Screenshot/CBS News
A CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) mobile mental health crisis intervention team answering calls in Eugene, Oregon
Brandon Johnson, newly elected mayor of Chicago, has called for more resources for community development over increased police budgeting. If Johnson wants to ensure the city has “smart” police, he could look at the plethora of models that demonstrate that the healthiest response to crime and community issues is often not the police at all. Across the country, cities have been experimenting with these community alternatives to policing.
To reduce reliance on the police, communities have begun reassessing what resources and power are available and reallocating them as appropriate. The various pilots show that in many instances, unarmed community responders are a more appropriate and far less risky strategy than police response to 911 calls and other emergencies.
That’s what “defund the police” really meant at its best, stripped of the inflammatory arguments about the slogan. By shifting public resources to more effective and less risky response systems, cities and historically marginalized groups are finding power to create their own community alternatives to policing, as well as demanding that systems take their needs seriously.
These programs are most commonly staffed with trained, unarmed community members, including EMTs and mental health workers. These alternatives include both independent mobile crisis teams, and newly restructured programs of the city’s emergency system.
To formulate a model, many cities looked to the CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) program, a “mobile social service” serving Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, that has been operating since 1989. The program, which is staffed through a local clinic and funded by the Eugene Police Department, dispatches emergency mobile crisis responders to behavioral health crisis calls.
The program provides 24/7 services. Each dispatched team consists of a medic and a crisis worker. CAHOOTS works in many areas, including crisis counseling, substance abuse aid, and housing crisis intervention.
The program estimates that it diverts more than 5 percent of calls from the police department. CAHOOTS received nearly 18,000 calls for service in 2019. Out of an estimated 24,000 calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019, they called for police backup only 311 times (1.3 percent of calls), notes a case study on the program by Greenfield People’s Budget from 2021. No responder has ever experienced a serious injury on a call in the 30 years of operation.
“Responders focus on listening, empathizing, stabilizing, and de-escalating, especially prioritizing a person’s basic needs like warmth … and a sense of trust,” the study says. CAHOOTS is effectively redirecting resources away from the police back to the community in order to provide a de-escalating and compassionate response to behavioral crises. And in addition to its longevity, it is the inspiration for many of the models that sprang up post-2020.
In Denver, the Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) initiative is a CAHOOTS-inspired program that dispatches teams to nonviolent emergencies. Originally piloted in 2020, the program is funded through the city, and dispatched through Denver 911. STAR sends teams to “engage individuals experiencing distress related to mental health issues, poverty, homelessness, and substance misuse.”
Pilots show that in many instances, unarmed community responders are a more appropriate and far less risky strategy than police response.
The program operates during set hours, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., and only responds to calls where there is no imminent risk. Still, STAR responded to hundreds of calls in 2021, and thousands of them in 2022, according to a report from the city. Many of these calls were well-being checks that STAR was able to handle without calling for backup. A Stanford study found that reported crimes dropped 34 percent in the six-month pilot of the program.
In 2016, WellPower, a Denver nonprofit that provides mental health services to the city, established a co-responder program with the city. When the city began experimenting with alternatives to policing in 2020, WellPower offered its staffing services to the STAR pilot, and eventually secured the contract to continue providing the clinician for a response. The team now consists of 20 behavioral health clinicians and paramedics, with the hope to expand.
Chris Richardson, a social worker with WellPower, was one of the initial responding clinicians. Richardson notes that the most common response when STAR arrives on the scene is a degree of confusion. People are used to the police responding, but when STAR shows up, “the guard gets let down a little bit and there’s more of a conversation on how we help people,” Richardson told the Prospect. He also notes the sense of gratitude that STAR receives from organizations around the city that the program collaborates with, such as the local shelters, Muslim Family Services, and Colorado Coalition for the Homeless.
In Durham, North Carolina, the city has implemented its HEART (Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams) mobile teams. Durham began operating this resource in June 2022, and has had nearly 5,000 calls since its launch. HEART in Durham has four response pilots to meet the needs of the city: Crisis Call Diversion, Community Response Teams (CRT), Care Navigation, and Co-Response (CoR). Two of these pilots, CRT and CoR, are mobile dispatch teams.
CRT teams are unarmed first responders dispatched to “non-violent behavioral health and quality of life” calls. They are three-person teams with the goal to respond “based on people’s needs [and to] reduce law enforcement encounters.” CoR teams are co-responders with the Durham police department to calls that pose “greater potential safety risk,” with the goal of assessing whether more police calls could be better served by unarmed responders. In some cases, HEART is requested by the police department to assist.
According to a HEART data dashboard, CRT teams have responded to over a thousand calls since its launch, mostly for trespassing, assisting another team, or mental health checks. There have been over 700 CoR responses since the launch, mostly for disturbances. This dashboard also contains stories of HEART aiding calls for impoverished community members, disturbances, trespassing, and more from HEART’s time in the field. A CNN report notes a suicidal community member who got to the hospital because of HEART. These programs demonstrate the effectiveness of partnerships with a city, and the difference that just having financial resources can make.
The summer of protests after George Floyd’s death led to more cities paying attention to alternative models. Take the case of the Cambridge HEART (Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team) program, which was born directly out of the 2020 movement. The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, moved to create the Alternate Public Safety Task Force, which was tasked with developing an alternative public safety model in the city. However, there was conflict between a key community group called The Black Response, which created HEART, and the city government.
The city’s task force ended up proposing a public safety department that would have done similar work as HEART, but it would be more deeply incorporated into existing city structure, including the police. An internal report from HEART notes that members of The Black Response attempted to engage the city in good faith. “However, it quickly became clear that the City’s intention was to use non-transparent, top-down processes to develop the program,” the report says.
The city council went on to approve both proposals in 2021. However, Corinne Espinoza, co-director of HEART, told the Prospect that HEART has never received any money from the city of Cambridge. This is because Cambridge’s budget is controlled by the city manager, who has thus far refused HEART funding and instead allocated money toward the public safety department controlled by the city.
Still, with the help of community fundraising, HEART successfully launched non-emergency services that provide an array of resources, such as mutual aid coordination and wellness checks. HEART is able to help with transportation, intake forms or other paperwork, or by lending a listening ear. HEART also works to connect people with its vast web of Cambridge social service organizations, a resource that was intentionally developed to harvest the power of the city already available.
To do this, HEART ensures that it pays its workers a living wage, and that the program never co-responds with police officers. The program, which has now hired two co-directors, plans to launch mobile emergency services, such as intervening in mental health crises, in the summer of 2023.
“A really good alternative emergency response will be informed by the cultures, values, and specific challenges in each community,” Espinoza told the Prospect.
HEART is a model different from the others, but emerging from the same community need, the same devastation that relying on police forces has caused communities all over the country. HEART demonstrates that resources are not just monetary, nor do they have to be at the whim of a city government that may have other interests besides the community. The power inherent in a community is a resource as well, one that can be harvested and directed to create change and build momentum.
Accessing the power inherent in a community is an essential value for many policing alternatives. As the Prospect and others have reported, a big problem with the traditional policing model is that departments are often overfunded, despite being chronically mismanaged. This diverts resources from a community but does not actually increase the safety of one. The less a community relies on a police department to meet its needs, the better.
Heavy-handed, aggressive policing is not the only way to maintain order. Communities have always trusted themselves to regulate internally, and American cities are doing well to finally redistribute power and wealth to create a more equitable future.
“We’re seeing more and more social needs coming up that are outside the scope [of police],” Richardson said. “Civilian response allows us to have a much more trauma-informed, client-centered approach. It’s just a social issue that we don’t need to send police to; we need to send people that are trained and understand the system.”
