In the wake of recent controversial and highly publicized uses of lethal force by police, many reform-minded activists and lawmakers have sought to take police out of the proverbial equation in a greater share of citizen interactions. One popular method has been the “alternative” responder approach for calls involving individuals thought to be suffering from mental health-related problems. But there is simply no way around the reality that police must continue to respond to these incidents.
The United States does not have an adequate number of qualified mental health professionals to respond to the high call volume that big city police departments field. In New York City alone, 911 operators handle nearly 180,000 calls annually that involve “emotionally disturbed persons.” The idea that there exists an untapped pool of qualified responders that would allow us to scale up alternative response efforts to the point of replacing police is simply incongruous with reality.
Many such calls will ultimately require a police response, either because the individual in question is violent or because more serious criminal conduct is discovered. What my colleague Charles F. Lehman found studying a mobile crisis intervention program in Eugene, Ore., called Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS), is illustrative of the limits of this approach:
“In 2019, [CAHOOTS] covered just 17% of Eugene 911 calls…. But even in those relatively limited circumstances, CAHOOTS responders still called for [police] backup in roughly 1 in every 67 calls for service in 2019.”
Based on the information typically relayed to a 911 operator, it's also often unclear whether a call can be safely diverted to nonpolice responders. A 2021 study in Philadelphia found that “some events eventually determined to be police/crime activity can initially appear to be public health related,” and vice versa, making the nature of 1 in 5 calls unpredictable. In other words, even if we had enough mental health professionals to respond, we can expect a real (and potentially dangerous) inefficiency based on the likelihood that the error rate in determining whether a police response is needed will be significant.
While efforts to augment what police do are laudable in their aims, reform efforts must be guided by the realities on the ground. Those realities suggest that while some calls can safely be handled by civilians, we must work to better prepare cops for a job that, for better or worse, they're going to be stuck doing for the foreseeable future.
Continue reading the entire piece here at CQ Researcher
______________________
Rafael A. Mangual is a senior fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in CQ Researcher