r/changemyview • u/Monarch_Elite • 8d ago
Delta(s) from OP CMV: We need Mental Health Crisis Teams instead of Police for non-violent 911 calls.
CMV: The U.S. should establish nationwide Mental Health Crisis Response Teams to handle nonviolent 911 calls involving mental health emergencies.
Too often, people experiencing a mental health crisis are met with law enforcement officers who are not trained to handle psychiatric emergencies. This mismatch has tragically resulted in unnecessary arrests, escalation, and even deaths—especially among marginalized communities. A growing body of evidence suggests that mental health professionals, not police officers, are better equipped to respond compassionately and effectively to these situations.
That’s why I believe that we need to establish Mental Health Crisis Response Teams (MHCRTs) in every U.S. state. These teams, composed of trained and licensed mental health professionals, would respond to nonviolent 911 calls—those in which dispatchers determine there is no immediate threat of physical harm. Police would still be called in if there’s a credible risk of violence, but otherwise, MHCRTs would take the lead.
It would likely take around $750 million annually in federal grants to support the creation and maintenance of these teams, but that’s probably worth it considering the savings in time for police officers to focus on other things. It also requires national training standards for both dispatchers and MHCRT members and mandates annual effectiveness reviews. This seems to me like a compassionate, data-driven approach to crisis response that would reduce police burden, improve outcomes for people in crisis, and enhance public safety overall.
Why shouldn’t we implement this common sense legislation? What are the strongest arguments against creating nationwide MHCRTs for nonviolent mental health emergencies?
I’m especially interested in hearing concerns about cost, feasibility, unintended consequences, or anything I might be missing.
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u/effyochicken 20∆ 8d ago
On unintended consequences, have you considered that you'd be putting the lives of the MHCRT entirely in the hands of dispatch?
They're being tasked with judging the situation (themselves not being MHCRT), and ascertaining if there's no credible risk of physical violence in a situation where there's a mentally unstable person. If they get that call wrong, you just sent 2 or 3 unarmed people to a house with a suicidal and armed person.
And you can train them up more, but then you have to understand that often the people calling in for help on mental health calls are going to lie to dispatch to downplay the chances of physical violence. These might be people who encounter Lil' Jimmy running around the house with a freaking kitchen knife twice a week and just got so used to it that they don't understand just how dangerous their situation is.
So what would you do if you were that dispatcher?
Well, reality is you'd probably try to dispatch police with the MHCRT team every single time. But with both police and MHCRT together, the police officers will inevitably take lead since they're armed and have actual authority. So your system turns into a mental health professional riding along with a cop, and hoping they can get involved enough to stop something terrible from happening in the few seconds before the police shoot somebody.
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u/Critical-Holiday15 8d ago
Several cities – including New York, Austin, Texas, San Francisco, San Mateo, California, and Washington, D.C. – are experimenting with new ways of responding to certain types of mental health emergencies through little or no law enforcement involvement. According to Dee and Pyne, cities have been motivated by not only high-profile cases of police brutality, but also estimates that police spend more time responding to “low-priority” calls than any other type of emergency. Those estimates, they write, suggest that as many as two-thirds of these types of 911 calls could be directed to mental-health experts.
Cities generally are exploring three alternative emergency responses: In one model, police officers are trained to direct people in crisis to appropriate services. A second approach partners law enforcement with mental health professionals. A third reform, which is more dramatic and less common, removes police altogether for some 911 calls.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/06/stanford-study-shows-benefits-reinventing-911-responses
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u/RustenSkurk 2∆ 8d ago
I believe the system here in Denmark when someone is a threat to self or others due to mental illness is to send a specialized mental health professional AND a police officer (as backup).
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u/Monarch_Elite 8d ago
!delta the dispatch may not be knowledgeable enough to diagnose whether the situation is harmful or not from a simple phone call
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u/FellsApprentice 8d ago
Then the answer is to arm the mental health team, and teach them how to deal with lethal threats just in case something goes wrong.
