[ti:US Cities Answer Some Emergency Calls with Mental Health Teams]
[al:As It Is]
[ar:VOA]
[dt:2023-09-02]
[by:www.voase.cn]
[00:00.00]DENVER —Clear Creek County in Colorado is one of the latest places to begin using mental health teams to answer some emergency 911 calls.
[00:19.35]Mental health response teams are not new. 
[00:25.08]Many large cities put such teams in place after the killing of George Floyd during his arrest by police in Minneapolis in 2020.
[00:40.93]Some people believe mental health response teams might be more successful in answering some emergency 911 calls than police. 
[00:56.16]The job of a mental health worker is to help people who have emotional problems or mental sickness.
[01:06.59]The job of the police is to enforce laws. 
[01:11.29]They are not trained to treat mental health conditions.
[01:17.63]In Clear Creek County, the case of Christian Glass received a lot of attention. 
[01:25.87]News reports said Glass called the 911 emergency phone number when his car got stuck on the roadside. 
[01:38.10]Police answered the call, but Glass refused to get out of his car.
[01:46.47]Later, the police broke the car window.
[01:51.06]Glass threatened them with a small knife. 
[01:54.65]He was then shot and killed by police. 
[01:59.36]The lawyer for Glass's parents said he was having a mental health crisis. 
[02:06.10]He believed that supernatural beings meant to harm him.
[02:12.00]After legal action, Clear Creak County agreed to pay $19 million as a result of the case and two officers face criminal charges.
[02:27.87]New York City officials said mental health response teams resolve half of their calls by talking to people or taking them to social services or community health centers.
[02:44.61]However, the Associated Press (AP) reported that workers for the city's mental health crisis program, called B-HEARD, have had difficulty dealing with the number of calls and cases.
[03:02.83]The program answered about two percent of the 171,000 calls throughout the city in 2022.
[03:14.63]Carleigh Sailon was a mental health response team supervisor who used to work in a program in Denver, Colorado. 
[03:24.65]She said mental health teams aim to meet the needs of the community and send the right experts to solve the problems.
[03:36.18]Mental health teams may also have more time to spend in response to an emergency call than police. 
[03:46.14]That could be a reason that mental health response teams might be more successful than police in answering some 911 calls.
[03:59.40]For example, a mental health team responded to a 911 call about a homeless man in Denver, Colorado. 
[04:10.62]The team spent three hours helping the man get a form of identification, food, and medications. 
[04:20.66]They also took him to a shelter designed to house homeless people. Police might spend 10 to 90 minutes on a call.
[04:32.33]This would not be long enough to help a homeless person.
[04:36.62]At least 14 of America's 20 biggest cities are using mental health teams to answer some emergency 911 calls.
[04:50.35]New York City, Los Angeles; Houston, Texas; and Columbus, Ohio, spent almost $125 million on their programs.
[05:01.99]Smaller cities are also starting to use the teams.
[05:07.20]The AP reports that federal government information is incomplete on how effective mental health response teams are. 
[05:19.07]But a recent study of a mental health response program in Denver from Stanford University suggested they have good results.
[05:30.58]The 2022 study found that, in some Denver neighborhoods where the programs were in place, few small crimes were reported while violent crimes remained unchanged.
[05:46.00]At a conference discussing mental health teams in Washington, D.C. this spring, officials from several cities discussed using mental health response teams.
[06:00.80]They said they faced difficulties in finding enough trained mental health workers, training workers at 911 call centers and sending unarmed civilians into situations that could be dangerous.
[06:19.82]However, an official for New York's B-HEARD program believes the effort is important.
[06:28.97]Laquisha Grant is with the New York Mayor's Office of Community Mental Health.
[06:35.82]She said, "We really think that every single B-HEARD response is just a better way that we, the city, are providing care to people."
[06:49.03]I'm Gena Bennett.