Removing Cops From Behavioral Crisis Calls: ‘We Need To Change The Model’

R&I – FS

In what will be among the largest and boldest urban police reform experiment in decades San Francisco is creating and preparing to deploy teams of professionals from the fire and health departments — not police — to respond to most calls for people in a psychiatric, behavioral or substance abuse crisis.

Instead of police, these types of crisis calls will mostly be handled by new unarmed mobile teams comprised of paramedics, mental health professionals and peer support counselors starting next month.

“It’s glaringly obvious we need to change the model,” says San Francisco Fire Dept. Capt. Simon Pang, who is leading the fire department’s effort to build these new street crisis response teams.

Removing police from most nonviolent psychiatric and behavioral crisis calls is no small shift: they can account for a quarter or more of all police calls for service. If you add in 911 calls for issues or complaints surrounding homelessness, the numbers shoot even higher, police data show.

Moreover, surveys show that nearly a quarter of fatal police encounters followed calls about “disruptive behavior” directly tied to a person’s mental illness and/or substance abuse disorder. Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics surveys show that 64% of those in jail and more than half of all prison inmates have a mental health problem, many of them undiagnosed.

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Article URL : https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/924146486/removing-cops-from-behavioral-crisis-calls-we-need-to-change-the-model