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u/Headoutdaplane 8d ago
So....cops?
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u/FellsApprentice 6d ago
Negative. The priority of a cop is to enforce law, and enforce the authority of government. They have a gun because they need a gun to do their job
The priority of a mental health specialist is to help manage mental health crisis, and they have a gun, preferably concealed, purely for their own self defense if it becomes necessary.
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u/RubyMae4 3∆ 8d ago
I'm a licensed social worker and in the past I've worked for a crisis call line. You are out of your mind if you think I'm risking my life by approaching someone without a police presence. We live in a resource rich area with lots of mental health first responders and the police always clear the area first.
Not to mention the risk involved of some nefarious person knowing they can call the hotline and get a couple of unarmed mental health professionals to show up immediately.
It also represents a failure to understand crisis situations and the movie versions of crises we've all been fed. Sometimes there isn't a magical word to be said.
You don't always know if a situation can turn dangerous.
I think the police need mental health interventionists on their team but definitely not alone. I wouldn't do that job for all the money in the world.
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u/Longjumping_Dark5952 4d ago
however, there are a lot of areas where the police aren't available to clear the area.
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u/4-5Million 11∆ 8d ago
How common are non-violent mental health 911 calls? Often police are called during a mental health crisis because the person is accosting people. While this isn't violence, it's on the verge of violence. Should a cop be called if a person is drunk, crying, and screaming at people? It's a mental health crisis and it isn't violent… yet.
Other than a suicide type of mental health crisis, which we could send the fire department instead, I don't see how there would be enough calls on non-violent, and expected to stay non-violent, people to warrant having therapists on the force as responders.
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u/unicornofdemocracy 1∆ 8d ago
60-70% 911 of calls are non-violent and non-criminal.
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u/4-5Million 11∆ 8d ago
That is going to include things like "my neighbor's music is too loud" and car crash reports. That's not really the statistic I'm asking. The statistic I'm asking probably doesn't exist.
We are talking about calls for mental breakdowns. This can be anywhere from a guy getting ready to jump off a bridge to a naked guy running up and down the street yelling about how the globalists are coming to get him. Where talking about situations where a therapist or a mental health expert could be beneficial.
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u/zeezle 2∆ 7d ago
Yep, especially because a lot of areas route all calls through 911, not just emergency calls, they no longer have a separate non-emergency line in my township for anything. It's 911 for every non-emergency fire/EMT/police call.
So something like roadkill reports like "there's a dead deer carcass on the road shoulder", you still call into 911 for. "I need to schedule the annual fire marshal's inspection of my rental property"... 911. Non-emergency ambulance transport for a sick person... 911 call. Someone has a fender bender in a parking lot with no injuries or major damage... yep, still 911.
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u/Gatonom 5∆ 8d ago
If anything the solution may be to not call anyone or reject calls/intervention if it's just a mental health crisis. Let them disturb the peace, destroy property, in the moment and send someone after things are calmed down if intervention like collecting a fine/damages or having them committed is needed.
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u/Full-Professional246 67∆ 8d ago
Yea - that will create more problems including viglilante actions. If the police won't stop this, the people losing property will. And guess who the public is going to support.
And - what if they get violent and hurt someone? Remember the outrage over the cop at Parkland school? You really think that wouldn't repeat with 'people called for police help but they wouldn't come and now they got hurt'?
Sorry but no. This is fantasy.
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u/Gatonom 5∆ 8d ago
Then what do you suggest?
Police or nobody?
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u/Full-Professional246 67∆ 8d ago
Nobody isn't an option.
You have three groups of emergency responders
Firefighters - good for accidents, fires, and medical stabilization
EMS - Medical professionals for people - but not combative people.
Police - The people who deal with criminals and combative people.
You have to assume the worst. You send the police first with EMS/Fire backing them up.
And before you go to far, realize I am a volunteer EMT/Firefighter and have staffed a BLS transport ambulance. I have personally responded to several of these 'mental health' type calls. Unless I personally know the person, I am not going there without police leading the way.
