Mental health pros, not police, to respond to some calls: Miami-Dade heeds calls for reform
After years of calls for reform, the Miami-Dade Police Department is set to make a landmark change in how it deals with many cases involving the mentally ill. Instead of dispatching just officers, the department expects to unveil “sprinter” trucks manned with mental health experts to respond to nonviolent emergencies calls.
Law enforcement and mental health professionals say the move to replace officers with clinicians for mental health calls will save lives, free up law enforcement to focus on major crime issues and — perhaps most important — cut down on low-level arrests and potentially volatile encounters with police.
Locally, police reform activists hailed the measure, expected to begin some time in the fall.
“Police officers are not mental health experts. They’ll be the first to tell you that,” said former state prosecutor and civil rights attorney Melba Pearson. “A couple of hours at the academy training in the field is not the same as a master’s degree in social work. It’s time to let the experts do what they do best — help people struggling with mental illness and addiction.”
It’s an approach that many urged during the Black Lives Matter marches in the summer of 2020, when protesters demanded changes after a nationwide string of controversial and sometimes deadly arrests — mostly of Black men. Far too often, critics argued that confrontations between the mentally ill and police ended badly because of a lack of training.
A Washington Post investigation into police shootings determined that of the 5,000 that have taken place in agencies nationwide since 2015, more than one-fifth of them have involved someone with a mental illness. An NPR story in 2020 estimated that calls that could be classified as mental health-related or substance abuse account for as much as 20 percent of emergency calls to police nationwide.
Miami-Dade Police, the eighth-largest law enforcement agency in the country, said that between 2017 and 2021 they received an average of 8,627 emergency calls each year that could have been handled by behavioral specialists.
“It reduces the risk of something bad happening, by far,” said Miami-Dade County Judge Steve Leifman, who has invested much of his career in helping people with mental illness stay out of jail. “Plus, cops have to handcuff them and they haven’t committed crimes. It’s terrible.”
EXPERT THOUGHTS
Though the Miami-Dade plan is still being pieced together, George Perez, assistant director for corrections and rehabilitation, said professionally trained and licensed health professionals will also work at the county’s 911 call center and help determine when to send out the new crews.
Perez couldn’t pinpoint exactly how many units would be activated at first, but he said the initial deployment would be to regions of the county with the highest number of calls. He said a behavior expert would accompany an officer on calls and that he hoped most of the costs would be covered through federal grants.
“Officers will not be leading and it will be very specific to mental health calls,” Perez said.
(Perez spoke to the Miami Herald about the initiative two weeks ago while he was interim police director. He has since been moved to corrections and former police director Alfredo “Freddy” Ramirez has returned to his old post.)
In the past few years, law enforcement agencies throughout South Florida have been involved in several shootings or violent encounters in which the suspect’s mental health came into question.
In one of the most high-profile incidents in South Florida in recent years, North Miami Police Officer Jonathon Aledda in 2016 shot behavior specialist Charles Kinsey — by accident, he said — while the health worker’s severely autistic client sat in the middle of a roadway playing with a toy truck after escaping from his home. Kinsey was shot while lying on his back, his hands up in the air, begging police not to shoot and saying repeatedly they were unarmed.
In August 2020, a Miami-Dade police officer shot Kendall resident Arcadia Hernandez, who a decade earlier suffered catastrophic brain damage when an aneurysm burst inside his head. Police said Hernandez “charged toward” officer Juan Calderon with a machete before he was shot. Hernandez survived, but video and a witness account didn’t seem to bolster the police statement.
It appeared that Hernandez turned towards Calderon after being stunned with a Taser. And a neighbor, who said Hernandez was partially paralyzed and dragged his leg, said he only turned toward the officer after being blocked from going into his home. The video did appear to show Hernandez having a mental breakdown as he repeated “God is with me” each time Calderon told him to put the machete down.
Other cases are less clear cut, and likely would have required police to accompany a mental health worker.
Take the case of Richard Hollis, 21, who was killed by a Miami-Dade police officer last month after he threatened his mother with a knife in their Kendale Lakes home. Police said Hollis wouldn’t put the knife down after they arrived.
Court records showed Hollis had a history of violence with family and neighbors. Once he pulled his mother’s hair because he was unhappy about something she cooked. Another time, he was accused of knocking down and kicking an 88-year-old man who complained about Hollis’ dog. He also once slammed the door on a cop who came to arrest him. The officer said he had to deploy a stun gun to incapacitate him.
911 calls a key decision point
Law enforcement and behavioral specialists say it’s likely going to be up to the trained 911 operator to separate the thin line between a dangerous and possibly violent incident and one that is likely to end peacefully with a clinician.
Alex Piqueros, sociology chair at the University of Miami, said trained 911 operators are critical to the success of the program.
“Police are operating with limited information. They only know what they’ve been told,” he said. “Better information will allow them to make better decisions. You want to try and talk down a situation that could go bad.”
Perez said the Miami-Dade startup is taking a page from the Denver Police Department’s successful “Support Team Assistance Response,” or STAR program.
A recent study by the peer review journal Science Advances found that Denver’s STAR program prevented about 1,400 low-level crimes in its first year, reducing that crime rate by 34 percent. Clinicians and paramedics who took part in the program said they responded to 748 calls and never once needed a police officer’s help.
Other cities like Dallas, Eugene, Oregon, and even Los Angeles have replaced police with mental health experts on some non-emergency calls. And so far, they say, their programs have been successful. The Dallas initiative was bolstered last year by a $175,000 grant from the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Police Reform and Racial Justice Grant Program.
Only a few months ago, Miami doctor Armen Henderson and a few others unveiled a private program with the same goal — to save lives and unburden police.
Read more: Freedom House Mobile Crisis wants to offer a 911 alternative for Miami public safety
The Freedom House Mobile Crisis program involves doctors and mental health workers driving a van around areas of need in communities such as Overtown, Wynwood and parts of Liberty City, and trying to attract those who need medical care. The van comes equipped with a doctor, therapist and conflict resolution specialist. The crew operates with a $900,000 grant from the Dream Defenders’ Healing and Justice Center. The hope is that its presence will cut down on unnecessary calls to police that too often turn violent.
A few weeks ago a reporter followed Henderson’s unit into the Shoppes at Liberty City, where with megaphone in hand, Henderson blared, “Did you know if you call the police during a mental health crisis, you are 16 times more likely to be shot and killed?”
Henderson told the Miami Herald last month that his model is far safer to those who need help, than crisis teams embedded with police, especially in Black communities where there is a lack of trust. Perez, while he was interim Miami-Dade director, said he was sending staff to take a look at Henderson’s model and how effective it is.
“The ultimate goal, is to have the person who is having a mental health crisis be in the best possible position to get the resources needed,” said Perez. “The uniform is not always the right answer. Officers come with a variety of tools and are forced to make split-second decisions, but sometimes a person just needs to talk.”
