Nationwide it is estimated that at least 20% of 911 calls involve a mental health or substance abuse crisis. With these rates increasing annually, the Eugene Police Department is collaborating with the Lane County Health and Human Services’s Behavioral Health Division to take the next step in providing increased mental health services for Eugene residents.
At the Oct. 12 Eugene Police Commission Meeting, it was announced that EPD and Lane County Behavioral Health were in the process of finalizing an intergovernmental agreement to initiate a Behavioral Health Co-Response Team for the city of Eugene. The team would work alongside and co-respond with EPD officers to calls that involve a behavioral health aspect.
Since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020, law enforcement agencies across the country have been faced with increased public demand to incorporate mental health professionals into their agencies. The new partnership will make the EPD one of few police departments nationwide to adopt a co-response model for mental health emergencies.
“The primary goal here is recognizing not everybody that’s suffering from a behavioral mental health crisis is also committing [a] crime,” Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner explained. “We’re going to try to continue to match the right response with the right need, then we need to have a response for those folks, so we want our partners at Lane County to come alongside of us and [in] a co-response model … we need that tool in our tool belt.”
This is not the first time Eugene has been on the forefront of mental health reform within law enforcement. In 1989, Eugene launched the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on The Streets program), a program founded by local Eugene mental health care provider White Bird Clinic. At its inception the program served as a first of its kind mental health-focused alternative to policing.
The program has been a huge success over years, saving EPD an estimated $8.5 million in public safety spending annually and has served as a blueprint for departments nationwide that wish to implement a similar program.
The new LCBH co-response model will not replace CAHOOTS, but serve in addition to the existing program by operating in different ways. The current CAHOOTS program operates by sending unarmed mental health professionals to mental health calls unaccompanied by EPD unless police backup is requested, and this model allows EPD to save police resources by outsourcing the mental health calls through CAHOOTS. The new program with LCBH, however, will feature a model where mental health professionals ride along with or closely follow EPD officers to calls. Unlike the CAHOOTS model, this approach is aimed at equipping officers with better resources such as mental health professionals to help de-escalate a situation upon arrival.
“I would suggest that the co-responder respond with [the] officer, either to the scene or in close proximity. Anytime we can de-escalate and stabilize a situation and then hand off [the] situation to a mental health professional, that’s exactly the way we want to do,” Skinner said.
Since details of the program are still being worked through it is unclear exactly how much, if any, tactical training mental health professionals will receive, however Skinner said he expects little training to be needed because mental health care workers will always be accompanied by tactically trained police officers.
Last month, the Lane County Behavioral Health Team received a $500,000 grant from the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services office to help supplement funding needed to begin the program. It is unclear how much the total cost of starting the new program will be, but the majority of funding will be provided through the Community Safety Payroll Tax. The tax, which went into effect in 2021, is an approximately 0.21% income tax increase for Eugene employers, and it is aimed at raising money for public safety services such as the LCBH co-response team.
The co-response team will initially be focused solely on the downtown Eugene area, where Chief Skinner reports receiving the most behavioral health related calls.
“When people are in crisis, they have a tendency to get a lot of exposure downtown. We have people suffering from behavioral and mental health crises all over the city, but we’ve got to start somewhere and this [downtown Eugene] is somewhere I’ve decided to start,” Skinner explained. “I’m hoping it’s [the co-response team’s downtown focus] successful and when successful, the discussion around expanding this type of model [across the entire city], I think is going to be warranted.”
It is not yet clear how many mental health professionals will be appointed to the co-response team or when they will officially begin work, but students such as UO freshman River Collis say the sooner, the better.
“Many cops do not receive the proper training to deal with mental health issues such as psychotic episodes. [Those episodes] can be frequently exacerbated by someone they perceive to be in a threatening role, mental health professionals have the necessary training to deescalate a situation,” Collis said. “I hope this program begins soon because I’m excited and hopeful that it leads to less police brutality.”
* The Daily Emerald reached out to the CAHOOTS’s founder White Bird Clinic for comment regarding their collaboration with LCBH and received no response.
