LA tests program to send unarmed civilians instead of cops to people in crisis

Los Angeles officials — eager to ease the city’s reliance on police officers for handling nonviolent mental health emergencies — have launched a new pilot program that sends unarmed civilians with training to respond to such calls.

Modeled after a heralded program out of Oregon, city officials said the socalled Unarmed Model of Crisis Response has two teams of mental health practitioners available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for situations that would typically fall to police, such as conducting welfare checks and responding to calls for public intoxication and indecent exposure.

The program, run by the city attorney’s office, is so far operating in three police divisions — Devonshire, Wilshire and Southeast — with plans to evaluate its performance after a year and potentially expand.

City officials unveiled the initiative at a news conference earlier this week, after the program had been up and running for at least a month.

“From welfare checkins, to nonviolent mental health/drug issues, to minor health crises in encampments and elsewhere, we need more tools in our toolbox to truly help Angelenos in need,” City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield said in a statement. “We can’t keep asking our police officers to also be social workers, mental health clinicians and outreach workers.”

The program is based on the “Cahoots” model, named for a Eugene,

Ore., nonprofit widely considered the gold standard in mobile crisis intervention. The program, started in 1989, today handles about 20% of the mental health calls for the city of around 180,000 by dispatching teams of specialists trained in counseling and deescalation.

The program’s launch in L.A. comes amid continued public frustration with the city’s handling of the intertwined issues of homelessness, substance abuse and mental health. The LAPD has come under heightened scrutiny after a string of mental health-related shootings and other use-of-force incidents. In 2023 alone, LAPD officers opened fire at least 19 times on people experiencing some form of behavioral crisis, according to a Times database.

Department officials have said repeatedly that, despite increased crisis intervention training and new “less-lethal” weapons designed to incapacitate rather than kill, officers are not always equipped to handle most mental health calls. At the same time, police say, these types of calls have the potential to quickly spiral into violence.

LAPD interim Chief Dominic Choi said during a meeting of the

Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners that the department

“fully supports” the new program.

“It’s taking some of the workload from us and shifting the resources to the appropriate” responders, Choi said.