Here & Now

First Responders for Mental Health Incidents

Frederica Freyberg:

In Milwaukee, with a spike in crime and calls for police reform, city alders are working to see whether they can both bring better emergency response and free up police officers for violent crime calls. The Common Council approved legislation to appoint a Milwaukee Police Department diversion task force to report its findings by next March. Alderperson Chantia Lewis says the goal is to reimagine the way of dispatching help and how we create a safer community for everyone and she joins us now from Milwaukee. Thanks for being here.

Chantia Lewis:

Thank you so much for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

How would you like to reimagine dispatching help to people and how would that work?

Chantia Lewis:

Absolutely. So first and foremost, I want to reiterate that this is not a reimagining for instances where officers are needed. This is literally looking at those calls that do not warrant a police, a sworn-strength officer, going to that particular situation. And so when we look at mental health, for example, and we look at the broader context of what happens when a person is having a mental breakdown, an officer should not respond to those calls because they are not trained for that. They don’t go to school for that. They don’t have that level of background. What we’ve seen over the last few years as we tried to institute that and add that to their responsibilities, but that’s not what they were sworn to protect to do. So in an instance where a mental health crisis is happening, that’s when you need a social worker.

Frederica Freyberg:

Is it my understanding — I mean, would paramedics report as well or who would be responding to a mental health call?

Chantia Lewis:

Absolutely. So the social workers, the paramedics, the firefighters, those people who are trained in de-escalation in a certain respect, but also those people that do not pose a threat. They’re nonthreatening. When you have a person showing up with a firearm, it tends to escalate the situation. And not intentionally. But it just tends to escalate the situation. And so we know that firefighters are ones that are looked at by the community as friendly. Social workers are looked at as necessary and friendly. And so when we have those types of trained individuals going into the field to respond to these types of calls, it really helps on both ends to, one, de-escalate the situation, but to ensure that we don’t have another Dontre Hamilton happening.

Frederica Freyberg:

Right, because I was just about to ask why would diverting police in this way create a safer community?

Chantia Lewis:

And that’s exactly the reason. We’ve seen not just here in Milwaukee and across the state, but across the country where an officer escalated the situation, not intentionally most often, but sometimes intentionally, and the individual that was having a mental health crisis lost their life. And so what we’re trying to do is to preserve life and to ensure that our officers have the ability to respond to those calls that they were sworn to do.

Frederica Freyberg:

How could saving police response for the most serious of violent crime calls help also kind of stem crime in Milwaukee?

Chantia Lewis:

Absolutely. So what we’re seeing is the calls for services that are needed for them to respond, the lag time is a lot longer, and so a burglary in process or someone with a gun, a suspect with a gun or a carjacking of sorts, we are seeing that they are tied up in other instances where they should not be responding to, dog barking calls or, you know, a dispute with a neighbor that’s not escalating to violence. We’re seeing they need to be freed up. They are saying — what I’m hearing as I talk to officers, I have officers in my family, and so when I talk to them, they’re saying we’re doing a lot of nonessential work. And when we need to be doing essential work. This is twofold, right? This is helping to ensure that the officers are responding to the calls that they need to respond to and that the especially mental health crises, they are able to walk away and get the help that they need.

Frederica Freyberg:

How big a proportion are the calls for help in Milwaukee that are actually kind of mental health, behavioral health calls as opposed to violent emergencies?

Chantia Lewis:

Mm-hmm. And so that’s what the task force is going to be taking a look at. Right now we have surface numbers. What we want to do is a deep dive into all of the calls that MPD are addressing and to make sure that we can see what calls actually need to be responded to and what calls can be diverted.

Frederica Freyberg:

And how are police officers and citizens responding to this idea?

Chantia Lewis:

From what we are hearing, the initial conversation is it’s needed, it’s warranted, it’s been a long time coming. I think the comments that we’ve heard that — very few comments that we’ve heard have been negative are from people who just don’t understand what the task force is slated to do. That’s why I’m grateful to be in your program today, to be able to express the true meaning and the true meaning behind it. And that’s literally having officers being freed up so they can respond to what they need to do, but also making sure that this is a trust-builder with the community. Because oftentimes we’ll see that people don’t want to call the police or call 911 for especially mental health crisis, because they don’t feel that their loved one would come out of that instance alive.

Frederica Freyberg:

Wow. All right. Well, Alderperson Chantia Lewis from Milwaukee, thank you very much for being here.

Chantia Lewis:

Thank you so much.

Frederica Freyberg:

In the city of Madison a pilot program with similar aims is getting off the ground. The city’s crisis response team is made up of paramedics and crisis workers who respond to behavioral health calls instead of armed police officers.