The Fifth Branch: Keeping People Safe

Note: This transcript has been created with a combination of machine ears and human eyes. There may be small differences between this document and the audio version, which is one of many reasons we encourage you to listen to the episode above!

Dan Gorenstein: Hey, it’s Dan. A couple quick things before we start.

This is part 2 of a 3-part series, if you haven’t heard episode 1, we suggest you check that first.

Also, today’s episode contains some strong language.

DG: It’s late May, a Durham police officer enters a tight, single story house.

Man: I like duck, duck, duck. I need to get up. 

DG: Inside a 32-year-old man has just gotten home from a psychiatric hospital.

His mom tells a HEART social worker who responded with the police, her son’s been agitated all day. 

Officer: Do you remember me?

Man: Yeah. I’m glad I’m coming with y’all.

DG: The man tells the officer he’s worried someone in the neighborhood is going to shoot him.

He’s scared.

He sweeps past the officer onto the porch. 

Man: Mom, he might shoot me. He might shoot. Yes he will. Yes he will. Listen to me.

DG: Violently rattles a metal bookshelf.

Man: Mom, shut the fuck up and listen to me. 

DG: Whatever threat her son is seeing, he directs this rage towards her parked car.

Man: Yes. The fuck he will. That’s why I’m beating on this fucking car. He might shoot me. I ain’t going nowhere. Put your gun out. Get in my car. No, no no, no, you might. I know you will. Cause I’m crazy as fuck. No no no no.

DG: The man pivots, now headed for the backyard.

Two officers follow.

The backyard, that’s where things could go horribly wrong.

DG: A mental health crisis can be volatile.

The likelihood of miscommunication, confusion, escalation is high.

And too often moments like this have gone horribly wrong.

News clip: Philadelphia is now bracing for a second night of possible unrest after police shot and killed a man allegedly armed with a knife. His family says he was having a mental crisis.

News clip: Police officers facing official murder indictments in the death of Melissa Perez. Perez was having a mental health episode when three officers shot and killed her in June of this year.

DG: Incidents like these have led more than 100 cities – including many of the nation’s biggest to ask: how do we stop this?

Welcome to episode 2 of The Fifth Branch, a three-part series from Tradeoffs and the Marshall Project on what it looks like when one community dramatically changes how it responds to people in crisis.

Durham, North Carolina is 24 months into its new experiment: sending unarmed social workers and EMTs on 911 calls sometimes with police, other times on their own.

It’s called HEART.

The idea? By better matching the responders to the crisis, everybody is safer.

In Durham that May evening everyone is safe.

Officer: I’m gonna take you to the hospital, okay? You’re not going to jail. we’re just going to the hospital. Do you understand why?

DG: Officers escort a more tranquil man to the squad car.

Man: I’m sorry.

Officer: You’re fine, man. Do you want to wear your seat belt?

DG: HEART’s responders speak with the man’s mom as her son heads back to the hospital.

Today, has HEART made Durham safer?

From the studio at the Leonard Davis Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, I’m Dan Gorenstein, this is Tradeoffs.

******

DG: HEART exists to keep people safe, that’s the whole point.

So we wanted to know is the program is keeping people in crisis safe, the people who respond to that crisis safe, and even if it’s keeping police safe.

To answer those questions we’ve built today’s episode around three big numbers, starting with 99.

Tradeoffs producer Ryan Levi – who has spent the last six months embedded in Durham has our story.

Ryan Levi: A lot of people are worried about David Prater.

Well, not David specifically … people in his line of work — unarmed mental health workers who respond to unpredictable 911 calls.

They worry responders like David will get hurt.

HEART takes the concern seriously.

So after every call David and his coworkers have to answer a question: 

David Prater: Did you feel safe during this encounter?

RL: Between their unarmed teams, clinicians in the 911 call center and co-response with police, HEART has answered 15,000 calls.

99% of the time responders said they felt safe.

99% is the number we’ll use to think about the safety of the people who respond to these calls.

After riding around with David and other HEART units for 30 hours, I realized why that number is so high.

