JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Sending a mental health worker out in response to 911 calls instead of police was a somewhat novel idea in 2020. There were only six places in the U.S. that did this. And now these alternative response programs are in nearly 100 cities across America. NPR criminal justice correspondent Meg Anderson spent time with one program to learn what it takes to do this work well.
MEG ANDERSON, BYLINE: On a recent Wednesday in Durham, North Carolina, Rob Crisp and Allie Craft are on a mission. They're equipped with snacks, bottles of water - hygiene kits.
ROB CRISP: So our notes say we got a trespasser on a business property. He has a bunch of belongings, and he's refusing to leave.
ANDERSON: They're part of the city's unarmed community response team. It's called Durham Heart. Crisp and Craft are driving a big, white minivan, looking for a man someone called 911 about. They find him in a parking lot on the side of a strip mall.
ALLIE CRAFT: The white shirt.
CRISP: I think that's him.
CRAFT: Yeah, that's got to be. OK.
ANDERSON: He's wearing a McDonald's T-shirt and a backwards baseball cap. He has a bunch of full garbage bags and an entire sofa with him. Crisp approaches the man, who looks tense. He says he doesn't want anyone touching his stuff.
CRAFT: He's a little bit escalated
ANDERSON: Craft asks me and my big microphone to hang back. Crisp takes his time talking with the man. After a few minutes, he has calmed him down. They give him bottled water and a fresh pair of socks.
CRISP: Little things like that to say, like, hey, I don't have a gun. I don't have a badge. I'm here because, hey, I feel for you, brother. You know what I mean?
ANDERSON: They convince him to haul his things off the property and onto a nearby vacant lot. It's not a long-term solution, but it resolves the immediate conflict. Just five years ago, the most likely response to this 911 call would have been the police. But since the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, dozens of cities around the country decided that calls like this - they don't always need an armed officer. Durham's community response program is 4 years old, and it has responded to more than 25,000 911 calls. Ryan Smith is the director of Durham's Community Safety Department, which runs the program.
RYAN SMITH: Honestly, I would say, if you can send a social worker to a call that you could send a law enforcement officer and you got the same results, then it's already a success.
ANDERSON: A study this year by the Research Triangle Institute found that Durham's program leads to fewer arrests, that most police officers find it helpful, and that police backup is rarely needed. But alternative response programs in other cities have drawn criticism. Recent police shootings in cities like Baltimore and New York raised questions about whether their programs were responding to as many calls as they could.
AMOS IRWIN: The easiest way to measure their success is, how many 911 calls are they handling?
ANDERSON: Amos Irwin studies these programs at the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, a criminal justice reform nonprofit. He says, some are just not funded enough to answer very many calls. Some only work certain hours, or they're understaffed. Another point of failure, Irwin says, is when alternative response teams can only respond to clear-cut mental health crises. He says, it's not always apparent when that is what's happening.
IRWIN: No one calls and says, somebody is in mental health crisis. They call and say, there's somebody panhandling really aggressively here. There is somebody loitering around my store refusing to leave.
ANDERSON: In Durham, before the Heart program launched, the city analyzed years of 911 data. They zeroed in on which types of calls rarely ended in violence. Those included certain mental health crises but also things like trespassing, panhandling, intoxication. Those 911 call types became the ones Heart responds to. But sometimes the calls bring up deeper problems.
CRAFT: CRT2, 10-4.
ANDERSON: On one call, Allie Craft spoke to a woman who said she didn't feel safe where she was living. She was hoping Heart could help her find a new place to stay. But after talking for about a half an hour, Craft told her...
CRAFT: Unfortunately, there's not, like, a placement today other than a shelter.
ANDERSON: The woman didn't want to go to a shelter. Calls about housing, Craft says, happen a lot, and it's frustrating when they can't help more. Mariella Ruiz-Angel says, this is a common limitation. She researches alternative response initiatives at Georgetown University.
MARIELA RUIZ-ANGEL: People are constantly like, why aren't you fixing homelessness? And I will say that in 2020, that was not the call to action, right? The call to action was, we don't want another George Floyd situation to happen.
ANDERSON: She says these programs eventually face a choice - should they manage the immediate crises or try to tackle the root causes?
RUIZ-ANGEL: They all come down to poverty issues, and there's just not enough resources at this point. There's not enough housing, there's not enough everything out there.
ANDERSON: In Durham, the city recently launched a new initiative to connect people to resources like medical care, mental health care and housing. The idea is that, eventually, all these 911 calls they're responding to - maybe not so many of them will come in in the first place. Meg Anderson, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