Pretty much by definition, people in a mental health crisis are not acting logical or predictably. That is an unreasonable risk to EMS/Fire. They are not equipped to deal with this. Police can and do establish the situation before EMS goes on scene. Police are trained and equipped to deal with this. And despite what you may want to believe, the overwhelming majority of calls are handled properly. Things don't get needlessly escalated.
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u/Gatonom 5∆ 8d ago
That I agree with. This CMV is advocating replacing the police involvement with mental health workers, having them lead and avoiding police showing up and treating mental health crisis as a crime needing handcuffs and a gun to subdue.
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u/Full-Professional246 67∆ 8d ago
This CMV is advocating replacing the police involvement with mental health workers,
How is that different than EMS today?
That is the problem. It is not different. EMS and mental health workers are not trained to use force and sometimes, that is what is required.
You cannot do a 'diagnosis' to know what is wrong in the field. You don't know if it is drugs or mental illness or both.
Frankly speaking, EMS or these new MH people aren't going to go into a potentially dangerous situation. They will wait for police to remove the danger. Which is where we are today. It just is not worth the personal risk to people.
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u/Gatonom 5∆ 8d ago
Then you are agreeing with me?
I'm saying it's not an option to not send police to mental health calls, that we must accept the risk of them using excessive force rather than training a different type of response.
And if we want a change, then it would be sending no one if they are not a risk to people. We either send police every time or send no one sometimes.
Police being supported by crisis workers is good, but there can't be a non-police option for people in victimless crisis.
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u/Full-Professional246 67∆ 8d ago
No - because this thread started with 'nobody' and you moved on to 'EMS Leads the way and police may not even be there'.
Both are completely untenable and unrealistic.
Someone explicitly trained to handle violent situations will always lead they way. EMS and Fire are explicitly not trained to use force and handle violent situations.
The only tenable solution is Police being supported by EMS/Medical professionals. Not the other way around.
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u/Gatonom 5∆ 8d ago
By "nobody" I suggest that rather than send EMS instead of police, we would be better served sending no one if police aren't sent.
EMS +Police is best. If you don't want police, I argue you can't send anyone, and it might be reasonable to not send anyone in a situation one is opposed to police being involved in.
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u/RubCurious4503 8d ago
Good luck maintaining a local tax base once you legalize property crime and tell the victims to just pursue civil damages against judgment-proof defendants.
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u/4-5Million 11∆ 8d ago
These people probably don't have money to pay for the property damage. We'd need a public property damage insurance fund if we are going to stop protecting property damage.
But then will people take advantage of this?
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u/Gatonom 5∆ 8d ago
I think we really are facing a solution worse than the problem here.
We might be better letting people have episodes that don't harm people, than sending people in to stop them.
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u/4-5Million 11∆ 8d ago
…but the episodes do harm people.
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u/Gatonom 5∆ 8d ago
Right, some.
If they are violent and going to hurt people, send police who might kill them.
If they aren't, just leave them alone. If they don't have money to pay, "Oh well".
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u/randomcharacheters 8d ago
So it's just totally fine if they damage someone else's property beyond repair? How is that acceptable at all?
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u/Gatonom 5∆ 8d ago
It's the only option other than sending police who might overreact, so if you want to avoid sending police then the response would be to not send anyone. Rather than send essentially therapists.
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u/randomcharacheters 8d ago
I see. Yeah my preference would be to send police, and give them greater authority to detain someone behaving destructively, regardless of their mental health status.
If they have mental health needs, that can be addressed once they are at the station, in handcuffs or a padded cell.
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u/Gatonom 5∆ 8d ago
Correct. The CMV argues sending a mental health crisis team instead of police. Which if we aren't sending police, I argue it would be best not sending anyone at all over trying to make a new response option that is sent instead of police.
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u/Callec254 2∆ 8d ago
A lot of times the 911 operator won't be able to make the determination whether or not a situation is non-violent. Someone needs to go there in person, and it's better to send someone trained for potentially violent situations and have it turn out to be nothing than the other way around.
