Last Thursday the New Orleans City Council called for the establishment of a health crisis intervention program.
This new program would comprise professionals more in line with Emergency Medical Services than law enforcement to act as potential first responders when it is identified that the subject involved in the police call is facing a mental health crisis instead of criminal involvement.
Called a policing alternative or diversion initiative, this kind of alternative response team could be born out of the numbers of the New Orleans Police Department, Health Department, Emergency Medical Services, and include the Orleans Parish Communication District and the Metropolitan Human Services District.
Council President Helena Moreno called for establishing such a unit “This resolution is about the best-serving people in the mental health crisis and also best utilizing our public safety resources.”
But is the creation and maintaining of such an overlay unit to respond to certain police calls feasible?
WWL went to LSU Criminologist Dr. Peter Scharf, who has studied these programs underway or proposed them in other cities.
“The problem I see is feasibility,” Scharf begins. “The department is manpower challenged, where do you get the officers for training? Make sure they understand their special skills and they are upgraded through regular training.”
“Do they have the manpower and the specialized resources to do this?” Scharf questions. “That’s the feasibility question.”
Scharf explains the training of officers or civilian responders for such a response team is a monumental task.
“To really make it where we budget it for the training and for the deployment. And again, you all have the tradeoff of getting there fast or getting their good.”
Scharf says the challenge is not just staffing up officers in crisis training, but also 911 staff who handle the first calls and gauging what kind of response to send.
But does the city have the resources?
“Do you want the quality to handle these types of calls,” Scharf says. “Or do you want to get enough bodies out there to answer these calls at all? And right now calls are going unanswered. We have to think about that.”
Two recent incidents in New Orleans show the need for a crisis intervention team like the one the City Council voted for recently. A shooting incident on Dauphine Street where the victim was clearly in some kind of crisis and a carjacking incident, stemming from a woman clearly in crisis and where a child’s leg was inadvertently run over, but police failed to respond at all.
“Is there a scenario we could’ve avoided that death with practical police action?” Scharf asks. “The guy was apparently under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or the carjacking in progress if they’d got there. How do you train civilians or police? I think it’s a monumental task to train the police.”
