It’s all but certain that next month the San Antonio City Council will approve the proposed $3.7 billion budget for fiscal year 2024, which includes added public safety spending for police and firefighters — partially to respond to the growing number of emergency mental health calls.
The proposed increases in public safety funding don’t concern me. Such public safety spending is inevitable in a fast-growing, sprawling city that is hard to cover. I am, however, concerned about how city, police and firefighter leaders are addressing the community’s mental health crisis. Residents made more than 32,000 mental health calls to 911 in 2022, according to SAPD Assistant Chief Karen Falks.
Now in its second year, the SA CORE program, which stands for Community Outreach and Resiliency Effort, deploys a three-person team in response to mental health calls that do not involve reports of a weapon. The team includes a specially-trained police officer, a paramedic from the San Antonio Fire Department and a licensed mental health clinician from the Center for Health Care Services.
In the vast majority of responses, however, armed police officers are sent to the scene without a mental health specialist, which at times leads to escalation and tragedy. Just this June, 46-year-old Melissa Perez, a San Antonio woman who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and experiencing a mental health episode, was shot and killed by police. SAPD suspended without pay the three officers, all of whom opened fire on Perez. All three have been charged with murder.
Mental health calls seldom end in fatalities, but that is no comfort to the victimized families. A single incident can undermine public confidence, especially among communities of color. Often the sheer number of bullets fired by multiple officers belies the assertion that the police response was controlled and proportional.
The proposed budget will add two more SA CORE teams to serve citywide, but that will still fall short of addressing the crisis. At a minimum, each of the 10 council districts should have an SA Core team in operation. Even with 10 SA Core teams, each unit would face an average of 3,200 calls a year. That’s nearly nine emergency response calls each day for each hypothetical team. Each call can require long period of time, even hours, to resolve satisfactorily.
“I wish I could have 10 or 12 teams to go around the city,” Falks told City Council this week during a briefing on the budget.
Bexar County launched its Specialized Multidisciplinary Alternate Response Team (SMART) program in 2020 after a sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a mentally disturbed military veteran, a death that County Judge Nelson Wolff said would have been avoided had mental health professionals rather than armed law enforcement officers responded to the 911 call. The county team faces an unrealistic workload, serving the unincorporated parts of the county and 26 suburban cities. The county also faces a serious problem with mentally ill inmates held indefinitely in the Bexar County jail, most deemed unfit to stand trial yet unable to secure a scarce psychiatric bed at a local facility.
Adding more police officers and firefighters to the ranks is not the best way to address the city’s mental health crisis. Innovative approaches are called for to more effectively address the crisis and to free up police to deal with other emergencies. Such calls would be better handled by trained experts who can call in police as a last resort.
Other cities are already moving away from sending police on mental health calls.
Eugene, Oregon’s CAHOOTS program, which stands for Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets, has been operating in concert with police and firefighters for years. All 911 mental health calls that do not involve crime are redirected to CAHOOTS, which has a 24/7 response team deployed consisting of an unarmed medic and crisis worker. Police can be called in if necessary. Persuasion and negotiation, along with empathetic offers of assistance to individuals facing seemingly insurmountable problems are tools that should be deployed by trained professionals.
Eugene is not alone. From Denver to Austin to New York and elsewhere, cities are launching pilot programs that end a police response to nonviolent mental health calls.
San Antonio should consider placing the responsibility under Metro Health while still relying on the 911 system. Significantly more funding will be required to place a team in each council district. Anything less will result in police responding to most mental health calls.
The crisis is an opportunity to enact real change.