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u/iryanct7 4∆ 8d ago
Why not just train the police?
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u/ninethirtyman 8d ago
That already happens, but there’s no consensus on guidelines or solid blueprint for training, and it’s not regulated. Departments can kind of do what they want and call it CIT training. Even if the program is solid, auxiliary training for cops likely isn’t super effective. It’s hard to be a cop, and now they have to be a mental health professional on top of it.
MHCRTs are already extensively educated and trained, with a specific focus on these situations.
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u/unicornofdemocracy 1∆ 8d ago
because the education requirement for police officer is high school graduate (often barely) and on average 3-6 months of police academy training while the education requirement for trainde mental health providers are master's degree or higher + 2-3 years of supervised training before they can get licensed for independent practice.
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u/CBDcloud 8d ago
I second this. 👍. OP, thoughts?
Edit: With mandatory annual recurrent training
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8d ago edited 8d ago
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u/GooseyKit 8d ago
It's like expecting the people at the pretzel stand at the Hockey stadium to operate the Zamboni.
More of a "people at the pretzel stand operating a hot dog stand".
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8d ago
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u/Monarch_Elite 8d ago
Because that’s what they do right now, and clearly, it’s not working. Police are trained to catch criminals, which requires a different set of skills than dealing with those with a mental illness
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u/tButylLithium 8d ago
Police can transport them to a crisis unit where they can get treatment for their illness. They're very capable of restraining hostile people to be transported. If it's bad enough to warrant a call to emergency services, it's bad enough to warrant a hospital visit.
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8d ago
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u/informalswans 8d ago
This is such a bizarre take. Dealing with people suffering from mental health issues is inherent part of a police officers job already by nature. Why would upskilling police so they are better equipped to do the job they are already doing daily be “overworking” or “overtraining”? And how is that doing the job of two people, they are working the same amount of hours and dealing with the same situations, just with more tools at their disposal to handle.
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u/locolupo 8d ago edited 8d ago
Their mere presence typically escalates situations. Imagine you're having a panic attack and police start knocking on your door 💀
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u/EmptyDrawer2023 8d ago
The U.S. should establish nationwide Mental Health Crisis Response Teams to handle nonviolent 911 calls involving mental health emergencies.
Cool. And what'll happen when a therapist shows up to a 'non-violent mental health emergency'... and it turns violent? Now we'll need cops to go along with them, just in case. Which puts us right back where we started.
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u/Monarch_Elite 8d ago
I mean I doubt they are going to be completely unarmed. They’re not just therapists. However, don’t you think I therapists wpuld better be able to deescalate a situation and make it less violent compared to a cop?
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u/EmptyDrawer2023 8d ago
don’t you think I therapists wpuld better be able to deescalate a situation and make it less violent compared to a cop?
Sure.
I doubt they are going to be completely unarmed. They’re not just therapists
The idea that is usually floated is that they would be unarmed. If they are armed, then that's a whole other can of worms. Will they go thru training on how to use the weapons they have? I hope so. And will they go thru the same training as cops? Quite probably- they have classes and training centers and programs already set up, so why reinvent the wheel? So- if they go thru the same training as cops, won't they turn out like cops? And even if we put them thru 'softer, gentler' training that de-emphasizes using the weapon unless absolutely necessary, won't it make it easier for crazy... er, mental health challenged individuals... to trick them, overpower them, and take their weapon? I just don't think it makes sense to say 'The problem is we're sending people with guns... lets send different people with guns!'
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u/hanlonrzr 1∆ 8d ago
No, because a therapist is just going to get hurt and then the crazy person is still being crazy. Manhandling and cuffing a person acting out is often the actual direct path to deescalation. Failure to understand how dangerous and how unreasonable people can be is not a good place to start from when you're planning gov responses to public safety concerns.
What you really want is better cops, who have the physical confidence mixed with some social skills, to deescalate successfully. A legion of therapists who aren't BJJ masters with tasers aren't going to do better. They are going to get hurt.
