Webinar highlights CAHOOTS program

Policing and community safety continue to be a focus worldwide and last Thursday the Santa Cruz chapter of the ACLU furthered the discussion in a Zoom webinar titled, “Alternative Responses to 911 Calls.” An ACLU press release explained, “Law enforcement leaders and activists agree that many nonviolent calls should be responded to by trained mental health and social worker professionals, instead of law enforcement officers.”

“This webinar is designed to educate the public about the need and possibility for change,” said Santa Cruz ACLU board member Lee Brokaw. “We will begin by discussing the mobile mental health services currently available to the community.” According to Brokaw, about 100 people attended the zoom webinar, which was translated simultaneously into Spanish.

Panelists included Stacey Falls of the local ACLU; Sarah Leonard, executive director of the Mental Health Client Action Network (MHCAN); Stephanie French, Operations Division manager of the Santa Cruz Regional 911 system; Ashley Tran, Suicide Crisis Line coordinator for Suicide Prevention Service of the Central Coast; Carly Memoli, program director for Suicide Prevention Service; and Ben Adam Climer, formerly of CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) in Eugene, Oregon and now a consultant to organizations and governments considering a CAHOOTS model.

CAHOOTS — Mobile Crisis Intervention Service (MCIS)

The White Bird Clinic was established in Eugene, Oregon in 1969 and in 1989 the clinic took it to the streets with CAHOOTS, an unarmed mobile response service of mental health counselors and EMTs. CAHOOTS responds to about 20% of 911 emergency and non- emergency calls in the Eugene/Springfield area.

Ben Adam Climer was a crisis counselor and EMT at CAHOOTS for five years and for one year was their schedule coordinator. Now he’s the consultant for California cities interested in adopting a CAHOOTS-style model called Mobile Crisis Intervention Service (MCIS).

“White Bird was tiny when it got started,” recalled Climer. “But you don’t need a clinic. You need a non-profit or group with the right perspective to provide cri

sis support. They need to be trained in listening to people, being empathetic and offering support. To form basic human connection and make people feel that somebody cares about them. It’s not that hard to do, if you act in a genuine and authentic way.”

Response

Currently, when Santa Cruz police respond to a call where someone may be having a mental health crisis, Mental Health Liaisons (MHL) often accompany the officers.

“SCPD has two liaisons who work with patrol officers in non- COVID times. Now they respond on their own and meet officers on scene. They work 10 hours a day and split the week,” explains Santa Cruz Police Chief Andy Mills. “They are professional Licensed Clinical Social Workers with Masters Degrees and advanced training. They’re even part of our Hostage Negotiations Team. Annually the calls involving the MHL is about 1,350 in the city of Santa Cruz. Of those, 642 were for committal evaluations. 128 people were held for an evaluation as a result.”

“That’s the co-response model. Over 2,200 cities in the country have some form of Co-Response,” Climer says of MHL services. “If it were efficient then everyone would feel that. But it’s not really working. A lot of people don’t even know these exist.”

Climer also thinks the coresponse model is too limited in scope.

“MHL teams primarily go out and do a 5150 assessment; ‘ Does this person need to have their civil rights taken away because of their mental health state?’ The truth is that the human experience is vast and an array of crises derive from a slew of different types of experiences. And many of those do not meet the qualifications for being put on a 5150 hold. But they do require some human connection in order to resolve.”

5150 is a 72-hour involuntary mental health hold in a locked facility with civil rights suspended.

“Co-response is very focused on mental health calls and is designed to handle people who are having acute suicidal or psychotic episodes,” said Climer. “The CAHOOTS MCIS ( Mobile Crisis Intervention Service) model is designed to handle acute suicidal and psychotic episodes and it’s also there to catch a lot more.”

Emergency calls

Some communities have

established crisis response teams outside of government systems like CAT-911 in Los Angeles, Anti Police-Terror Project in Sacramento and the international Don’t Call The Police, created in June, 2020. Climer says he respects such efforts but adds, “Because police and fire departments have a monopoly on responding to 911 calls, it’s super hard to create an alternative without getting into that dispatch system. You have to create a new number, advertise it and people have to remember to call it. We’re better off committing efforts to get CAHOOTS into the system.” Locally, YARR ( Your Area Rapid Response) responds to specific emergencies related to federal ICE agents and hate groups. (831231- 4289)

Mills told the Sentinel, “If we can come up with a model that works — like the CAHOOTS model — then I’m all in favor of us figuring out how to fund that, how to make it happen.”

