LEILA FADEL, HOST:
There's been a quiet surge in the years after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 of a different kind of emergency response - sending unarmed mental health clinicians to answer 911 calls instead of police. These programs are now in nearly a hundred cities across the U.S. NPR criminal justice correspondent Meg Anderson visited one of those programs in Durham, North Carolina, that is doing this right, and she joins us now to talk about that. Good morning, Meg.
MEG ANDERSON, BYLINE: Good morning.
FADEL: So tell us about this program that you visited. How does it work?
ANDERSON: Yeah. So it's called Durham HEART, and researchers who study these programs often point to this one as a success. It's a community response team, and they usually go out in pairs. There's a mental health clinician and then another worker who has, like, lived experience - something - you know, they've struggled with drug use or something like that.
And I saw some interesting calls. There was one 911 call about a man trespassing on private property. When we got there, he was pretty agitated. He was yelling. He had garbage bags full of stuff and actually an entire sofa with him, and he didn't want to leave. But the HEART workers stayed with him. They calmed him down. They got him to take some supplies - a fresh pair of socks and bottled water. And they did get him to move his belongings off of that private property.
FADEL: OK. That seems like a success. How are officials measuring success?
ANDERSON: Yeah. So I spoke with Anise Vance about that. He's an assistant director in the Durham Community Safety Department. That's the department that runs the HEART program. And he put it pretty simply.
ANISE VANCE: Somebody receives us on a 911 call and is able to be de-escalated and is able to view that in a way that is - oh, thank you for helping me get through this moment - as opposed to that call potentially ending up in handcuffs? That is a huge win.
ANDERSON: And, you know, theoretically, HEART showing up instead of police, like, also frees up police - right? - to go do other things, to go solve violent crime. And a study this year also found that the Durham program leads to fewer arrests, that most officers find it helpful and that police are rarely called for backup.
FADEL: OK. So those are the upsides. Are there limitations?
ANDERSON: Yeah. So there are two big ones that are facing a lot of these programs across the U.S. Remember, there are, like, almost a hundred of these. One of them is funding. You know, they just can't operate at scale in the city. The other is what types of calls they're answering. So Amos Irwin is with the Law Enforcement Action Partnership. That's a criminal justice reform nonprofit. He says some teams are only authorized to respond to clear-cut mental health crises, things like suicidal ideation. But Irwin says, you know, it's not always that obvious.
AMOS IRWIN: There are all kinds of calls that responders can handle that do not have mental health on the surface. They call and say, there's somebody panhandling really aggressively here. There is somebody loitering around my store, refusing to leave.
ANDERSON: And Irwin says that all of the leading programs are handling calls like that, including Durham. But I should note that kind of opens the door for some tension.
FADEL: What kind of tension?
ANDERSON: Well, some of those calls - right? - about panhandling or trespassing - they often have really complex root causes, things like homelessness or drug addiction. It's hard to fully address those things with a 911 response, right? You need more. But addressing those things was not the original point of these programs, right? The original goal was to reduce the number of police interactions in communities. And so Durham and plenty of other cities across the country are actively trying to figure out how to balance that immediate response with those deeper, long-term challenges.
FADEL: That's NPR's Meg Anderson. Thank you, Meg.
ANDERSON: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF ACETONE'S "MIDNIGHT COWBOY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