RL: I assumed my ride-alongs in HEART’s white mini-vans would feel like some mental health ambulance.

We’d race from one crisis to the next.

But mostly, it was pretty quiet. Checking up on an elderly couple.

Allison: Your dentist was just really worried.

RL: Gas station owners with panhandling complaints.

Miss Shirley: They just asked if you wouldn’t do that in front of their store. Are you okay with that?

Woman: I’m okay with that.

RL: We gave people rides, helped people in their homes. None of it felt dangerous.

HEART director Ryan Smith says that’s by design.

Ryan Smith: We first looked at what were the calls that other cities already had some evidence to support that it was safe to do this work.

RL: Ryan analyzed tens of thousands of calls nationwide. He learned unarmed teams had been safely responding to these calls since the 1980s.

Trespassing, wellness checks, intoxication.

Durham’s own 911 data showed those calls rarely ended in violence for police.

Just like with firefighters, EMS and cops, Ryan says, there’s no escaping the danger that comes with this job.

RS: I think it would be a mistake and disingenuous to kind of gloss over the risk and uncertainty that is inherent in any 911 call.

RL: Ryan has tried to mitigate that risk.

If a weapon is present, a HEART social worker responds with a police officer.

Same thing when someone threatens violence.

Durham police train HEART staff to stay alert on scene. 

And the program outfits teams with police radios to get back up fast.

But taking on some risk that’s the job.

RS: I think that’s part of what being a public servant is. I think government at its best is shifting burden and risk away from those that we serve to those who are signed up to be public servants.

RL: Police in America have shot and killed 1,939 people in the middle of a mental health crisis in the last decade.

One of every five police killings.

Ryan believes, like the other branches of public safety, it’s worth putting HEART’s first responders in harm’s way to lower the risk that someone in crisis is hurt by the police.

Of course, some disagree with this idea. 

But some, like David Prater, agree.

David Prater: It is a sacred duty.

RL: David’s official title is ‘peer-support specialist.’

DP: I don’t come to this work with a master’s degree like our clinicians do. I come to this work with lived experience of homelessness, of a substance use disorder, with criminal convictions.

RL: David told me about the years he spent addicted to crystal meth, living on the streets in Durham and Atlanta. 

Remember from episode 1, how all HEART employees have a bird name?

David’s is Phoenix.

I’ve watched him support people by drawing on what they have in common.

DP: I have no problem going under the bridge because I used to live under the bridge.

RL: David stands about 5’9, with short, spiky black hair.

He’s intense. You see it in his eyes.

He knows that anything can happen on any call.

People have spit at him.

DP: She said, look, white motherfucker, I don’t want your fucking help.

RL: A shootout forced him to scramble behind a car.

DP: We call for help on our radio. We’ve got shots fired.

RL: David and I did a ton of ride-alongs together over my five visits to Durham.

I asked him a few times if he was ever scared.

David doesn’t really ‘do’ scared. 

But the job, on occasion, has put him at risk.

Like the time a gas station worker called 911 about a woman loitering outside.

The attendant then called her homeless and accused her of begging for money.

DP: She was waiting on her husband to come pick her up, and her husband on the phone heard all of the nasty things that the gas station management said to her.

RL: David is already on scene, talking to the worker, when the husband storms in.

DP: He got out of the car and went in to let management at the gas station know how unhappy he was.

RL: Very unhappy.

DP: The management of the gas station’s response was to show the gentleman the very large gun that they had behind the register. 

DP: And so in this scene, you’ve got, um, an armed teller and an angry husband, and they are yelling at each other.

RL: David’s reaction is swift. 

DP: I put my body in between theirs.

RL: I wanna pause the story right there for context.

RL: Why David inserted himself, with that big gun on the counter, helps explain why HEART responders report feeling safe 99% of the time.

First, David knows he’s got backup. Police are always a radio call away.

Second, a bunch of people at HEART told me they have faith in this work.

DP: When we arrive at a call, we have no arrest power. We have no weapons. We are trying to help somebody get their needs met.

RL: And third, HEART has hired a bunch of people willing to make sacrifices.

