The calls come to police departments with growing regularity: a man in mental crisis; a woman hanging out near a dumpster at an upscale apartment complex; a homeless woman in distress. In most cities, police officers respond to such calls, an approach experts say increases the risk of a violent encounter because they aren’t always adequately trained to deal with the mentally ill. At least one in every four people killed by police has a serious mental illness, says the Virginia-based Treatment Advocacy Center. In Eugene, Oregon’s third-largest city, when police receive such calls, they aren’t usually the ones who respond, the Wall Street Journal reports. The first responders are typically pairs of hoodie-wearing crisis workers and medics driving white vans stocked with medical supplies, blankets and water.
They work for a nonprofit called Cahoots—which stands for Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Street. Started by social activists in 1989, Cahoots handled 17 percent of the 96,115 calls for service made to Eugene police last year. In 2017, police officers spent 21 percent of their time responding to or transporting people with mental illness, found a survey of 355 U.S. law enforcement agencies by the Treatment Advocacy Center. More police departments are training their officers in techniques to deal with the mentally ill. Los Angeles, Houston and Salt Lake City pair officers with mental-health workers with police officers. Still, the center found that in 45 percent of the agencies polled the majority of officers haven’t received crisis-intervention training. Public anger over police killings has pushed law-enforcement leaders in California to discuss how to replicate Eugene’s program in their state, said Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California.