crises … In the vast majority of these calls, the police are never called upon for backup. This saves police resources and indicates care can be provided without police.”

The report authors spoke extensively with both police leadership and patrol officers to get a sense of how the San Francisco Police Department views the role that these civilian responder teams play in the city’s public safety response. 

Overall, the authors concluded that, “most police we spoke with believe that San Francisco should take an all-hands-on-deck approach to rightsize the footprint of policing and strike a better balance between providing resources and achieving public safety.”

Critically, in conversations with other city leaders—including elected officials, civilian responders, and 911 dispatchers—the authors underscored that the solid relationship between police officers and civilian responders in San Francisco did not happen by accident. Instead, “police leadership” actively worked to overcome “initial resistance from rank-and-file officers”  in order “to facilitate the shifts San Franciscans sought.” 

That said, interviews with police leadership and patrol officers revealed that once the officers saw the civilian responders in action, loving the shift wasn’t too hard of a sell: 

“Over the years, somebody decided that [every social problem] is a police issue and then we built on it, and built on it, and built on it, and built on [our responsibilities]. And [when] we try to push back a lot with our city partners and say, ‘No, no, no, that’s you, that’s a social issue ... we find ourselves pulled back in again. Because at the end of the day, the lady with the tent in front of her house, trying to get the kids to school with the tent blocking the driveway… we’re the only ones that can come out and deal with it in a timely manner.”

When civilian responders showed up on the scene, there was a natural tendency to protect against a sense of role diminishment even though it wasn’t a role the officers particularly wanted in the first place. Yet, as one patrol officer told the researchers, those feelings faded rapidly:

“Very quickly we’re all like, ‘No, why would we fight this? Why would we argue?’ Because this is the right model. It’s what always should have been happening. It’s what we wanted.” 

Or, as the San Francisco police union leadership put the point: 

“Why would you wanna put us in a situation where more than likely we may fail, and if we fail, our failure is epic, right? Our failure is front page news, right?"

2. In Saint Petersburg, Florida, “Anthony Holloway [,] the chief of police, [has] long realized that many officers are sent to address problems that they weren't trained to handle, but there was no other option. That is, until 2021.” 

As Carl Smith reports for Officer.com magazine, which is “law enforcement’s leading source for news,” “at the beginning of that year, the St. Petersburg City Council approved a pilot program allowing dispatchers to send social workers to respond to calls about emergencies such as mental health crises, complaints about the homeless population, truancy or suicide threats.”

Today, the program, which “has also added a juvenile specialist” and takes calls seven days per week from 6 A.M. to 2 A.M., has “helped build trust [with] residents [and is] “popular with police as well.”  

In a slide deck used to educate community members and officers alike about the civilian responder program, Chief Holloway has a slide that visualizes how police officers are asked to wear too many hats:

Thus, as Chief Holloway told the news outlet, “you still need law enforcement out there to protect people[,] but you need people to help those going through a crisis who can do better than law enforcement.” That’s why police officers “don’t want to see this go away,” they know “they’re not trained as well as the navigators in handling some of these situations.”

3. In Northwest Louisiana, “mobile teams of civilian mental health professionals will begin responding to emergency calls reporting mental health emergencies across nine parishes, Brendan Heffernan reports for The Advocate. The teams will start “replacing law enforcement officers on some mental health crisis calls, a setup that mental health experts hope will lead to better outcomes across the board.”

Heffernan illustrates the need for better outcomes because explaining that “mental health crisis calls that Shreveport police officers have responded to historically have often ended with the person in crisis hospitalized, a traumatic outcome that may not be the most appropriate level of care for them to receive.” By contrast, “civilian crisis response teams will be able to connect mentally ill people with a wider range of resources.” 

Here’s the upshot of this shift, as Louisiana State University Medical School’s Laura Baxter told the news outlet: 

“By using resources in a more strategic way we save additional distress and harm being done to the individual who's needing some help …. You can imagine, if your employment is disrupted for 10 to 14 days because of the hospitalization, you don't have a job when you come out. So, we haven't solved your problem, we've just caused more.”

If you had to find one person to credit for the creation of the mobile crisis team, one could do worse than picking Lieutenant Amy Bowman from the Shreveport Police Department, who “has been a driving force for reshaping how area law enforcement will collaborate with the mental health system.”

“Our goal is to have no wrong door,” Bowman told The Advocate:

“If somebody needs help, we’re going to get the right response and get people the care that they need … we’ll do a risk assessment so we send the appropriate response, because it may not always be law enforcement …  We had to kind of blend perspectives to come up with what the better practices are and how they could benefit the residents here.”