Who do you call when you’re in crisis? Until around 50 years ago, the answer was the police. Law enforcement officers were regularly dispatched to crimes in progress, car crashes, overdoses, heart attacks, and everything in between. The first emergency medical services recognized that police were ill-equipped to respond to medical emergencies and used pioneering techniques like CPR and rescue breathing to help more patients survive devastating injuries. Today, there is a growing understanding that mental health and substance-related crises, too, need a tailored non-police response. 

The killing of Miles Hall, a young, unarmed Black man living in Walnut Creek who was shot by police in front of his family home while experiencing a mental health crisis, galvanized California’s efforts toward developing an alternative crisis response system. Today, dozens of localities around the state have implemented mobile crisis response. These programs are staffed by people trained in deescalation, many of them peer support specialists who know firsthand what it’s like to experience a behavioral health crisis and can respond with understanding and compassion. Instead of escalating a situation by entering with weapons and demanding compliance, which can exacerbate a person’s distress, they use effective, evidence-based techniques to help people in crisis, regardless of whether they are experiencing suicidal ideation, paranoia, substance-related psychosis, or another mental health emergency. Most of these programs are dispatched through 988, the national suicide and crisis lifeline, so people seeking assistance through the phone can also choose to receive in-person care and connection.

The effectiveness of these programs is unparalleled. Most immediately, they substantially reduce the risk that someone experiencing a mental health or substance-related crisis will have contact with law enforcement, which can quickly turn dangerous and even deadly, especially for people of color. They reduce the burden on emergency medical services, who no longer have to respond to situations that medical training does not equip them to encounter, and they divert people in crisis from emergency departments, freeing up space for people with urgent physical injuries. In California, mobile crisis response has caused a significant reduction in the number of people placed on traumatic involuntary psychiatric holds. And, most importantly, they provide connections to care that extend past the mobile crisis team’s deployment. Research has found that 44% of people who utilized a mobile crisis service were connected to care within a month.

These programs work. They reduce costs and they bring care directly to the people and communities who need it most, fostering trust and supporting people in the short- and long-term. Funding these programs is critical to ensuring that Californians remain safe, healthy, and able to access the services they need.