Two things law enforcement agencies should do to keep police responses from ending in tragedy

To handle the mental health crises that will undoubtedly still occur even with better health care, communities should create teams of mental health responders to serve as alternatives to police. In Eugene, Ore., for example, CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) is a 24/7 mobile crisis-intervention team that handled 24,000 calls last year — more than 15 percent of Eugene’s total call volume.

In addition, every 911 system should have available — 24/7 —behavioral health specialists to help ensure that police aren’t dispatched when EMTs or mental health specialists would be better equipped to handle the call. The key to both dispatch and community-responder systems is ensuring sufficient investment for round-the-clock availability: mental health and behavioral crises have a way of occurring during off-hours, yet agencies often end coverage around midnight.

Still, it is important to recognize that even if a community has each of these components working perfectly, when the person in crisis appears agitated and has a weapon, as it seems Wallace did, there may still be a need for a police response. Dispatching mental health workers to handle the call on their own is not always the best public-safety response.

We must reject the false dichotomy between a “safe” non-police response and a deadly police one. A police response to a person who has a weapon and is in mental health crisis does not need to devolve into tragedy, as it too frequently does — roughly one-third of all police shootings involve an apparent mental health crisis. There are two big things every law enforcement agency should do to change this equation.

First, law enforcement agencies should ensure that every officer is comprehensively trained in how to de-escalate mental health crises without resorting to deadly force. A system developed by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) provides guidance for avoiding the use of deadly force in such encounters — even when the individual has a weapon. PERF recommends integrating de-escalation training with crisis intervention training. This training should be paired with active bystandership training, which teaches officers how to intervene to keep each other from over-reacting during crisis situations.

Currently, even in departments that provide crisis intervention training, most officers receive just eight hours rather than the full 40 hours of training — and some receive none. Given the proportion of police calls and deadly shootings that involve persons in mental health crisis, reforms should include investment in full training for all officers. Nor should crisis intervention training be paired with Taser training, as the Justice Department warned Philadelphia in 2015. Such coupling sends the dangerous and inaccurate message that weapons, rather than words, are the best tool to bring to the scene of mental health crises.

Secondly, cities should consider identifying and deploying — again, 24/7 — teams of individuals, either two officers or an officer paired with a mental health professional, to respond to individuals who are in mental health crisis and threatening to use a dangerous weapon. This intervention is more fraught, given the risks that a police culture of confrontation would undermine the effectiveness of such teams, or that they would be used in situations where a police response is unnecessary or even counterproductive. But as part of a larger community-based response to mental health crisis, such teams could fill a small but critical need.

Philadelphia’s impressive new police commissioner, Danielle Outlaw, already had many of these initiatives underway, and there is no way to know whether the outcome would have been different on Monday if these systems were fully operational.

But as we collectively look to reimagine public safety, we cannot wish away the continuing need for a police response on some occasions involving acute crises. Instead, we must adopt mechanisms to ensure that when desperate families call 911 seeking help for a loved one, help is what they receive — even if it is the police who respond.

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