In the past year, a handful of sheriff’s departments in California have started refusing to respond to 911 calls that involve a mental health crisis, but where no crime has been reported.
In February, the Sacramento sheriff, Jim Cooper, announced that his deputies would only respond to mental health crises if a crime had been committed or was in process, or if someone other than the person in crisis was in imminent danger. Down in San Diego county, the police chief for the city of El Cajon, Jeremiah Larson, made a similar policy decision in May.
Several other law enforcement agencies in the state, including the Ventura county sheriff’s office and the Long Beach police department have said their officers will respond to every call, but they may not stay if no crime is happening and the person in crisis does not pose a threat to other people.
The trend comes as data shows the catastrophic results of police responding to mental health calls. But the removal of police from these situations, which civil rights advocates have long sought, has also raised questions about the real-world impact in communities where alternatives are incomplete.
The announcement by Cooper, the Sacramento sheriff, was motivated by a 2024 federal court ruling that held Nevada police officers liable for killing a mentally ill man.
The ruling involved the killing of Ray Anthony Scott, a man known by the Las Vegas police department to have schizophrenia. Scott called police just after 3am on 4 March 2019, reporting suspicious men outside his apartment. When officers Kyle Smith and Theodore Huntsman arrived, Scott complied with their requests; he handed over a pipe and a knife that he had on him. But when officers asked Scott to face a wall, he panicked and told them he couldn’t turn around because he thought people were after him.
The officers forcefully apprehended the mentally ill man, placing their body weight on Scott’s back, neck and legs as he struggled and begged them to stop. Scott fell unconscious. Paramedics declared him dead after removing him from the scene. A ninth circuit court of appeals panel of three judges ruled Smith and Huntsman should face charges for excessive force.
“Our caselaw makes clear that any reasonable officer should have known that bodyweight force on the back of a prone, unarmed person who is not suspected of a crime is constitutionally excessive,” said US circuit judge Roopali Desai, writing on behalf of the panel.
Indeed, a significant portion of police killings in the US in the past decade have occurred when police respond to people suffering a mental health crisis. Nationwide US police have shot and killed 2,057 people in a mental health crisis between 2015 and 2024, according to a comprehensive database of police killings in those years compiled by the Washington Post, which amounts to 20% of all police killings. Police in California shot and killed at least 274 people suffering from a mental health crisis in that period, more than any other state.
People in the throes of untreated mental illness have a disproportionate amount of contact with police, according to the non-profit mental health advocacy group Treatment Advocacy Center (Tac). During these encounters, too often those in mental health crisis respond to police commands irrationally or with peculiar behavior that may be misinterpreted. The result, says Tac, can be catastrophic: the risk of being killed while being approached or stopped by law enforcement is 16 times higher for individuals with untreated serious mental illness than for other civilians.
According to a 2015 Tac report: “Reducing the likelihood of police interaction with individuals in psychiatric crisis may represent the single most immediate, practical strategy for reducing fatal police encounters in the United States.”
It’s that reality that motivated his decision, said Larson, the El Cajon police chief. “There have just been too many times where [mental health] situations have gone sideways for a family or for an officer, and it affects everybody for the rest of their lives,” he says. “Sometimes just the mere presence of a police officer can escalate a situation.”
Larson said that in situations where police officers decline to intervene, someone in the communications center will contact the caller and explain why the police aren’t coming and provide them with other resources. That can include the nationwide suicide prevention and mental health crisis hotline 988, or specific to his community, the San Diego Access and Crisis Line, a local hotline that connects with 988.
In more than 90% of cases, 988 hotlines can successfully diffuse a crisis, connect the caller with needed services and never involve police action, says Le Ondra Clark Harvey, chief executive of California Behavioral Health Association, a statewide non-profit organization that supports and promotes community-based behavioral health agencies.
Clark Harvey says we need to see mental illness for what it is: a health issue – not a crime. “If you’re having a heart attack, we don’t send the police, we send an ambulance, we send a physician or EMT to get you the treatment you need without delay,” she says.
