Comment by BryantD
3 days ago
The Eugene CAHOOTS team has existed since 1989 until it was shut down recently. Dispatchers make the call as to whether or not to send police officers along with CAHOOTS responders on a per call basis.
Quoting vera.org: “ Of the estimated 24,000 calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019, only 311 required police backup, and in Eugene, CAHOOTS teams resolved almost 20 percent of all calls coming through the city’s public safety communications center.”
To the best of my knowledge, no CAHOOTS staff have died or been seriously injured on the job. I’m not sure the evidence shows that finding the right balance is dangerous. Hard for sure, CAHOOTS put a lot of effort into building the right relationship with the police, but the risk to responders is overstated.
I lived in Eugene previously and CAHOOTS is (seems they are still operating in Springfield) quite effective in the limited response work they do, particularly de-escalation and triage of mental health crises. These are classic situations that (American) police are not needed nor are most properly trained for, and several crisis intervention teams modelled after CAHOOTS have been stood up elsewhere in the US in the past several years (e.g. BCR in Minneapolis) with seemingly good results.
However, CAHOOTS is selectively dispatched by 911 and is only sent to a small percentage of situations which would otherwise overlap with police. (Most of their calls are more general assistance to the houseless folks/public where no police response would occur.) This is largely due to very strict “low-risk” criteria to not send police. This may be appropriate to protect all parties since CAHOOTS is not as equipped or qualified as other first responders — CAHOOTS only receives partial city funding, notably through the police department, and they are not equipped as EMTs/paramedics.
But this also means if you witness someone in crisis and call 911, you cannot be certain that CAHOOTS will show up and not the police, because as the article points out, 911 is set up to send police as the default and will likely do so whenever in doubt. This can clearly have life-or-death consequences for the person in crisis, and we won’t understand the full potential of these intervention teams until they are decoupled from the police and treated as peers with a discrete scope of responsibility.