NEW POLL: When You Call 911, Who Should Respond? For Mental Health And Homelessness Calls, Voters Favor Medical Professionals Over Police Officers.
Cities across the country--most recently smaller cities including Madison Wisconsin, Athens, Georgia, Overland Park, Kansas and Newport Beach, California--are rerouting 911 calls for mental health and homelessness-related situations away from police departments to medical professionals.
These programs offer two simultaneous advantages over sending armed police officers to respond to such calls for service:
Medical professionals are better equipped to handle these calls. Their training means that they are better able to deescalate these tense situations and to connect the person in crisis with services and programs that will address the trauma and reduce the likelihood of future calls for service. Even aside from the differences in training and expertise that make medical professionals the better solution, showing up to a scene where a person is experiencing a mental health crisis with flashing lights, blaring sirens, and a gun can needlessly escalate an already strained situation despite the best efforts and good intentions of police officers.
Police officers are spread too thin. Asking officers to respond to homelessness-related calls or mental health crise means they are not doing the most important job that they are uniquely trained and qualified to do: solve serious crimes like murders and rapes. We recently reported the results of a national survey that showed a significant majority of voters want police departments to reallocate their resources to prioritize more time and money on solving these serious crimes. Rerouting certain 911 calls to civilian medical professionals frees police officers to focus their efforts and limited resources on that critical work.
To gauge public support for this increasingly popular trend, Safer Cities conducted a national survey of 1,223 likely voters using web panel respondents on the Data for Progress infrastructure. The sample was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, and voting history. The survey was conducted in English. The margin of error is ±3 percentage points.
RESULTS:
73% of voters support creating a new agency of first responders, like emergency medical services or firefighters, to reroute some 911 calls away from armed police officers to medical professionals who are better situated to respond to mental health and homelessness related situations than armed police officers. (Net Support = +52)
56% of voters would prioritize investing more money into medical professionals who respond to mental health and homelessness related situations even over investing more money in armed policing.
CONCLUSIONS:
There is nothing more important to local leaders than ensuring that the residents they serve are safe. Law enforcement plays a critical role in a city’s public safety plan, but to fully fund and support public safety, cities need to lean on other professionals to respond to medical or other trauma-related emergencies and solve problems so that the police can focus on solving the most serious crimes like shootings and murder.
Our survey results show that voters overwhelmingly support sending medical professionals instead of armed officers to mental health and homelessness related emergency service calls, and they also support the concrete step of creating new public agencies to carry out these services.
Crucially, in an era of constrained local budgets, most voters--and over three-quarters of Democrats--would prioritize investing more money into medical professionals who respond to mental health and homelessness related situations even over investing more money into armed policing.
These results should send a loud signal to public officials that putting safety first means building and funding programs that recognize the difference between threats and trauma and tailor responses that work in parallel to and complement traditional policing. Of these programs, very few of them are as popular with voters as enlisting medical professionals as emergency first responders.