In an ideal world, mental health professionals respond to mental health crises, but the real world isn’t ideal, Clark Harvey acknowledged. “Some communities don’t have a mental health response team, they don’t have funding, they don’t have the infrastructure.” So that’s why, she says, all first responders – police, fire, EMT – need robust mental health response training.
“There shouldn’t be a lack of response. Somebody needs to respond, and ideally that person has all the training,” says Clark Harvey.
In El Cajon, firefighters raised concerns that they’d been left dealing with people displaying mental health problems – and Larson’s deputies refused to help.
Larson says the police and fire departments in his community have since agreed how to handle situations that aren’t clear cut – meaning, the situation doesn’t seem to warrant police response, but the fire department still wants officers present.
“If the fire department wants us there, we will 1767376641 be there,” says Larson.
But even in cases where there’s violence or a weapon involved and police are warranted, Larson says he prefers to have mental health workers assist. San Diego county provides Psychiatric Emergency Response Team (Pert) clinicians who can co-respond with police to mental health calls. The program has been around for nearly three decades.
“When we started we had funding for 23 clinicians partnered with officers and now we have 70,” says Mark Marvin, vice-president of San Diego’s Community Research Foundation, which heads up the Pert program.
Marvin says the growth is because the program works: Internal data suggests that more than 90% of the time trained Pert clinicians are successful at de-escalating crisis calls and connecting people to appropriate mental health resources. That said, a Pert team is not always available everywhere. In fact, Pert and San Diego law enforcement use heat maps to make decisions about where clinician teams are deployed each shift.
“We have a Pert clinician assigned to El Cajon and we will continue working closely with Pert,” says Larson. That is – when Pert is available. “We’re trained to enforce laws … We don’t have adequate training to be considered experts in the mental health field.”
Shannon Scully, director of justice policy initiatives for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (Nami), a grassroots organization for individuals and families affected by mental illness, says overall police trying to stand down should be viewed as a positive step.
“I think what we’re seeing right now is a shift, it’s government trying to be responsive to what people want,” explains Scully, who says a robust mental health crisis response system includes a 24-7 call center, non-law enforcement first responders and adequate crisis receiving centers for people who need a safe way to get emergency mental healthcare. Many US communities are only just starting to develop this trifecta of much-needed services and facilities, though, Scully said. And too often there are not enough around-the-clock mental healthcare workers.
An Ipsos poll commissioned by Nami last year found that 86% of 2,045 US adults surveyed thought that people who were experiencing a mental health or suicide crisis should have a mental health response as opposed to a law enforcement response.
“We have this overwhelming agreement from Americans that this is what should happen,” says Scully. But we may experience some pains as we get used to relying on responders other than police, communities marshal resources and as different entities figure out how best to serve.
The National Emergency Number Association, which is for 911 call centers, only last year finalized the standard for how 911 centers should interact with 988 centers. In many communities, there still is not a smooth way to even transfer callers between the two systems for appropriate response. And other factors – particularly a shortage of trained personnel for many emergency call centers – add to the challenge.
“Systems change a lot slower than I think what community expectation is,” says Scully.
For Larson, the future is clear: “I envision a day when there’s a team that’s able to handle mental health calls, and the police are essentially out of it.”
Police, he says, should specialize primarily on crime. “We shouldn’t have officers tied up handling calls that they probably shouldn’t be involved in to begin with.”
Taun Hall agrees. If police wouldn’t have been dispatched in June 2019 when her 23-year-old son was experiencing a mental health crisis, the outcome may have been better. Miles Hall, who was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, was gunned down by police in his family’s upscale Walnut Creek suburb after he shattered the family’s sliding glass door and took off in the neighborhood brandishing a metal garden tool.
Neighbors and the family called 911 hoping to get emergency medical help. Miles was shot after police cornered him in a cul de sac, used rubber bullets and unsuccessfully ordered him to stop.
California AB 988 was named after Miles and the Hall family has been on the forefront of changing the way mental health crisis calls are handled in the state.
“Police probably should not be the ones responding most of the time,” says Hall. “Meanwhile police departments have huge budgets. So now it’s time to consider if maybe some of that money should be going to other folks – people who are trained and can respond appropriately.”
