Philly, stop sending police to mental health crises

Imagine that your loved one is experiencing a crisis. They are agitated and nothing you say is helping them calm down. You call 911 to request a professional to help treat their symptoms. Instead of treatment, the police arrive. The officers shout commands while you plead with them that your loved one has mental health issues. But within minutes, police shoot them dead. This isn’t imaginary for the family of Walter Wallace Jr. This is what happened to him in West Philadelphia in October 2020.

This is what many mental health emergencies in Philadelphia look like, with law enforcement as the default for mental health crisis care.

When there is a fire or a health emergency, people don’t expect armed police officers to show up. But when it comes to mental health crises, trained professionals aren’t available 24/7, so when someone calls 911, it’s often police who respond. When we ask police to serve as social workers and mental health professionals, we create dangerous situations, especially for our Black, brown, and Indigenous communities. Estimates suggest that up to half of all fatal encounters with law enforcement nationwide involve a person who is experiencing mental illness.

“Up to half of all fatal encounters with law enforcement nationwide involve a person who is experiencing mental illness.”

We are counselors and members of the Treatment Not Trauma coalition, which advocates for nonpolice responses to mental health crises. We encourage the use of support mobile crisis teams, which are staffed by a peer support specialist (an individual with lived experiences using crisis response services), a licensed mental health clinician, and a medical professional. Last year, we successfully fought for a $7.2 million budget increase for the city Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services (DBHIDS) to pilot a mobile crisis team expansion program. We celebrated this budget increase as a chance to fund additional mobile crisis teams. The role of these teams is to offer mental health crisis response in the city, so police are never needed. Adding enough teams to adequately serve more of the city were crucial first steps.

Over a year later, we thought we would be able to show how successful the program was and how many people were helped. Instead, the expansion and overhaul of the mobile crisis system have not happened.

The new mobile crisis teams are still not fully staffed, and not all teams are operating 24/7, even though DBHIDS awarded contracts to two additional service providers in September. Commissioner Jill Bowen updated city councilmembers in April that full implementation is not expected until the end of 2022.

While the Community Mobile Crisis Response Team expansion languishes, Crisis Intervention Response Teams have been up and running since spring 2021. While similarly named, the two resources are critically different. Both utilize a mental health professional, but Crisis Intervention Response Teams include an armed police officer who is trained to respond to mental health emergencies, and lack the crucial peer support specialist. This type of intervention is not as effective. Research fails to show a reduction in the risk of injury or death when people in mental health crises are met with crisis intervention teams that involve police vs. police alone.

» READ MORE: Following other cities, Philly will soon send specialists alongside cops to some mental health calls

If the nonpolice mental health crisis response doesn’t get the attention it deserves, it could be set up to fail.

We cannot let that happen, especially with the implementation of the new 988 national mental health hotline. 988 has received criticism, as it still utilizes police, especially when local mobile crisis units are not available. Therefore, without robust and fully operational mobile crisis response teams in Philly, 988 counselors may very well rely on police officers. This is not in line with best practices for people experiencing mental health crises and presents great risk for vulnerable people.

It is not too late for the city to show Philadelphians that it is dedicated to nonpolice mental health crisis response. At a minimum, DBHIDS should staff enough mobile crisis teams to adequately serve Philadelphia’s population, with all teams operating 24/7; provide nonpunitive transportation (i.e., no transportation in police vehicles) to care centers; and provide sustainable wages and benefits to staff.

Philadelphians deserve care, not cops. We need treatment, not trauma. We deserve a crisis response that is informed by mental health providers dedicated to abolition and — most importantly — by those who have survived police interactions during a mental health crisis. We are hopeful that someday Philadelphia will do more than pay lip service to mental health and instead properly fund, staff, and actualize mobile crisis units.

Julia Lyon and Thomas Clancy are both affiliated with the Philadelphia Treatment Not Trauma coalition.