DP: Is there a level of risk in this job? There is. Do I consider it an acceptable risk? I do.

RL: As soon as that gun was out, protocol demanded David call Durham PD.

Instead, his instincts took over.

DP: We didn’t want this gas station owner to hurt someone. We didn’t want this angry husband to go to jail and so I absorbed the risk in that situation by putting myself physically between them.

RL: It worked.

The husband walked away, the gas station worker offered David coffee, as thanks.

Again, most HEART calls are not this intense.

The point of David’s story, for me, is that they can be, but the evidence shows responders can handle it.

HEART’s unarmed teams have responded to more than 8,000 calls.

They’ve only called for police backup over any personal safety concern 5 times, point-zero-six percent.

RL: This work can also take an emotional toll.

I certainly felt drained after seeing people in crisis day after day.

A paranoid older woman who kept dialing 911.

The mother with two kids about to be evicted with nowhere to go.

So many people just trying to survive.

David tells me he knows all about it from an old job.

DP: If somebody called me at one in the morning with a crisis, I was expected to support them through that.

RL: Before HEART, David helped people with severe mental illness and addiction at a local nonprofit.

DP: I would drive thousands of miles every month, running people around to different appointments, to courthouses, to doctors, to therapists.

RL: All those hours and still David watched his clients fail to land housing, hold down a job or stay on their meds.

David could feel like a failure and he’d take it out on himself.

DP: It was overwhelming for me, and I just I reached a breaking point working with clients.

RL: It could get so bad sometimes he’d bite himself, hit himself in the head with a metal coffee mug.

Ryan Smith: This work can bleed into every part of your life if you let it.

RL: Director Ryan Smith says HEART offers responders free counseling. 

Supervisors regularly check in tell folks to take a break after tough calls and ‘turn off’ at the end of their 12 hour shifts.

David says those boundaries and support are huge. 

DP: That rest and recovery time is what enables me to show up at my best and show up fully when I do come to work.

RL: I heard this from a lot of people at HEART.

And it seems to be working. The department has only replaced 6 people on a staff of 55 over their first two years.

For David, at the end of most shifts, before he drives home, he stops.

DP: I take a moment before I start the car, and I close my eyes, and I take a deep breath, and I exhale the day.

RL: All the hurt he’s seen, all the people he couldn’t help.

In this small way, David keeps himself safe.

DP: And then I start the car.

RL: Can unarmed mental health workers be sent on 911 calls safely?

The most robust programs in the country, Eugene, Oregon; Denver; Albuquerque,  answer that with a definitive yes.

Like in Durham, their unarmed responders rarely call for police backup.

But programs like HEART are also – of course – being created to keep the people calling 911 safe.

RS: We have an annual resident survey.

RL: If there’s one thing HEART Director Ryan Smith loves it’s a good survey.

RS: One of the questions that we added this year is, does the presence of HEART make you more likely to call 911?

RL: Skeptics and critics made up a minority in the survey, 13%.

That matched what I found on the ground.

Some cops and 911 workers still question the program’s safety.

911 worker: A lot of the calls the people can turn on them in a heartbeat, and there’s nobody there to protect them.

RL: Apartment managers and gas station owners I met wanted the police to show up when they called 911. They were angry when HEART showed up instead.

And I talked to a few business owners who question HEART’s value.

John Warasilla: At a certain point you’re like, I appreciate all the effort that’s going into this, but this is not functioning as a solution.

RL: Another 30% of people said HEART had little to no influence on whether they were more likely to call 911.

But most people, 57% felt better about calling 911 thanks to HEART, and Ryan says that’s an encouraging start.

RS: I think part of a safer Durham is that you feel comfortable reaching out and asking for help, and that you trust that the help that is coming is going to address and help connect you to the kind of services and care that you need.

RL: 57 percent is the second of our three big numbers this episode. It’s the one we’ll use to explore how HEART is making people in crisis feel safer.

People like Yolanda.

Yolanda: The sun is bright. 

RL: We could stay in the shade.

RL: Yolanda is wearing a purple tank top and blue jeans as we pull chairs onto the small cement patio behind her narrow brick-fronted home.

