Calling the Cops on Someone With Mental Illness Can Go Terribly Wrong. Here's a Better Idea.

By Sigal Samuel, Vox

16 June 20

What if we sent mental health experts instead of police?

e’ve seen it happen too many times. Someone calls 911 to report a disturbance next door or out in the street. The police show up. Things go awry, and the police shoot the person at the center of the disturbance — and it turns out that the person had a mental health issue. 

In the US, at least one in four people killed by the police has a serious mental health problem. Stories of these police killings have been in the headlines for years, with anguished family members decrying officers’ violence toward their loved ones. Now, with protests over police brutality going strong across the country, and calls to defund the police becoming increasingly mainstream, many Americans feel there has to be a better way to handle 911 calls.

Some people say there is: Instead of sending police to deal with non-criminal emergencies, why not send mental health experts? And instead of pouring more money into police budgets, why not redirect funds to programs that would get those experts out on the streets?

Oakland, California, is the newest city to explore this approach, which has already been tried to good effect in Oregon and, farther afield, in Sweden. 

Rebecca Kaplan, Oakland’s citywide council member, successfully advocated last year for $40,000 from the city budget to be spent on a study on how best to implement the Oregon model there. The study investigated questions like: What’s the best way to complement existing mental health services without competing against them? Where in Oakland do most 911 calls related to mental illness originate? In which neighborhoods does it make most sense to concentrate a pilot program?

This month, as the city council debated the budget for the coming year, that study was presented to a meeting of the Oakland Police Commission. Council members discussed the possibility of launching a pilot called MACRO (the Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland). The goal is to launch the pilot next year with funding from the city budget, and although supporters are not yet sure what its size and duration will be, they’re hopeful it’ll make a big difference to Oakland’s overpoliced community of people without homes. They were among those who first called for a non-policing approach. 

Other cities from Portland to New York are keeping a close eye on what happens in Oakland, because they’re also interested in potentially implementing this approach. If the model takes off nationwide, it could be an effective way to reduce needless suffering for millions of Americans who have mental illness.

The non-policing approach has been tried elsewhere — and it works

In 2015, Stockholm started test-driving an ambulance devoted entirely to mental health care. It looks like a regular ambulance on the outside, but instead of stretchers, it’s got cozy seats — perfect for a therapy session on wheels. Two mental health nurses and one paramedic travel on board. Most of the emergency cases they handle involve people at risk of suicide; sometimes, they involve people having a psychotic episode. 

The idea is that making these experts available boosts the quality of care, avoids needless escalation by law enforcement, and minimizes the stigma attached to people with mental illness.

“It used to be the police who handled these kinds of calls,” Anki Björnsdotter, who works as a mental health nurse aboard the ambulance, told Vice. “But just the presence of the police can easily cause a patient to feel like they’ve done something wrong. Mental illness is nothing criminal so it doesn’t make sense to be picked up by the police.”

During its first year, the ambulance was requested 1,580 times and attended to 1,254 cases. That means the single vehicle was tasked with zipping all around Stockholm to handle 3.4 cases per day. 

“It has been considered a huge success by police, nurses, healthcare officials, as well as by the patients,” said Fredrik Bengtsson, who’s in charge of mental health emergencies at Stockholm’s Sabbatsberg Hospital. 

In Eugene, Oregon, the group handling such calls is called Cahoots (Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Street). This nonprofit was founded by social activists way back in 1989, but it’s been garnering more attention in recent years as the police’s sometimes violent and even lethal treatment of people with mental illness has sparked a public outcry. 

Cahoots handles non-criminal crises involving people who are homeless, disoriented, or intoxicated, have a mental illness, or are enmeshed in an escalating dispute. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal explained their work: 

The program in Eugene is unique because Cahoots is wired into the 911 system and responds to most calls without police. The name Cahoots was intended to be a humorous nod to the fact that they are working closely with police. Cahoots now has 39 employees and costs the city around $800,000 a year plus its vehicles, a fraction of the police department’s $58 million annual budget. They are also paid to handle calls for neighboring Springfield.

