USA Today, the programs are being piloted and run in Denver, Colorado, Olympia, Washington, and Eugene, Oregon, and seem to be working. The Support Team Assistance Response (STAR) program in Denver deploys a two-person team, a medic and a clinician to calls involving people experiencing mental health crises. The program responded to 748 calls over the course of six months and none of those calls required police assistance, and no arrests were made.
USA Today cited a 2016 study released in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that approximated that nearly half of fatal encounters with law enforcement involve someone who has a mental illness. Since 2015, about 25 percent of people fatally shot by officers have had a mental illness, according to a database maintained by
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None of these programs is meant to replace a community’s need for a trained police department, but to supplement and support more effective community emergency services. All of these programs are a win-win for the police and the community.
Fri, Feb 12th 2021 9:28am
Tim Cushing
In June of last year as protests over police brutality occurred all over the nation Denver, Colorado rolled out a program that combined common sense with a slight defunding of its police department. It decided calls that
might be better handled by social workers and mental health professionals
should be handled by… social workers and mental health professionals.
The city s STAR (Support Team Assistance Response) team was given the power to handle 911 calls that didn t appear to deal with criminal issues. Calls related to mental health or social issues were routed to STAR, allowing cops to handle actual crime and allowing people in crisis to avoid having to deal with people who tend to treat