In the summer of 2020, it often seemed like there were two diametrically opposed views about the role of policing.
The truth is that many public safety officials recognize that certain situations and incidents are better handled by an alternative response to traditional policing. Some officials are passionate advocates for partnerships that help incorporate additional community resources, redirect police resources where they’re needed the most and best serve communities.
“You have to have a blend, is what we’ve found,” says Tom Wieczorek, director of the Center for Public Safety Management, which is the exclusive provider of public safety service to the International City/County Management Association. “Mental health is probably not best handled by police. You’re not going to take a person suffering from addiction for a lifetime and cure them in 15 minutes. Often, they’re taken to jail, and normally they don’t receive counseling or treatment. It’s a revolving door.”
These partnerships don’t just spring up on their own. To improve call response, Wieczorek notes, communities must seek to understand how they’re currently responding, identify community resources and adopt appropriate 911 center equipment and processes — and then train dispatchers to direct the right resources to the right calls. Technology is often at the center of these efforts, with communities integrating partner organizations into computer-aided dispatch systems and supplying them with onboard vehicle routers and other equipment to keep them connected.
“It’s about re-envisioning the dispatch center,” Wieczorek says. “How can we be more effective? How can we best use the resources within the community? In the short term, it may be more work, but over the long term, it’s about solving problems rather than warehousing people.”
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Denver Launches a New Approach to Public Safety Response
Denver launched the Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program in June 2020, sending out vans staffed with paramedics and mental health clinicians instead of police officers for some calls. These teams treat people with mental health issues and connect them with services, and a six-month study of the new program showed immediate benefits.
The alternative team responded to 1,685 calls as of Sept. 9 — a volume that could potentially reduce Denver police calls for service by nearly 3 percent. With very few exceptions, STAR was able to resolve situations without the need for police intervention.
“We’ve seen a really solid response, and the teams are very busy,” says Jacob J. Woodard, Denver’s 911 IT manager. “These alternative response programs are new, and they’re a deviation from a prior train of thought for a lot of emergency services departments. That said, I think they should be taken as seriously everywhere, from a technology and operations perspective, as they have been in Denver. This has been success because we’ve given the program our full range of capabilities, both from a technology and an asset perspective, to make sure they can be as successful as possible from day one.”
One early example of this sort of partnership is Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets, or CAHOOTS, a mobile crisis intervention program in Eugene, Ore. The response units are staffed by White Bird Clinic personnel using vehicles from the city of Eugene, and the program has been in place since 1989, diverting between 5 and 8 percent of police calls. The program receives around $800,000 a year in city funding, and in 2019, CAHOOTS handled nearly 19,000 calls for service.