We’re only using Yolanda’s first name to protect her family’s privacy.

We face a small playground, people walk their dogs, planes fly overhead.

It’s a peaceful afternoon.

24 hours ago, Yolanda tells me, things were anything but.

Yolanda: She just. She lost it. Like screaming and hollering and throwing stuff and kicking stuff.

RL: Yolanda had just told her daughter she couldn’t have friends over to celebrate her 13th birthday.

Yolanda had planned a surprise party with family, but before she could explain her daughter rushed to the bathroom, locked the door.

Screamed at her mom, ‘I hate you.’

Yolanda: She wouldn’t come out of the bathroom. She just sat in there in the dark it was hard to watch for a child so young to be so emotional.

RL: Yolanda, who is 38, told me her daughter struggles with depression.

She worried what might happen in that bathroom.

And Yolanda’s own challenges, depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder, made it hard at that moment for her to keep it together.

Yolanda: I started to get upset. I’m not going to lie. Um, it started to bother me that she was so loud.

RL: When these situations had hit a breaking point in the past, Yolanda had yelled right back.

This time she stopped.

Yolanda: When I saw myself getting upset with her, I knew that was the wrong choice.

RL: Yolanda’s whole family struggles with mental illness.

She says before HEART, she went through a stretch with her middle daughter where she guesses she called 911 about once a week.

It was always the last resort.

Yolanda: I hate to say it like this, but, you know, officers are usually pretty brutal people. None of us like the police. Like none of us like the police.

RL: But the fights, she said, scared her.

Punching doors. Yelling. Tears. Cussing.

She knew she needed help, and 911 was often her only option.

Reluctantly Yolanda would call, always on edge.

Yolanda: When the police show up, you know, the first thing we see is guns and badges. That’s the situations that I feared. What officer is going to show up and be having a bad day and decide that today’s the day that I’m going to use my badge to be able to do whatever it is that I want to do, and nobody’s going to be able to do anything about it because I have a badge.

RL: She always worried will the police take my kids, will the police take me to jail.

Yolanda kept calling 911, but after HEART launched she found them much easier to trust.

Each time a team came out, she said she learned something like how to check her own temperature when she was hot.

Those lessons helped Yolanda see how upset she was that her daughter’s special day was going so wrong.

Yolanda: So I grabbed a bag of peas out of my freezer and put them on the back of my neck, and I dialed 911.

RL: She realized, thanks to tips like the peas, this was the first time she called 911 in four months.

Call taker: Durham 911. What’s the address of your emergency?

RL: This is a recording of the 911 call Yolanda made. Durham digitally altered her voice.

Yolanda: Can you please send the heart team, please? Can you please get them to come out here?

RL: What happened next, I think, captures the difference between the two public safety branches.

And, why 57% of residents say they’re more likely to dial 911 now that they know HEART is an option.

All three HEART teams were busy when Yolanda called.

Instead, a police officer showed up.

Yolanda: He has a daughter that’s around the same age as her, and he was able to kind of calm her down a little bit, but she still was a little irate.

RL: The officer, at Yolanda’s request, radioed for the next available HEART team.

By the time David Prater’s unit showed up 10 minutes later, the officer had gotten the family to agree that Yolanda’s daughter would spend the night at the hospital.

An improvement over the standoff in the bathroom, but hardly ideal.

David Prater: What 13-year-old wants to believe that like, I’m so broken, I have to go to a hospital on my 13th birthday?

RL: The officer left. HEART’s social worker coaxed Yolanda’s daughter out of the bathroom to talk upstairs in her bedroom.

Yolanda stayed downstairs with the rest of the team.

David says Yolanda was still clearly upset.

David Prater: I can’t have her here, I need space, you know she’s got to go to the hospital. And so then we began talking. Well, what other options are there? And Big Sister came up.

RL: The HEART team asked if the 13-year-old could spend the night at Big Sister’s place.

Yolanda got the OK from her older daughter.

A few minutes later, the social worker came back downstairs with the 13-year-old.

