What To Read This Week
1. New Report From Leading Law Enforcement Group Finds That Sending Unarmed Community Responders—Instead Of Armed Police Officers—Can “Reduce [A] City’s [Civil] Liability Exposure.”
The Law Enforcement Action Partnership has heard the same concern raised over and again from the police departments and local officials for whom the organization provides technical assistance: Does sending unarmed first responders—instead of armed police officers—to handle mental health, homelessness related, and other low risk calls for service increase or decrease a local jurisdiction’s exposure to civil lawsuits?
To provide guidance to local officials across the country, the Law Enforcement Action Partnership released a new report last week—in collaboration with Ackerman LLP, one of the largest and most respected law firms in the United States—that examines both the “case law and statutes from the federal system as well as all 50 states” spanning “state law tort claims, federal civil rights law, and workers’ compensation.”
Here are three key takeaways from the report:
City leaders should consider the relative risk of sending police officers as compared to sending community responders.
“What if the responder injures a member of the public? What if a responder is sent to a call that escalates into violence or property damage? What if the responder gets injured?” These are the questions that the Law Enforcement Action Partnership hears repeatedly from local lawmakers who are considering launching—or expanding—community responder programs.
Right now, though, the default in most places is to send police officers, and those officers also sometimes deal with escalating violent crime and injuries to both the officer and the civilian. The Washington Post recently found that local governments representing “25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff's departments” paid out over three billion dollars over a ten year period to settle civil lawsuit claims. The point is not to pick on police officers, but rather to remind city leaders to “assess the liability risk of sending community responders to low-risk calls not in a vacuum but in comparison to the liability risk of the status quo – handling those same calls by dispatching police.”“By sending community responders” to handle “low-risk conflict resolution and behavioral health” calls, cities can “reduce their overall liability risk.” The biggest driver of the gap in civil liability exposure between police and community responders is the higher risk of liability for police officers under state tort and federal civil rights statutes. As the Law Enforcement Action Partnership report explains: “many calls are related to low-risk conflict resolution and behavioral health issues. When these calls fall on the police's shoulders, officers are forced to act as mediators and counselors, and they risk using force in an escalating situation.” That force is more likely both because the officers are carrying weapons and because other first responders—for example mental health mobile crisis teams—are specially trained and experienced in how to “de-escalate situations and connect people to care.” Indeed, to take Chicago’s new behavioral crisis response program as an example, the “22-member mobile team of crisis counselors, call takers and peer engagement specialists”—all of whom are unarmed—successfully resolved “94 percent of calls without law enforcement.”
Cities also can proactively reduce their liability risk even further by, for example, writing clear policies and providing robust training:
Clear Policies. By writing dispatch and responder procedures into policy, cities can help protect their programs from tort liability by providing clear guidance and minimizing the likelihood that a responder might act in a grossly negligent manner.” At a minimum, these policies should include the understanding that the “scope of work” for community responders “does not include use of force.” Responders also “should understand when to summon police or emergency medical assistance.” Finally, responders “should understand any state-mandated reporting requirements, such as for domestic violence or child abuse and neglect.”
Robust Training. Police cadets receive roughly 1,000 hours of highly structured and rigorous training. Cities should consider creating similarly formal, robust, and professionalized academies for community responders. This is true both to ensure that these responders provide the best service possible to citizens in need, and to lower liability risk for cities. As the Law Enforcement Action Partnership report explains, though, at a minimum cities should do these three things: 1) “train call-takers to screen out safety risks by asking the caller about weapons and credible threats of violence, and then sending screened-out calls to the police”; 2) “train their responders to approach scenes safely, maintaining physical separation while they scan for signs of weapons or violence, which would lead them to back away and involve the police”; and 3) while the responder is handling the situation, if it begins to escalate toward possible violence, responders are trained to safely distance themselves and summon backup.”
2. In California, Transit Ambassadors Increasingly Seen As A Critical Component Of Making Public Transit Safer, Cleaner, and More Orderly.
In Northern California, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District—or BART—embraces “mounting requests from passengers for an increased safety presence in the [transit] system but with less reliance on armed officers.”
For KQED, Matthew Green reports that the metro system that connects the San Francisco Bay Area together is experiencing a “discernible uptick in the number of people on trains and platforms experiencing homelessness or suffering from serious mental health issues.”
That uptick helped BART’s Deputy Chief Of Police, Ja’Son Scott, to “realize we didn’t have all the tools as police officers to deal with all the issues that you see in BART, and it’s not always necessary for a police officer” to be the first responder who handles these situations.
That’s why Deputy Chief Scott told the news outlet that he is a big supporter of the Crisis Intervention Specialist teams who patrol the Bay Area Rapid Transit system’s trains and stations. These specialists are trained in “conflict resolution and de-escalation techniques for people suffering from mental health, homelessness and substance-abuse issues.” The teams also carry “Narcan to reverse opioid overdoses” and are experts at connecting people to “social services and mental health nonprofits sprinkled throughout BART’s five-county service area.”
Arguably, though, the most important tool these teams wield is persistence: As Deputy Chief Scott told KQED: “It may be that on the first contact [with a crisis intervention specialist] somebody is ready to seek help. [But] sometimes it might be the 20th contact.” As one intervention specialist put it:“We can be more accessible to the public than officers can [be]….If you need to talk to me for an hour, you have me for an hour. If I need to escort you on the train, and I need to take you to a resource that’s 30, 40 minutes away, I have the time to do that.”
The upshot is that the crisis intervention team has the training, expertise, and mandate to provide that type of “boots on the ground outreach” whereas police officers typically possess neither the training or experience needed to address these situations—and almost always could be better deployed tackling more serious and dangerous threats.
The only problem? As another crisis intervention specialist told the news station, “we are definitely needed … [It’s just that] there needs to be a 100 of us, not just 20.”
In Southern California, the Los Angeles Times editorial board recently called on Los Angeles County Metro to “develop a comprehensive approach to safety — and put it in place quickly,” writing, “riders deserve safer bus and rail service. And Metro is doomed without it.”
The editorial board highlighted as part of a comprehensive solution the now year-old transit ambassador program, which placed “300 unarmed and trained ambassadors riding the trains and buses providing customer assistance and calling for security and social services teams as needed.” The editorial board noted that 63% of riders in a recent survey “said that seeing an ambassador made them feel safer,” and that more “unarmed staff” —and not just “sworn police officers or security guards” are an option for “patrol[ling] the buses and trains every day” and “develop[ing] relationships with operators and commuters.”
The role of safety ambassadors are particularly salient given that the nature of “the vast majority of safety concerns cited by riders are about comfort and cleanliness … such as “homeless people sleeping on the trains and buses” and “people experiencing mental health crises.” It’s the failure to “consistently address” these factors that “feeds into the sense of disorder.
Beyond the Los Angeles Times editorial board, local residents and community groups also have recently “called for a four-to-five fold increase” to the budget of the “18-month-old [transit] ambassador pilot program” to “add ambassadors to buses, which are how 80% of Metro customers ride … Currently, ambassadors mostly ride the six train lines and greet passengers at rail stations and multi-modal depots.”
