As Mental Health Calls Increase, Crisis Teams May Be The Solution

Over the last year, police departments across the country have been facing increased and fast changing challenges related to mental health in our communities. Lansdale alone has witnessed an increase in mental health calls of over 85% since 2020 began. This trend is something police are adapting to and managing. However, the need for mental health professionals is increasing as cases become more frequent and more complex.

In Montgomery County we have the Mobile Crisis Team, which helps address people who need crisis assistance. The challenge is that the volume of help needed is far larger than any one team can handle across the whole county. It is likely that if Lansdale is experiencing a huge spike in mental health assistance, so are most other communities in our area. These increases in requests for assistance can make response times and timely assistance more challenging for all those involved.

As emergency responders, we must continue to evolve with the needs of our community. Lansdale Police have, and will continue, to be trained on responding and managing mental health calls, but adding a local layer of support would help us better manage a serious problem in our community.

The Brookings Institute has been tracking the success of Crisis Intervention Teams (CITs) in communities across the country, where police and mental health clinicians work in tandem to help manage any call that may require the assistance of a trained mental health professional. One notable success is the Denver STARS program, where officers can call in mental health assistance and if the CIT team feels comfortable to manage the situation on their own, officers are able to leave the scene and head back into the field to continue to respond to other calls. Since the STARS program began, they have responded to over 700 calls (as of February 2021) and not even one has resulted in an arrest or jail time.

More people getting more of the services they need, while officers can spend more time responding to other calls that require the assistance of trained police officer and not the assistance of a trained mental health worker. That is a win-win-win.

Naturally, the challenge comes down to funding and prioritizing access to CIT teams. Denver is obviously far larger than Lansdale and has access to more resources than we do. However, that does not mean we should not find unique ways to learn from the success of other communities around the country. How can we scale down the model created in Denver and other larger areas?

The first is to let our internal data guide us and highlight when and where we might need this assistance. Can we isolate our needs to a few key days per week? Maybe there are trends in the data that suggest a particular time of day is more urgent than others? As municipal police departments, we can be surgical in the way we develop and deploy programs that help our community. If they become successful, we can then find ways to scale them up to further enhance and develop them based on the feedback that we receive.

It is my hope that Lansdale Police can partner with neighboring municipalities and the county to explore new ways to improve the effectiveness of responding to mental health calls in our community. Certainly, the increase in demand alone over the last year makes this a worthy discussion and something that could yield dramatic improvements for everyone involved. Residents in need of crisis intervention would receive faster access to the services they need, officers will have more time to respond to non-mental health calls for service, and as a community we can know that we are better serving all the residents of Lansdale.

This is part of the ongoing, and ever present, evolution that is policing. We need to lean into it and find what works for our community and our residents.