Yolanda: Whatever they talked about was exactly what my baby needed to get off her chest. She wanted to cuddle, she was back to her usual self, the playful baby that I know.

RL: Mom and daughter agreed, a Big Sister sleepover beat spending the night at the hospital.

Yolanda looks at me, a light breeze stirs on the patio.

She says as helpful as that police officer was, HEART helped more.

Yolanda: She texted me today and was like, hey, I love you. So she’s better.

RL: Yolanda is pretty sure she’ll keep calling 911.

That’s what happens when you’re dealing with as much mental illness as she and her daughters are dealing with. 

And she tells me, when she does call, she’ll trust who’s on the other side of the door.

RL: Do you feel safer knowing that heart is an option that you can call heart?

Yolanda: Oh, yeah. Definitely. Help is on the way. That’s how I feel. Normally when you hear 911 say that, it means absolutely nothing. But when you ask for the heart team and they say help is on the way, to me that is the biggest sigh of relief that I could possibly take during an altercation.

RL: As much as Yolanda values HEART, she says she’s glad she’s been calling less, thanks, in part, to what she’s learned from them.

DG: After the break, our final number shows how HEART tries to keep police officers safe too.

MIDROLL

DG: Welcome back.

This episode we’re asking whether HEART helps make Durham safer.

We’ve talked about the evidence that suggests unarmed people responding to 911 calls are safe and some people in crisis now feel safer calling 911.

But proving people are physically safer is harder.

Take officer ‘use of force’ incidents, even after HEART launched, that number has stubbornly stuck to about 100 each year according to the Durham P.D.

Now, that’s less than one-tenth of one percent of the 300,000-some calls police answer.

But you’d think removing police from volatile mental health calls would mean less ‘use of force.’

It hasn’t yet.

That said, one thing is clear: when HEART responds instead of police, chances of getting hurt or arrested nearly disappear.

And that, in theory, leaves everybody safer.

Here’s Ryan with our third and final number. 

RL: Eight thousand thirty-two.

That’s how many 911 calls the unarmed HEART teams have diverted from police since the program launched two years ago.

That’s 1% of all Durham PD calls and HEART estimates they’ve saved police officers 5,561 hours.

Which made me wonder: what do all those saved hours mean for the police?

Dan Leeder: It frees up officers to be able to do more. It enables them to be more effective as patrol officers.

RL: That’s Durham police sergeant Dan Leeder.

You may remember him from episode 1. He was a big critic, but now he sees HEART as a critical part of the public safety response team. 

He says HEART taking calls that cops used to handle has been a real help.

Dan Leeder: I definitely noticed that when they were taking those calls, it made a huge difference in my guys productivity because we weren’t being spread so thin anymore.

RL: Adding capacity is critical.

Durham P.D. says they’re short 140 officers, a 25% vacancy rate.

DL: There’s definitely an officer safety issue when you only have a certain number of officers that are available to respond to calls.

RL: The department told me, in part thanks to HEART, cops have more time to respond to violent and more urgent calls, like Durham’s recent surge in gun violence.

Officers have also started asking HEART to take over their calls. It’s happened 451 times.

Dan’s bottomline: more cops available to do what cops do best leaves them – and the whole city – better off.

DL: You want the right people dealing with the situations that they’re most trained for.

RL: Durham Police Chief Patrice Andrews says adding HEART gives her more uniforms to throw at the dangerous calls.

And she believes, HEART has also bred a patience throughout her department. 

Multiple officers told me this too.

Like this one time when a guy scrambled up a squad car.

Patrice Andrews: Dancing on top of the patrol car, was sliding down the windows, was just laying all over the patrol car.

RL: Before HEART, Patrice knows what would’ve happened next.

PA: We’d pulled that person off, they’d have been cuffed, taken them to jail.

RL: Instead, the officers talked to the man and they called HEART.

PA: I was just so damn proud. I was so damn proud of how those officers just allowed this man to just have his space. He wasn’t hurting himself. He wasn’t hurting the officers. He was on a patrol car. Big deal.

RL: Two things are happening here.

