Orlando man's 7th arrest in 7 years raises questions about mental competency system

The case of Gabby Petito illustrates how decades-old laws meant to make police take domestic violence more seriously can backfire on the people who most need protection. Mandatory-arrest laws require police responding to a domestic-violence complaint to determine who is the primary aggressor, as a prelude to an arrest. In Petito's case, as in many, Moab, Utah, police deemed her the aggressor based on a cursory investigation, and possibly based on ingrained biases against women. This does nothing to get at the root of the problem and get people the help they need.

Washington state legislators imposed new restrictions on the use of force by police, including strict limits on physically restraining someone who is not suspected of committing a crime. At a time when non-police responders to mental health crises are not yet fully staffed, the use-of-force reforms have had the unintended consequence in Seattle of denying some people in mental health crises the emergency care they need. Police believe they are not allowed to restrain someone in order to involuntarily commit them to a mental hospital. Involuntary commitments have dropped by almost half.

Federal consent decrees install court-appointed monitors to oversee reforms agreed to by a police department and the U.S. Justice Department after federal officials have found a department violates people's civil rights. In Seattle, a long-running monitor program oversaw great improvement in the police department's use of force. But the project turned so acrimonious that the monitor called the department a failure and the department said the monitor lacked accountability and a sensible yardstick to measure success. The Biden administration has revived the program nationwide but is studying ways to fix it.

Denver's school board responded to the 2020 racial justice protests by removing the police officers who were stationed in certain middle and high schools. But the police or the district's growing force of armed guards get called thousands of times per year to the schools, including "child in crisis" calls. Their response can escalate tensions and unnecessarily criminalize behavioral problems that could be helped through other means. The schools are exploring ways to use the money they saved on "school resource officers" to improve counseling services and give teachers realistic alternatives.

Montgomery County's longtime crisis response center illustrates the pitfalls of embracing a policing alternative without proper resources or thinking through the implications. The racial-justice protests of 2020 inspired many more cities and counties to explore mobile crisis response teams instead of police, to minimize violence and get people needed help instead of incarceration. While Montgomery County's team often deescalates crises and can either provide care or refer people to needed services, it lacks the staff to respond effectively. And the system of mental health care is too thin for the need.

The nationwide 988 call system for suicide prevention and mental health crises will go live in July 2022, with federal funding available for certain local crisis response programs. Santa Cruz and Alameda counties already offer a variety of police and non-police teams that will either benefit from the new system or must adapt to the changes coming. Most of the non-police responses in the area operate only during daytime hours, and in the case of Santa Cruz's Mobile Emergency Response Team are not well known by the public. When police are the default responders, people may not get the care they need.

The CAHOOTS program's national popularity as a model for diverting crisis calls from the police to unarmed teams of a medic and counselor belies its inability to fully serve its own community because of under-funding. Program director Ebony Morgan talks about the flip side of the program's cost savings for the city: unfairly low pay for its workers, long response times, and an inability to expand. The program's success with the community is built on trust that people in crisis will be helped rather than viewed as a threat. Morgan says the program itself needs to be valued more by city budget managers.

Alameda and Santa Cruz counties have fielded their own mobile teams to respond to mental health crises as alternatives to police-only responses. Aimed at reducing conflicts with police, overuse of hospitals and jails, and involuntarily commitments for short-term emergency mental health care, the services' limited hours and resources mean that the police still handle the majority of such calls. Alameda's pilot, begun in July 2020, is able to provide help to about one-third of the four dozen monthly calls it gets. Santa Cruz's volume is higher. Impacts on involuntary commitments unclear.

Despite committing hundreds of millions of dollars to programs that make New York City's emergency response to mental health crises less punitive, a pattern of over-promising and under-delivering, plus pandemic snarls, kept the programs from getting off to an effective start. Two "diversion centers" where police could bring people in crisis, as alternatives to jail or hospital emergency rooms, either sit empty or have served only a tiny number of people. A program to send counselors with police on calls never got off the ground. In its place is a non-policing team that is having trouble recruiting EMTs.

After the U.S. Justice Department found that Portland police used excessive force too often when dealing with people in mental health crises, the city formed an unarmed mobile crisis team and a team of police officers with extra training in such cases. Neither team was used when a man with a history of mental illness, armed with what turned out to be a toy gun, was shot to death by a police officer. The Portland Street Response team was not called because the incident occurred outside its limited working hours during the team's pilot phase.