Mills cautions, “You don’t destroy the old stadium until you build a new one. Meaning that you’ve got to have some place for people to go. And there is nothing in place right now other than a very small-scale, limited model — CAHOOTS — that has taken hold in a couple of cities.”

According to CAHOOTS, they’re assisting development of MCIS programs in Olympia, Denver, Coos Bay, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Indianapolis, New York City, Hartford and other cities. Ben Adam Climer is currently in conversation with activists or city officials in Huntington Beach, Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Lompoc and Los Angeles about establishing mobile crisis units.

Mills doubts the need for more crisis responders in Santa Cruz.

“A city our size is not going to have enough business, if you will. Maybe it could be combined with the Sheriff’s jurisdiction, with the whole county. But then your response times become very slow.” Mills said. “There are a lot of those calls but not probably enough for a fulltime person. Of the 100,000 calls for service that police responded to, or proactively did themselves, about 60,000 of those people called us for help. Of those 60,000 about 1,900 were for mental health help. So, is 1,900 enough? You’d have to have a staff of two on- duty at a time. With a relief factor of two and a half persons.”

“(Nineteen hundred) calls is quite a lot — that’s a lot of work,” responds Climer. “Assessing how many SCPD calls would be diverted by a CAHOOTS-style program would have to be done sys

tematically. And we’d also look at what crises are happening because people are not housed.”

“Sometimes what gets confused is this idea that CAHOOTS responds only to “mental health” calls. That’s a misnomer because while mental health, homelessness and substance abuse are all things that we do respond to, what we are is a crisis response team,” said Climer. “People who are having crises get a CAHOOTS response. And those crises might develop from a mental health issue, a substance use issue, or a homelessnessrelated issue.”

Homelessness

“Santa Cruz has an abnormally large density of people living unhoused for a city its size,” Climer said. “Numerous reports show that a large amount of what police respond to relates to people living outside. A lot of those calls would go to a CAHOOTS-style program.”

Sarah Leonard, executive director of Mental Health Client Action Network, told the Sentinel that 60% of their members are unhoused. MHCAN is a peerrun support program for and by people diagnosed with severe mental illness, “whether they agree with their diagnosis or not.”

Leonard told the Sentinel the current Co-Response Mental Health Liaison program is not effective.

“We’ve been asking for years for a CAHOOTS system to be established here. We’ve received zero response from the people who hold the resources,” Leonard said. “People like us need special care and often don’t get that. It would save many people from enduring and re-experiencing traumas.”

Lee Brokaw told the Sentinel, “Depending on how you look at the data, 4060% of the calls could be covered by CAHOOTS. The majority of calls that SCPD

responds to are homeless, mental health, suicide, wellness checks, substance abuse. It’s about responding to 911 calls without law enforcement when law enforcement is not needed, and can be harmful.”

Mills disagrees.

“I am not sure where ACLU got their data. CAHOOTS would not respond to 40- 60% of calls. Checks are officers “checking” locations where crime occurs, also known as hot spots. For example drug dealing, incidents of theft and violence are confined to small spaces and frequently the same victims and suspects. Suspicious persons or vehicles are calls for police service; rarely does it have anything to do with mental health. Even the mental health or drug addiction calls where CAHOOTS might be able to respond, if there is a mention of violence or weapons, officers would be sent. These calls are frequent.”

It can be done

Stephanie French, Operations Division manager of the Santa Cruz 911 system said that CAHOOTS responders could be added to the Santa Cruz emergency 911 dispatch.

“It’s totally doable.” she said. “It just is going to be some work. Our agency is always willing to connect the caller with the right resource and it just takes time and planning and commitment for everybody to get to an agreeable place to have a fourth resource in the system.

About creating a CAHOOTS crisis response team locally Gelblum emphasized, “We’re not interested in just talking about this. We want to get this done.”