Every community in the United States that continues to rely solely on law enforcement to respond to behavioral health emergencies must confront the often inappropriate and deadly use of force on these calls. According to the 2024 Police Violence Report an estimated 1,270 people were killed by law enforcement officers in 2024. Of these, about 10 % or 118 had been behaving erratically or appeared to be having a mental health crisis. The American Psychological Association reports that up to 20% of police calls for service are for a mental health or substance use crisis. The increasing number of people with behavioral health issues in the jails—up to 70% of the people in the Sacramento County jail have a mental health diagnosis—lends urgency to the need to find alternatives to law enforcement responses to these kinds of calls.
The Vera Institute report on alternatives to law enforcement responses describes three different strategies or approaches to responding to behavioral health emergencies. These include police-based responses, police-based co-responses, and community based responses. Many communities are working to put alternative response programs in place—including ours.
Sacramento County is a petri dish of solutions at this point. We have three cities who have co-responder teams of a police officer and a clinician responding to 911 calls. A fourth city is experimenting with pairing a clinician with the fire department response teams while maintaining the standard police officer response model for most calls. The entire county has access to our Community Wellness Response Team which is a 24 hour civilian crisis response team of a clinician and a peer. These teams do not respond to calls where there is a threat of violence and cannot do involuntary transports. The unincorporated area of Sacramento County has no law enforcement response to any behavioral health emergency unless a crime is being committed. Then the response is to arrest the person and take them to the jail, not the hospital. Our Sheriff is refusing to back up the Community Wellness Response Team and the Fire Department and so there are perhaps 500 calls a year going unanswered in the unincorporated part of the County…