The first is immediate: officers kept their hands off the man, physically safer for everybody.

The second is a longer play. 

A police department that uses less force, that causes less harm, in Patrice’s eyes, is more likely to be embraced. That would make officers safer, too.

PA: Heart provides us the opportunity to be a part of a different face of public safety.

RL: There’s one other way Patrice sees HEART improving police safety: limiting their exposure.

Sometimes that’s from violence.

Sometimes that’s trying to protect them from future remorse.

PA: I don’t want any officer to ever look back. Five, ten, 15, 20 years from now. And regret how they treated someone.

RL: Patrice carries that regret.

Early in her career she’d handcuffed a suspect’s hands behind his back.

But he kept “stepping through” the cuffs, bringing his hands in front of his body.

PA: I told him several times, don’t do that. Stop doing that.

RL: He ignored her.

Another officer asked if she was going to let this guy get away with that.

PA: And um, I said, well, no. And, and he said, well, well then you need to do something about it. I took that as meaning that you know, You need to teach him a lesson.

I remember. Um, grabbing him and just kind of,, picking him up and pushing him back down and picking him up and pushing him back down. while he was in handcuffs. That was excessive. And that was wrong.

RL: Decades later, Patrice is known as a reformer, someone committed to making policing better.

But sitting in her home in Durham, Patrice still struggles with what she did.

PA: If my dad knew that I had done that. My parents, they would have been so disappointed. How could I treat someone that way? How could I treat another human being that way?

RL: Patrice knows there’s no excuse and little sympathy for cops who use excessive force.

At the same time, she knows it happens. 

And it’s that much more likely to happen when cops respond to a volatile mental health crisis.

HEART, she says, can protect her officers from their own worst impulses, like her with that man in the handcuffs.

That’s one reason she’s supported HEART from the beginning.

PA: Part of it, it’s me trying to make amends. I don’t know where that man is now. I don’t remember his name. I don’t know that he ever remembers mine, but. It’s a part of me that wants to make it right because I had gotten it so wrong.

RL: HEART has answered 8,032 calls that would have otherwise gone to the police.

8,032 calls to 911 where the first-responder was unarmed.

8,032 fewer chances for Patrice’s officers to make split-second decisions that could forever alter people’s lives including their own.

RL: My time in Durham makes it clear: HEART’s helping lots of people in crisis and cops, too.

Sending unarmed responders is certainly a lot safer than some first assumed.

But HEART’s Ryan Smith says we all have to be honest with ourselves about this work.

Ryan Smith: No matter how carefully we plan, someone’s going to get injured and killed doing it. It happens in every other branch of public safety. We should both expect that that will happen and do everything that we can to plan and avoid that day, but it will happen one day.

RL: That, he says, is the nature of this work.

DG: Tradeoffs Producer, Ryan Levi. We’ll be right back.

******

Dan Gorenstein: Like our first episode. I’m joined now by Christie Thompson, a staff writer with our reporting partner, The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom that covers the criminal justice system.

Christie has been talking to national experts and other alternative response programs, and today she’s going to help us understand how the question of safety is playing out in other communities. Christie, how are you?

Christie Thompson: I’m doing well, thanks.

DG: So we discussed in this episode that Durham and other cities have shown that unarmed responders can safely respond to all of these 911 calls. It makes me wonder if cities are being too cautious about the kinds of calls that they send these teams to. Did you find anyone thinking about that?

CT: That’s definitely a question that a lot of cities are asking themselves. Could we get a little bolder and have a bigger presence in these cities? One big debate, for example, is whether these responders can show up to calls inside private residences instead of just in public spaces or on the street. Other calls that are being debated are domestic disputes.

Another call type that I thought was really interesting is suicidal threats, because it seems like exactly the kind of call that you would want a mental health specialist at. But because there’s always the fear of a weapon or that it could escalate really quickly, cities are still insisting on sending police to those kinds of calls.

DG: Yeah. We heard in Durham, uh, examples of just how effective the HEART teams could be inside some of these spaces. It’ll be interesting to see if that evolves for other cities around the country.

