This is a win for the police reform BLM movement.
It'll be a good test to see how this plays out. In these scenarios I actually worry more that the mental health pro will be harmed physically than the person having the crisis.
After years of calls for reform, the Miami-Dade Police Department is set to make a landmark change in how it deals with many cases involving the mentally ill. Instead of dispatching just officers, the department expects to unveil “sprinter” trucks manned with mental health experts to respond to nonviolent emergencies calls. Law enforcement and mental health professionals say the move to replace officers with clinicians for mental health calls will save lives, free up law enforcement to focus on major crime issues and — perhaps most important — cut down on low-level arrests and potentially volatile encounters with police. Locally, police reform activists hailed the measure, expected to begin some time in the fall.
It’s an approach that many urged during the Black Lives Matter marches in the summer of 2020, when protesters demanded changes after a nationwide string of controversial and sometimes deadly arrests — mostly of Black men. Far too often, critics argued that confrontations between the mentally ill and police ended badly because of a lack of training. A Washington Post investigation into police shootings determined that of the 5,000 that have taken place in agencies nationwide since 2015, more than one-fifth of them have involved someone with a mental illness. An NPR story in 2020 estimated that calls that could be classified as mental health-related or substance abuse account for as much as 20 percent of emergency calls to police nationwide. Miami-Dade Police, the eighth-largest law enforcement agency in the country, said that between 2017 and 2021 they received an average of 8,627 emergency calls each year that could have been handled by behavioral specialists.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article262499387.html#storylink=cpy
It'll be a good test to see how this plays out. In these scenarios I actually worry more that the mental health pro will be harmed physically than the person having the crisis.
After years of calls for reform, the Miami-Dade Police Department is set to make a landmark change in how it deals with many cases involving the mentally ill. Instead of dispatching just officers, the department expects to unveil “sprinter” trucks manned with mental health experts to respond to nonviolent emergencies calls. Law enforcement and mental health professionals say the move to replace officers with clinicians for mental health calls will save lives, free up law enforcement to focus on major crime issues and — perhaps most important — cut down on low-level arrests and potentially volatile encounters with police. Locally, police reform activists hailed the measure, expected to begin some time in the fall.
It’s an approach that many urged during the Black Lives Matter marches in the summer of 2020, when protesters demanded changes after a nationwide string of controversial and sometimes deadly arrests — mostly of Black men. Far too often, critics argued that confrontations between the mentally ill and police ended badly because of a lack of training. A Washington Post investigation into police shootings determined that of the 5,000 that have taken place in agencies nationwide since 2015, more than one-fifth of them have involved someone with a mental illness. An NPR story in 2020 estimated that calls that could be classified as mental health-related or substance abuse account for as much as 20 percent of emergency calls to police nationwide. Miami-Dade Police, the eighth-largest law enforcement agency in the country, said that between 2017 and 2021 they received an average of 8,627 emergency calls each year that could have been handled by behavioral specialists.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article262499387.html#storylink=cpy