Officials in Los Angeles — eager to ease the city's reliance on police officers to handle nonviolent mental health emergencies — have launched a new pilot program that sends unarmed civilians to train to respond to such calls.
The so-called unarmed model of crisis response, modeled after a program announced out of Oregon, involves two teams of mental health practitioners available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for situations that would normally fall to police, city officials said. , such as conducting welfare checks and responding to calls for public intoxication and indecent exposure.
The program, run by the city attorney's office, so far operates in three police departments — Devonshire, Wilshire and Southeast — with plans to evaluate its performance after a year and potentially expand.
City officials unveiled the initiative at a press conference earlier this week, after the program had been running for at least a month.
“From welfare check-ins, to non-violent mental health/drug issues, to simple health crises in encampments and elsewhere, we need more tools in our toolbox to truly help Angelenos in need,” City Councilman Bob Blumenfeld said in a statement. . “We cannot continue to require our police officers to also be social workers, mental health clinicians and outreach workers.”
The program is based on the “Cahoots” model, named after a nonprofit organization in Eugene, Oregon, that is widely considered the gold standard in mobile crisis intervention. The program, which began in 1989, today handles about 20% of mental health calls for the city of about 180,000 by dispatching teams of specialists trained in counseling and de-escalation.
The launch of the program in Los Angeles comes amid continuing public frustration with the city's handling of intertwined issues such as homelessness, substance abuse and mental health. The Los Angeles Police Department has come under intense scrutiny after a series of mental health-related shootings and other use-of-force incidents. In 2023 alone, Los Angeles police officers shot people in some form of behavioral crisis at least 19 times, according to the Times database.
Department officials have repeatedly said 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. Meanwhile, police say, these types of calls have the potential to quickly turn violent.
Interim LAPD Chief Dominic Choi said during a meeting of the Los Angeles Police Board of Commissioners that the department “fully supports” the new program.
“It takes some of the workload off of us and diverts resources to the appropriate responders,” Choi said.
He said 911 personnel have been trained to transfer calls to the program when there are no weapons or threats of violence mentioned.
Similar programs have been around for years, with new efforts emerging since 2020, spurred by a national movement to redirect law enforcement funding after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Los Angeles was among the major US cities that pledged to develop and invest in new emergency responses that use trained professionals to provide assistance to the homeless and those with mental health and substance abuse problems.
Some initiatives have struggled to achieve widespread crisis intervention alternatives. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Fire Department recommended ending the pilot program after officials said it did not effectively free up first responders and hospital emergency rooms.
The fire department program was launched in the fall of 2021 and cost nearly $4 million. It operated vans staffed with psychiatric mobile response teams that included a psychiatric technician, a peer support specialist, and a driver with experience transporting patients to and from health and mental health facilities.
In New York, officials cited staffing and training issues as reasons why a Cahoots pilot failed to meet its goal of redirecting at least 50% of mental health calls away from police.
Activists say such efforts remain woefully underfunded and, in the same cases, still closely aligned with law enforcement.
Too often, city officials have undermined such alternative programs by making poor hiring choices, said Eddie Anderson, a pastor at McCarty Memorial Christian Church in Jefferson Park and a recent City Council candidate. He also questioned whether officials would continue to support these efforts, given the city's ongoing budget issues.
“We're really good at funding pilot programs, but we're not really good at accountability measures and sustainability measures in terms of implementation,” Anderson said.