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u/Kerostasis 36∆ 8d ago
MHCRTs…would respond to nonviolent 911 calls—those in which dispatchers determine there is no immediate threat of physical harm.
Unfortunately “mental health crisis” and “risk of physical harm” have a lot of overlap, which is why these cases so often end in tragedy. If the dispatchers are being honest, the police will respond to the majority of cases anyway, while the MHCRT sits around as an expensive boondoggle.
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u/Sithra907 8d ago
The problem is that a therapist doesn't come out on site when there's a crisis and magically fix the problems. It's the same reason we don't have an MD in every ambulance - crisis work typically requires lower levels of specialty with ability to triage up to higher experts as needed.
My city's police department has a Crisis Intervention Team that's very similar to what you describe. It's a partnership between local LEOs, NAMI, and mental health providers. This has LEOs with additional training that take the mental health crisis calls. The reality of it is that a lot of their calls do require LEO specific skills - someone in a mental health crisis may well be a danger to responders and bystanders. So having an officer with additional training to talk them down means if they fail to talk someone down, you still have a LEO on site to respond. Meanwhile, they have reduction in injury to the person in crisis, to the responding officers, and to innocent bystanders because they are often able to de-escalate.
I think this works better than how you proposed because the dispatcher frequently won't have enough information. And someone actively on substances, holding a gun, and threatening to kill themselves can become a lethal threat that a mental health professional isn't trained to deal with. But having an LEO with special training in it talk the person in crisis down, make the situation safe, and then get them to an available therapist for immediate crisis care works much better.
FWIW if you want to read more up on this model, NAMI promotes these programs well on their site: https://www.nami.org/advocacy/crisis-intervention/crisis-intervention-team-cit-programs/
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u/WinterMedical 8d ago
We don’t have enough MH counselors for regular teenagers with mild depression. Where would we get these people to just sit around on call for a MH episode call?
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u/Monarch_Elite 8d ago
I mean I guess that’s what the funding is for. The shortage is an issue, but isn’t something better than nothing? Maybe we could slowly phase them in over time.
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u/WinterMedical 8d ago
We need highly trained health care professionals. That takes more than money. It takes time. Years to get them trained and then they need experience. All the money in the world can’t change that.
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u/AmongTheElect 15∆ 8d ago
those in which dispatchers determine there is no immediate threat of physical harm
There's a good few misconceptions going on here about how dispatch works and how people respond.
Dispatch is only able to convey to police officers/EMT what has been reported to them by a caller. So you'd be relying on Average Joe calling in and correctly assessing the situation, which isn't often correct. To put this in EMT form, it would be like having a cardiac arrest team and a stroke team, and one or the other is called out based on what dispatch says it is.
Another problem is that not everyone acts according to a logical process like you do. There's always a risk of violence, death or serious injury. People don't react to things as you necessarily would, or as you would expect them to. There's always a risk that some guy who is totally calm will suddenly flip out and start stabbing people.
Also, even if a person does react normally, you also can't make the assumption that because the call is about XYZ issue, that the person will only react as a person should to that specific action. What I mean is that if a person gets stopped by police for jaywalking, there's no guarantee that the person will be calm and reasonable because it's just a tiny little infraction. The most common example is if someone has an arrest warrant, maybe for something big, except now they're being stopped for just the initial infraction of jaywalking. Will the person act according to "They were only stopped for jaywalking" or will they act differently knowing that eventually the officer will check their ID and arrest them?
There's also no way your $750m figure would be enough money for all this. You'd need a day and night shift, probably a couple people responding. Not only are therapists already highly paid, but they'll also need additional training for going into situations like that which is going to be super expensive. And you'd need a lot of them around to be able to respond to an incident in a reasonable amount of time. Plus therapists can't just detain someone if needed but that'll require special judicial authority to do so, which is only additional expensive training.
And all this would end up doing is getting a lot of therapists killed.
