The Community Response Program Model: An Alternative to Police in Responding to Mental Health Crises

Abstract

Police in the United States killed 1,194 people in the year 2022, more than any other year on record. An estimated 1 in 4 of those killed by the police were experiencing mental illness or mental or behavioral health crises. Much evidence has been accumulated supporting the belief that public safety should be reimagined to decrease the police’s role therein. While previously researched models emphasize the training of police in mental illness or partnering police with mental health workers, the Community Response Program (CRP) model uses unarmed mental health workers to respond to nonviolent incidents and crises. This study gathered 15 current performance evaluations of CRPs and analyzed their findings. Analysis demonstrates that CRPs can receive and resolve large volumes of calls across long periods of time, divert significant amounts of nonviolent calls away from police, and resolve the high majority of calls and incidents without needing police assistance. While more research is needed, some of the evaluations give evidence that CRPs can do all these things while keeping their team members safe, decreasing nonviolent crime, improving short-term mental wellness, relieving hospitals and emergency departments from oversaturation, and linking community members to long-term community services all at increased cost efficiency. Furthermore, the evaluations demonstrate that those who receive services from CRP teams overwhelmingly give positive feedback about the team’s services, help, and empathetic support. This thesis gives strong evidence that CRPs are not only possible but may also be more efficient than current first response models. This thesis informs future research of what CRP aspects need to be further examined and encourages social workers to implement possible solutions like CRPs to create care-first crisis response systems.