So, Christie, the main metric that Durham pointed to when we asked how HEART is making people in crisis safer was the thousands of calls that they’ve diverted from the police. Is that a data point that other cities are also using to measure if they’re making their communities safe?

CT: Yes. Right now, that’s mostly what these programs are using to measure their success. But those secondary impacts that, you know, I’m really interested in, like what impact they’re having on arrests and involuntary hospitalizations, those kinds of impacts and safety metrics are a lot harder to measure.

DG: And why is this so hard to measure?

CT: There’s just so many variables at play that it’s really hard to say what’s being directly impacted by these new teams. You know, if you did see a decrease in arrests or in use of force by police officers or involuntary hospitalizations, that could be due to lots of different reasons other than just that you sent an unarmed crisis responder.

We are seeing some researchers in Durham, in Madison, Wisconsin, and a couple other places that are now trying to discern these secondary impacts. So it’ll be really interesting to see when that research starts coming out.

DG: Christie, have cities been able to show that their alternative response teams have had an impact on safety more broadly in their communities?

CT: There’s one study out of Denver that was done by a group of researchers from Stanford. The program there is called star and they compared neighborhoods who had the Star program operating with neighborhoods who didn’t yet have this program. And they found that there was a 34% reduction in low level crimes in the neighborhoods where Star was operating.

What’s really interesting is that decrease in crime happened even in the hours that the team was not working, which, you know, I talked to researchers on this study and they said that implied to them that connecting people to services and care, instead of arresting them, can impact future public safety, and not just in that moment. 

DG: So the evidence so far shows that unarmed response can be done safely, and it may even make communities as a whole safer. We’re seeing more and more cities launch programs. Yet many, including HEART, have limited hours or only cover certain parts of town. Why are these so small?

CT: Yeah. I think the scale of these programs so far is really important to remember. I mean, even in Albuquerque, which is considered one of the biggest, most successful programs in the country, they’re now handling about 5% of 911 calls.

So there’s a couple factors that are keeping these programs small. You know, finding the cash to create a totally new public safety branch during, you know, what many cities are experiencing as a budget shortfall is not easy. Another problem is staffing. These jobs require really specific set of skills. And the jobs can be really draining and difficult. And so burnout and turnover is a really big struggle for a lot of places.

Some experts did tell me that there were some benefits to growing slowly. It allows you to make sure that you’re building best practices. It can also make it easier to study their impact, because you can compare the places where the teams are operating to the places where they are not. But growing slowly also means that a lot of mental health calls, homelessness calls, addiction calls are still getting an armed police response. And obviously that has consequences for those people.

DG: Sure. Of course, the stakes here are so high. Christie Thompson, thanks so much for your reporting.

CT: Thanks for having me.

DG: To see more of Christie’s reporting, you can go to themarshallproject.org where she has a new story on the state of alternative crisis response across the country.

******

DG: Next week, in our third and final episode of The Fifth Branch…

Sammetta Cutler: When she got with me, it was about how can you help me get where I need to be so I don’t have to go back to living in my car.

DG: … the responsibilities – and realities – of being the last line of care. 

Ryan Smith: It is completely beyond the scope of our department to step in and be a cold-weather emergency shelter provider. And yet this last winter, we did that for one weekend.

DG: HEART’s job is at the front of the line, answering someone’s 911 crisis and then connecting people to services that address the problems that led to the call.

Mental illness. Addiction. Poverty.

But people keep falling through the gaps.

Sarah Hall: It kind of pisses you off because when you really trying to diligently do the right thing and not go the wrong way, it is real, real frustrating when you cannot get the assistance that you need.

DG: HEART’s handoffs to other providers continue to fail.

Ryan Smith: I knew that it would be hard. I knew that it would be messy. But that it would be the hardest thing that we do? That’s the thing that surprised me.

DG: Can this upstart city agency find new ways to fix a perennial problem: a social safety net so full of holes, people keep falling through.

The final episode of The Fifth Branch drops next Thursday.

Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. 

I’m Dan Gorenstein, you’re listening to The Fifth Branch, a special series from Tradeoffs and the Marshall Project.