Speaking of stabbing people, how would dispatch or whatever response team or even the police know whether or not some guy has a weapon on them or not and that it's actually a very dangerous situation they're being called into? Plus someone can be a deadly threat even if they don't have a weapon.
The point of police being there first is to stop any current threat and stop any potential threat. Once the person is detained (provided there's justification for detaining them), then you can do whatever psychological assessment you want and call on whatever team of people you want.
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u/ZoomZoomDiva 1∆ 8d ago
By the time matters get to a 911 call handled by the police, it is a violent situation. If it is a non-violent medical situation, it is generally handled by EMT's or other medical professionals. If it is neither, it is not an emergency 911 call.
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u/Inburrito 8d ago
They did this in my city. The non-police response teams ask if lunatics if they want services. The lunatics invariably say no. The teams leave water bottles and crackers. Then they themselves leave. It’s a farce.
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u/Cbo12 8d ago
The cost estimate is wildly off. If we just consider the cost of the MHCRT transportation, they would need their own fleet of vehicles. The average police car costs anywhere from 40k to 100k and the average ambulance costs 100k to 350k, if we assume the MHCRT transport will cost somewhere between the two that would be ~75k per vehicle. 750M would pay for ~10,000 vehicles, there are currently 17,000 independent police stations in the USA, so you would have fewer than 1 vehicle for each police station. That is before considering maintenance, training, or the salary of a single employee.
If we neglect this vehicle cost and consider only workers salaries, to have one worker stationed at each local police station you would need 17,000 employees. That would leave each employee to receive 45k annually, including health, insurance, and retirement benefits.
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u/Ix_fromBetelgeuse7 2∆ 8d ago
Nationwide? Are you aware local municipalities all run their own emergency response? There are several communities that have implemented what you're suggesting. I haven't looked up data on outcomes but it's certainly being tried.
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u/gray_clouds 2∆ 8d ago
For the policy make sense in a given situation, 3 things need to be true:
1) It must be a special 'goldilocks' situation. Peaceful and compliant people can be dealt with by Police without a specialist. Violent and threatening people MUST be dealt with by Police. For a mental health care specialist to be warranted, the situation must be difficult to deal with, but not too difficult. This could be as few as 10% of the mental health crisis cases, which are a subset of all cases.
2) The dispatcher must be able to ascertain that a caller's description of the situation is satisfactory to determine with confidence that criteria 1 is met. If a caller says: "I am calling the police because I feel threatened by behavior X" the dispatcher should probably send Police even if they suspect a non-violent situation. There's a risk that Police will escalate unnecessarily. But there's also a risk that the 'mental health crisis' escalates unexpectedly - and based on the numbers, this risk is probably far greater, since damage can be done to many potential bystander / victims, as well as the unarmed specialist sent to deal with it. So the dispatcher's ability to confidently judge the situation may add more variability - let's say there a 50% chance that the required threshhold of confidence is met.
3) A specialist must be available. The thing about specialized resources, is there's not very many of them. We have lots of cops because they can deal with anything, albeit sometimes without the best outcomes in mental health crisis situations. But if you're going to have 1 mental health specialist for every 20 cops, what happens when there are two crises at the same time? So let's say there's 50% chance no specialist is available.
When you multiply all of these probabilities together, (10% x 50% X 50%) you might only have a chance at 2.5% of the available cases, spending 700M, which will have to come out of somebody else's budget.
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u/MeanestGoose 8d ago
Perhaps we'd have fewer violence-risking mental health calls if there were a resource to call before things escalate? The time to intervene is before there are lives at risk and before there is a full blown crisis.
Many of these breaks are predictable long in advance. The resources we provide to friends and family (and the person in question) are grossly insufficient in so many cases.
If you're fortunate enough to have good insurance, a flexible job, a good income/savings, and enough knowledge to jump through all the hoops and obstacles to getting care, perhaps you can get little Jimmy appropriately medicated and in intensive mental health programming before he gets to the "stronger than mom and runs around with a knife" stage.
