An Op-Ed I Contributed To

Back in July I was able to work with some colleagues on this op-ed for the Baltimore Sun, titled, “Police Shouldn’t Be Handling Mental Health Crises.”

It is obvious that the police should not be the ones responsible for dealing with mental health crises, because they are not equipped to do so. They lack both training and skills, which increases risk of harm to people in crisis - especially People of Color.

Mental health crisis response is a key example of a community safety & support role that we currently do not handle properly in American society. Rather than relying on police, we need to invest in community-based, peer-led, grassroots infrastructure. What that means is, funding and supporting agencies rooted in the community that can use culturally appropriate techniques rooted in deescalation and harm reduction.

Unfortunately, we’re pretty far away from that at this time. One way to consider a transition toward grassroots/peer-led/community-based intervention is to prioritize a shift away from policing and toward the use of social workers in crisis response. Of course, social workers have their own problems with bias and abuse of power, but they don’t have guns. This step, while incremental, represents a form of harm reduction.

One question is how to recruit and train social workers to staff these positions, which involve overnight shifts, on-call work, etc.. In recent decades, as a way to reduce the harm caused by the lack of professionalism and training within our public child welfare apparatus, the federal government created a funding stream, known as Title IV-E, to incentivize social work students to pursue careers in child welfare. This strategy worked, and child welfare outcomes improved as the workforce professionalized. A similar program should be used to train mental health crisis response workers, to cultivate a trained pool of professionals at scale who are equipped to take over certain functions currently handled by police.