A program in Denver removing police from certain 911 calls led to a 34% reduction in low-level crimes, a study Wednesday found amid a growing wave of cities changing their responses to mental health crises.
The Support Team Assistance Response, or STAR, pilot program, prevented nearly 1,400 crimes during its six-month pilot launched in June 2020, the results showed.
“We think we have something that’s really seminal in terms of suggesting the promise of this fairly radical reform of how we do emergency response,” said study author Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education who studies public policy.
The growth of the non-police response programs have accelerated since calls for changes to policing after the 2020 deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York, who was suffering a mental health crisis when he died in police custody.
Advocates urge removing police from 911 calls related to mental health crises, substance use disorders, homelessness and other social welfare issues. Mental health advocates and law enforcement experts often agree certain types of 911 calls do not need a police response.
More than 1 in 5 people fatally shot by police since 2015 had a mental illness, according to a Washington Post database of fatal shootings by on-duty officers.
MORE ON THE STAR PROGRAM:Denver successfully sent mental health professionals, not police, to hundreds of calls
Similar programs have cropped up in New York, Washington and San Francisco, and many organizers cite the program in Eugene, Oregon, known as Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets, or CAHOOTS, as a model of success.
While the specific structures of the programs often vary in each city, the goal is to team up mental health clinicians and emergency medical technicians to respond to certain 911 calls instead of police officers. The programs are different from Crisis Intervention Training for police and co-responder models, which pair police officers with non-police responders.
“It’s worth underscoring whether your politics are ‘back the blue’ or ‘defund the police,’ there’s a lot to like about this type of program,” Dee said.
How the Denver pilot succeeded
In Denver, the pilot consisted of two-person teams of a medic and a clinician in a van from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays in eight police precincts. The Stanford study focused on crime data related to offenses the program was largely intended to target, such as disorderly conduct, trespassing and drug use, but it also examined trends in crimes, such as burglary or weapons charges. It looked at data from before and during the pilot as well as in the eight police precincts where the pilot operated and those it didn’t.
Taking police out of 911 calls for these targeted types of offenses did not lead to a significant increase in other crimes, Dee said, challenging a once more commonly held belief that policing “low-level” offenses prevents more serious crime.
The analysis also controlled for a variety of factors that could have attributed to the crime reduction in the study area, such the time of year and the overall trends in crime in the precincts where the the pilot occurred, Dee said.
IT’S WORKING IN EUGENE AND OLYMPIA TOO:More cities are sending civilian responders, not police, on mental health calls
Why crime rates lowered for related offenses in the pilot area could be attributable to two different factors: The first is a matter of recording, Dee said. The STAR teams aimed to connect people in crisis to care, rather than arrest them or issue a citation.
The second is more “genuine, authentic” reductions in crime, he said. It’s not just that police weren’t responding, therefore there were fewer crimes being recorded; the study found there were fewer of these incidents that otherwise would have gotten a police response over the six-month period.
According to the researchers’ analysis, STAR’s response to 748 calls would have meant an expected 1,047 fewer recorded crimes. But the actual reduction in offenses showed there were an estimated 1,376 fewer offenses across the eight precincts over the six months. The data showed recorded offenses were also lower during the hours when STAR wasn’t operating in the precincts where the pilot was held, Dee said.
“When someone’s in mental health distress, that continues. There’s a kind of recidivism to these lower-level crimes when there are some behavioral health problems going on. But by providing health care, instead of an arrest, (STAR) may have prevented that recidivism, prevented the future events that might occur in the coming days and weeks for a person who’s not getting treatment,” Dee said.
The six-month pilot was $208,141, meaning the 1,376 fewer offenses cost around $151 each to reduce, according to the study. Had each offense been handled in the criminal justice system instead, the cost would be an average of $646, based on available estimates of the cost of prosecution and imprisonment, the study found.
911 CALLS AND MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS:911 operators need more training to handle mental health crisis calls. Here’s why it matters.
Denver program grows
The study, published in the peer-reviewed Science Advances journal, comes at a time when the STAR program is undergoing growth.
Vinnie Cervantes, who works with the Denver Alliance for Street Health Response and serves on the STAR Community Advisory Committee, said the idea for the program dates back several years before its launch during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That sense that we can do something better with regards to our unhoused community, our community experiencing mental health crisis and substance use (disorders), knowing also that those issues are increasing, especially with the pandemic, that really drove us to want to create a program like that,” Cervantes said.
What started as a six-month trial in the center of Denver has now expanded in the city, and STAR teams have already responded to more calls in 2022 than all of the pilot program, said Tristan Sanders, director of Community and Behavioral Health for Denver’s Department of Public Health and Environment.
The program also has a budget closer to $1.3 to $1.6 million for the year, and half of the funding comes through a city tax initiative that created the Caring for Denver Foundation and the other half through general city tax dollars, he said.
IS THE COUNTRY READY FOR 988?:The suicide lifeline will soon be 3 digits
The results from the Stanford study show how worthwhile the investment in the expansion is, Sanders said. “It’s really a testament to the process that followed, and that there’s really fidelity in how those calls are triaged. In other words, how they come in, the questions that are asked, and that really, when the STAR response is the response that’s put in place, it’s the right response,” he said.
Cervantes said the early results show the STAR program is “clearly a better approach than having police show up to all these different situations that they don’t need to be present for.” However, as the program expands, he wants it to better serve communities disproportionally impacted by police violence and mental health issues.
Cervantes hoped for more responsiveness in the services offered during and after a STAR call and for a wider array of follow-up services to be provided. Underpinning the idea of a community responder program is that after a crisis is de-escalated, a person can be connected to longer-term health care options and services.
“We just don’t quite have that. We’re kind of building that out right now,” Cervantes said.
Sanders said there were plans to include more community-based services in the response. Housing and food were the two major services identified as the primary, additional needs after a STAR call. The goal is for a “warm handoff” to community organizations that can provide similar services, not “just a brochure,” he said.
While Sanders said he expects the call and response volume to increase as the program expands and meets more demand, he hopes it can reach a certain baseline where this type of crisis response is not as needed because a people’s needs are met before they reach crisis.
“Right now, this may be the only line of support that some people are accessing,” Sanders said. “I would hope that five, seven years from now or something, there’s this really meaningful community network of supports that exists there currently but people are accessing it in a much different way, and that it’s truly accessible to everybody. That it’s meeting a large number of folks in a really meaningful way.”
If you or someone you know may be struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) any time day or night, or chat online.
Crisis Text Line also provides free, 24/7, confidential support via text message to people in crisis when they dial 741741.