Three Things To Read This Weekend
(1) Police Chief Anthony Holloway praises the St. Petersburg, Florida mobile crisis response program, saying it “frees up the police officers so they can do police work.”
Here’s more from the chief: “This is going to be very positive for law enforcement because it does two things: One it frees up the police officers so they can do police work, so they can go out there and look for the burglars, robbers, things that we are trained and know how to do. And the other part of it is, we are getting healthcare professionals who can help law enforcement help people through their crisis … when people are calling 911 and they are going through a mental crisis then we can send a professional there to help them through their mental crisis instead of just sending an officer there with a badge and a gun.”
(2) Mobile Crisis Teams Help Kids Stay In School, Avoid Jail.
1-in-4 students attend a school that has a police officer but no nurse, social worker, or mental health counselor. This makes law enforcement the default mental health responder in America’s schools—a scenario that often leaves the needs of students unmet while nudging children into the criminal legal system. That’s why some school districts are turning to youth-focused mobile crisis response teams specifically trained to assess and treat children in crisis. As Whitney Bunts, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy has detailed, “mobile crisis programs have been linked to decreases in school arrest, improved school attendance, and a decline in police calls.” For example, schools in Connecticut and Oklahoma that make regular use of their respective statewide youth-focused mobile crisis teams saw both school absences and arrest rates plummet.
(3) A Standout Program Gets Even Better.
The Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland (MACRO) program, which launched earlier this year and is housed within the city’s fire department, has dispatched medics to over 3,500 calls for service related to mental illness, substance use, and homelessness. These are calls that armed police officers used to handle, and Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong told The San Francisco Chronicle that he is grateful for the help—“OPD has more than enough to deal with,” he said. The program could handle more calls, but getting calls routed to the team from the 911 call center has been an obstacle to scaling the program. Starting this month, though, 911 dispatchers are now equipped to dispatch a mobile crisis team through the fire department instead of sending a police officer.
Related: Safer Cities recently conducted a national survey that gave likely voters various additional facts that could shift baseline support or opposition to mobile crisis response. In general, baseline support is so high that additional facts didn’t shift it much. But the one exception is the kind of 911 integration that Oakland just did— “Traditionally, a 911 operator can dispatch a police officer, a firefighter, or an ambulance. However, in places where a mobile crisis response unit exists, the 911 operator has another tool to solve the caller's problem—they can now dispatch a police officer, a firefighter, an ambulance, or a mobile crisis responder.” Knowing this fact increases support for creating a mobile crisis response program, especially among Republicans.
