San Francisco’s latest attempt at taking mental health crises out of the hands of sworn police officers is off to a slow start.
The Street Crisis Response Team is run by public health and the fire department and was rolled out at the end of November, in response to protests over the summer calling for scaling back police responsibility. One of the major demands of Black Lives Matter protestors was for people with training in mental health and substance abuse issues to respond to calls of people in crisis, rather than police.
“The SCRT team handled 184 calls for service. At the same time, there were 3,659 calls for service that were dispatched that could qualify for SCRT response if we had enough resources,” said SFPD Chief Bill Scott.
That works out to about 5% of calls that could have been handled by the new program. While the police department is not running the program, they are tracking how many 911 calls the new team is able to handle.
SCRT was modeled off of a similar program in Eugene, Oregon.
“It took (Eugene) quite a few years to get that program really up to what it is right now,” said Chief Scott. “So hopefully we can accelerate that in our city and county. We’re going to do everything in our power to do that, but right now it’s a very small percentage of the call load.”
Currently SCRT is made up of just one team of responders, but the program is going to scale up quickly.
“The second team will be rolled out this month if everything works as planned, and six teams will be in operation by March 2021,” said Scott.
The teams give trauma-informed help to people suffering from mental breaks or substance abuse, calls that normally are handled by police who often do not have the training to handle these types of crises.
“There’s a lot of excitement about this program, including from us in the police department and we all want to see it succeed,” said Chief Scott. “But it’s gonna take time.”