After the contest for Buffalo mayor is decided, election platforms and promises will give way to governing. A question for the next mayor to grapple with is this: What role should the police play in responding to mental health emergency calls?
If there were easy answers, they would already be in place. After a police officer shot an agitated homeless man in September 2020, the Buffalo Police Department announced creation of a Behavioral Health Team, in partnership with Endeavor Health. The team pairs specially trained police officers with mental health clinicians, what they call a co-responder model. Mayor Byron W. Brown had held the team up as an example of his willingness to make changes in policing.
A recent Buffalo News story reported that from Oct. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021, the Behavioral Health Team responded to 1,110 of the department’s 6,742 mental health-related calls. The team also performed about 1,400 follow-ups.
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India B. Walton, the Democratic candidate trying to unseat the four-term mayor, has said she would prefer a response team for mental health calls that does not include officers.
“I want to free police up to do police work,” she says.
Walton has spoken of creating a “mental health first responder corps” that would send out mobile crisis teams that include therapists and social workers.
That echoed an opinion piece that The News published in November 2020. Four local educators in counseling and social work from area colleges and universities said police should not be involved at all as first responders to mental health calls.
“While some argue that a police presence is necessary to prevent violence, numerous cases around the country demonstrate that it is often the police who make a situation unsafe, by escalating tensions with threats or by reacting with violence unnecessarily and prematurely,” the authors wrote.
Another social worker separately argued that a mental health crisis can be triggered or made worse by the mere presence of uniformed police.
“Mental health practitioners must be in the decision-making role,” Victoria Ross wrote in March. “If police help is needed, they can convey that.”
More involvement by responders trained in social work and mental health counseling could be a positive step, but it’s not as simple as telling police to skip any call related to a mental health incident.
First, the typical call to 911 to summon help does not paint a complete picture of who and what are involved in an emergency. The best-trained 911 operator in the world may not be able to tell whether a given call should be handled by police or by a social worker trained in de-escalation techniques.
When a violent situation puts the public in danger, there is a clear and legitimate reason for police to be there to protect citizens and restore order.
As we have noted in this space before, the problems of requiring police to deal with the mentally ill date to the 1980s, when New York adopted the policy of “deinstitutionalization,” a practice in which some mentally ill patients were moved out of hospitals and – theoretically – into a system of community care. That system never developed, making police the de facto first responders, a duty for which they were not trained.
If Walton is elected mayor, she has vowed to direct more funding to mental health care. The challenge would be paying for that without cuts in police funding that could make the city less safe.
Funding for police has climbed steadily during Brown’s years in office. If he wins another term, the city would benefit from the administration bringing in an outside evaluator to study the Behavioral Health Team and see if there are improvements it could make to ensure it meets its mission.
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