Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Police changing response to mental health crisis
Philadelphia police officers Kenneth Harper and Jennifer Torres were in their patrol car sitting at a red light when a call came in over the 911 radio dispatch.
“This job says ‘female complaint in reference to dispute with daughter, suffers from bipolar, infant on location,’” Harper read off the computer near the front seat.
The officers got a little more information from the dispatcher: A mother needed help with her adult daughter who had become combative after drinking alcohol.
It was a Friday morning. Harper and Torres quickly drove off in the direction of the address they were given just a few miles away. They traveled in a white SUV, absent of any police markings, with a third team member in the back seat, Krystian Gardner. Gardner is not a police officer. She’s a mental health clinician and social worker.
“Do we know the age of the daughter?” Gardner asked the officers. She was preparing a list of possible services and treatment options.
As the team pulled up to a row house in North Philadelphia, the mother was waiting for them outside, on the front stoop. They spent 40 minutes with the family, working to de-escalate the immediate tension, provide the mom with support and connect her daughter to treatment services.
The trio returned to the patrol car and got to work documenting what had happened and recording the visit in an electronic database.
Officer Torres commented on the adult daughter: “In regards to her mental health, she is taking care of herself, she’s taking her medication, and she’s going to therapy, so we don’t need to help her too much on that aspect.”
“She’s actually sleeping right now, so I gave her my card and she’ll call us whenever she wakes up,” Torres added.
Soon, the radio crackled with their next call, to a home across town where an older woman with a history of mental disorders had wandered outside naked.
This visit took longer, over an hour, but had a similar outcome — help with the immediate mental health crisis, a connection to follow-up services with a case manager, and no arrest or use of force by police.
New ways to respond
Emergency dispatchers in Philadelphia are increasingly assigning 911 calls involving people in mental health crises to the city’s Crisis Intervention Response Team, which pairs police officers with civilian mental health professionals. This model is called a “co-responder program.”
Cities are experimenting with new ways to meet the rapidly increasing demand for behavioral health crisis intervention, at a time when incidents of police shooting and killing people in mental health crisis have become painfully familiar.
Big questions persist: What role should law enforcement play in mental crisis response, if any? How can leaders make sure the right kind of response is dispatched to meet the needs of a person in crisis? And what kind of ongoing support is necessary after a crisis response call?
City officials and behavioral health professionals often don’t have easy answers, in part because the programs are new and hard data on their effectiveness is scarce. Without a single, definitive model for how to improve crisis response, cities are trying to learn from one another’s successes and mistakes as they build and adjust their programs.
The Philadelphia Police Department established its Behavioral Health Unit in November 2022 and officially launched the co-responder crisis teams as a main feature.
The department said its goal is to meet people’s immediate behavioral health needs, avoiding arrests or use of force, if possible. Philadelphia’s program has answered about 600 calls since December 2022 — and only one case resulted in an arrest as of November 2023, according to city data.
In about 85% of cases, people experienced one of four major outcomes: They were connected to outpatient mental health and social services, voluntarily entered psychiatric treatment, were involuntarily committed to treatment, or were taken to a hospital for medical care.
“I think the practical experiences that people have had has really opened up a lot of people’s eyes to what the work does, how it’s actually reducing harm to the community,” said Kurt August, director of Philadelphia’s Office of Criminal Justice.
Social worker with radio
City officials in Philadelphia looked to such cities as Los Angeles, Houston, and Denver, which have developed their own models over the years. They contacted people like Chris Richardson.
Richardson in 2016 helped found Denver’s co-responder program, which pairs police officers with mental health professionals, like Philadelphia’s CIRT program.
Denver residents had been unhappy with the status quo, Richardson recalled. At the time, rankand-file police officers were the only ones responding to 911 calls involving people in crisis.
“We just heard a lot of those communities saying, ‘We wish there was something better,’” he said. “That’s what kind of gave us that ability to start those conversations and start a partnership.”
Getting buy-in from law enforcement and other emergency response teams took time, Richardson said. Eventually, the co-responder program grew to include all police precincts and several fire departments.
Then, Denver city and county park rangers began requesting the aid of mental health professionals to accompany them while on patrol in public spaces, and during emergency calls.