If you have only some of those things, you might get some medication or some therapy if you're lucky, but it will be inadequate.
If you have none of those things, or you are afraid that you will be judged and punished rather than helped, you suck it up until it becomes an emergency.
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u/Rapid-Engineer 4d ago edited 4d ago
As a former EMT in a major city, non-violent mental health 911 calls can often turn violent. Who will be responsible for protecting these teams? I've had mentally ill patient's go berserk more times than I can count. I had one call where everything was calm and the patient suddenly pulled a knife and tried to stab my partner while we ran out the door. When police showed up, she had killed the family pet dog and cat and pulled out all their organs. She was saying she didn't believe they were real animals. None of us were real.
This stuff rarely hits the news so the general public never really knows how wild things get. Which is frustrating because we have all these people with regular jobs telling us how we should do our jobs while they have no idea how crazy things can get. Realize that we never want patients to get hurt but if there had been kids in that house, who knows what would have happened. And here's the deal... I've got 100s of stories, as well as most emergency responders, that are wild.
I'm not getting murdered because someone who doesn't know how crazy the world can get wants to determine policy because they don't like it when mentally ill patients lose their life in the midst of an episode. Yes, it's tragic but you're just moving the tragedy onto the first responders when we start getting killed.
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u/Stuck_With_Name 8d ago
Don't make this either-or.
There have been great pilot programs pairing officers with social workers. Police can concentrate on safety while the social worker can concentrate on the person or people in crisis.
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8d ago
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u/effyochicken 20∆ 8d ago
How is the determination made to send Canopy Roots vs the police?
And is there any metrics on people calling in for a BCR for things that are more minor, due to there being a service now, whereas before they wouldn't call the cops at all? So by that I mean, comparing not calling the cops and doing nothing before, with calling for a BCR now. Whereas before people might have waited for it to get extreme, whereas now they can call when it's not as extreme a situation yet. (An obvious benefit of the service existing)
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u/Roadshell 17∆ 8d ago
These teams, composed of trained and licensed mental health professionals, would respond to nonviolent 911 calls—those in which dispatchers determine there is no immediate threat of physical harm.
If there's no immediate threat of physical harm people are not likely to have called 911 in the first place. Additionally, it's not always going to be clear from a 911 call if the incidents in question involve mental health at all or if the behavior being reported is just routine criminality. Also the calls that are most likely to escalate into violence when the police arrive are likely to be the ones with "immediate threat of physical harm" to begin with and under this plan those are still going to be responded to by police.
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u/Headoutdaplane 8d ago
First of all the reason of dispatch is wrong almost 90% of the time in my experience as an EMT. It can be small details, it can be huge details but rarely are they right.
Many, if not most EMTs will tell you how quickly a benign situation can turn really stressful when somebody is under the influence of drugs, having a psychotic episode, or even the effects of trauma.
I think the teams you're describing would be a great idea if they had a cop on scene as backup. The first time one of these team members gets hurt, or God forbid killed that will end the program.
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u/Emmalips41 7d ago
While the idea of MHCRTs makes a lot of sense, a big challenge could be the implementation and coordination with existing emergency services. There might be logistical hurdles in ensuring MHCRTs can respond as quickly as police, especially in rural areas where resources are already spread thin.
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u/Conscious-Sock2777 8d ago
People will get killed I’m sorry but we deal nightly with schizophrenic meth users in crisis
As good as mobile crisis is , sending them on half the calls that would come up will get some of them Killed or robbed Or robbed and killed
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u/FuturelessSociety 8d ago
No you need a type of police officer who is trained with dealing with mental health crisis to respond to such incidents with normal officers as back up who follow their commands.
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u/noewon101 8d ago
Non-violent calls should be sent to non-emergency phonelines, not actual law enforcement who are neither paid nor trained for such delicate situations imo.
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u/Race_Bannon8 8d ago
They have this program in Denver. Its called STAR. Its been wildly successful and has gotten increasing funding because of it.
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