Before renewed calls for defunding police departments, advocates have pushed for medical professionals to respond to mental health crises. “There’s been broad agreement that mental-health crises are not appropriate criminal-justice matters.'
Thirty-one years ago, the Eugene, Ore., mobile crisis-intervention program Cahoots was born. The 24/7 service, provided by the nonprofit White Bird Clinic and integrated into the city’s public-safety infrastructure, dispatches a medic and crisis worker to respond to non-criminal crises involving people experiencing mental illness problems, substance abuse and homelessness.
Advocates at Cahoots and elsewhere have long argued that trained mental-health and medical professionals, not armed police, should be the ones deployed to respond to people experiencing behavioral-health distress — a view that some people with law-enforcement backgrounds appear to share. An ambulance and medical professionals represent a standard response for someone having a heart attack or stroke — but “for some reason, we have decided that mental illness needs to be treated differently,” John Snook, the executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, told MarketWatch.
Cahoots staff, in contrast, show up to a scene in a white van wearing informal attire, Black said: “We can send a clear message that we’re not the police, that we’re not the fire department.” Ideally, Snook added, “this isn’t the first time anyone’s heard that you’re in need of care — and someone coordinates with you to ensure that you get the response that you need.”
One survey respondent said, “We should not be in the mental health transport business. … We are a police department, not doctors.” Another asked, “Since when did we consider the idea, even with the best intentions, that placing someone in need of psychiatric care in the back of a squad car is a good thing?”
‘They realize that we’re not part of that same system' Around one in five calls that come in to the Eugene police department results in a Cahoots response, Black said. During a typical Cahoots call, a person experiencing a crisis or a third party will put in a call to dispatch , and a Cahoots team is sent to the scene, Black said.
“You can do the math on how much it costs to have two officers show up, with everything else that comes along with that,” Black said, suggesting Cahoots is the cheaper option. Of those 24,000 calls, just 150 interactions escalated to the point of Cahoots responders calling for police backup. The program is funded entirely by the city in Eugene, and by a combination of city funds and a state grant in Springfield, he said.
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