We Ask Police To Do Too Much. There’s A Better Way – Inside Sources

When 25-year-old Alex LaMorie, an autistic man in Maryland, called 911 during a mental health crisis, he was following the plan meant to keep him safe. Instead, police arrived, and within minutes, he was dead, shot by officers after they encountered him holding a knife, despite the presence of crisis-trained personnel in the department and access to mobile response teams that were never deployed.

This was not a failure of one officer or one decision in a single moment. It was a failure of a system that continues to send armed law enforcement as the default response to behavioral health crises. The District of Columbia has the opportunity to build something different, but doing so will require a clear, coordinated approach to crisis response that ensures the right responders are sent in the first place.

Recently, a colleague attempting to request a behavioral health response in D.C. was routed from the Department of Behavioral Health’s access line to the WarmLine before finally reaching the crisis response team. After describing an individual in clear mental distress and explicitly requesting a non-police response, he was told to call law enforcement instead. When he declined, explaining that police were not warranted, the call ended without assistance. This is not a capacity problem; it is a system that, culturally and operationally, still defaults to police, even when alternatives exist.

The public health approach to community safety is about getting people the right help before things escalate. One of the clearest places to start is how the District responds to behavioral health crises.

In May 2020, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller tapped me to launch the Albuquerque Community Safety (ACS) Department. ACS was designed to deploy behavioral health professionals to respond to certain 911 calls for help — such as welfare checks, non-criminal trespass and behavioral health crises — that don’t require a police officer to resolve. ACS is about more than just who responds to certain 911 calls. It’s a first step toward building a sustained, public health approach to community safety. It’s exactly the approach the District of Columbia lacks.

Nationwide, we’ve seen that in well-designed and coordinated agencies, unarmed, specially trained teams can respond safely and effectively to behavioral health calls, connecting to care instead of defaulting to law enforcement. That system requires coordination across prevention, early intervention, treatment and victims services.  The District spends hundreds of millions of dollars on these efforts annually, but no single office is accountable for these efforts. Without that ownership, the system cannot function.   

The responsibility is spread across a patchwork of government agencies: the Department of Behavioral Health, the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, the Office of Victims Services and Justice Grants, the Department of Human Services, and the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, among others. These efforts are a minor part of several deputy mayors’ portfolios, but the central focus of none.

D.C. already has the foundation for a better approach in the Department of Behavioral Health’s Community Response Teams (CRT). However, the system isn’t set up for them to succeed. CRT is almost never dispatched by DC’s 911 call center. When they are dispatched, they take an average of two hours or longer to arrive to Priority 1 calls (immediate, life-threatening emergencies). This isn’t a capacity issue alone; it’s a coordination failure. CRT sits in one agency, 911 in another, and they operate under different deputy mayors and different chains of command. The result is a system that can’t deliver on what it was designed to do.

A city the size of D.C. should expect its community response teams to respond to 50,000 calls yearly. To meet that need will require hiring more than 125 responders and, more important, building a system designed to support them. This cannot remain a small program buried within a larger department. 

The District’s next mayor should take a cue from Durham, N.C., Seattle and Albuquerque and establish a standalone department responsible for community response. That department should be led at the city administrator level, with a clear mandate to coordinate and implement a public health-anchored approach to community safety. Without that level of ownership, the District will continue to fund programs that look strong on paper but fail to deliver in practice.