“It allows police officers to … deal with crime, but it also allows us to offer a different service that is really needed,” said Lt. Ron Tinseth of the Eugene Police Department.

In contrast to police officers who typically seek to project authority at all times, Cahoots employees dress in black sweatshirts, listen to their police radios via earbuds, and speak in calm tones with inviting body language.

In 2017, Cahoots handled 17 percent of the police calls in Eugene, according to the Journal. “When I’m talking to a more liberal group of people, I’ll make the argument it’s the compassionate thing to do, it’s the humane thing to do,” said Manning Walker, a Cahoots medic. “When I’m talking to a conservative group, I’ll make the argument that it’s the fiscally conservative thing to do because it’s cheaper for us to do this than for the police and firefighters.” 

Oakland plans to launch a pilot program inspired by Cahoots. It will see a mental health counselor and an EMT respond to some 911 calls instead of police. 

Anne Janks from the Coalition for Police Accountability, an organization that advocates for constitutional and transparent policing in Oakland, told me she hasn’t encountered any critics of the plan to adopt the Cahoots model. “It’s actually been heartening for those of us who’ve been doing political organizing for a while — we’ve been joking that we’ve never worked on something before where everyone’s supporting it,” she said.

“The Cahoots program has proven successful in Eugene to treat those struggling with mental health issues with dignity and respect, and to direct them to services that are more appropriate than spending time in police custody,” said Kaplan, Oakland’s citywide council member. “I believe this is a good model to test in Oakland, and I look forward to sharing the results.”

Already, Cahoots is working with a number of cities — Olympia, Washington; Denver, Colorado; New York; Indianapolis, Indiana; Portland and Roseburg, Oregon — to see how they might be able to implement the non-policing model. With any luck, this approach, which is both more empathetic and more cost-effective, can help reduce suffering for millions of people.

Corporations Are Claiming "Black Lives Matter." That Would Be News to Their Workers.

By Toni Gilpin, Jacobin

15 June 20

How much do black lives matter to America’s leading corporations? Not enough to put any real money on the table for their workers.

ever underestimate the American business community’s capacity for hypocrisy.

That’s one of the lessons to be drawn from the explosive reaction to George Floyd’s murder. As demonstrators began flooding streets, corporate PR departments flew into rapid response mode, issuing a flurry of agonized, apologetic pledges to do more to combat racism and inequality.

Such statements may, on a personal level, be sincere: the depth of righteous pain and anger expressed by African Americans has induced widespread soul-searching, even in executive suites. Yet this high-profile hand-wringing is used to uncouple the outpouring of outrage from capitalist practices that are now, and always have been, at the intertwined roots of racial and economic injustice.

As they nimbly co-opted the language of the protests, moreover, corporate leaders offered up “solutions” to structural racism that won’t diminish managerial control or redistribute power in the workplace, meaning their proposals won’t promote actual structural change of any sort. With a few well-publicized contributions and some new rounds of diversity training, business elites hope to emerge from the present crisis with their privilege, and their profits, intact.

“Tragic, painful and unacceptable,” so Walmart CEO Doug McMillon described George Floyd’s death. “The inequitable and brutal treatment of black people in our country must stop,” an Amazon tweet proclaimed. “We do not tolerate inequity, injustice or racism,” McDonald’s announced, with CEO Joe Erlinger insisting, “when any member of our McFamily hurts, we all hurt.”

To address this “hurt,” McDonald’s announced it will donate $1 million to the NAACP and the National Urban League and promised “tangible goals related to diversity.” Many corporations made similar commitments. Amazon said it will give $10 million to “organizations supporting justice and equity,” and Walmart pledged $100 million over five years to create “a new center on racial equity” aimed at promoting “economic opportunity and healthier living.”

But such contributions, publicized with much fanfare, in fact are chump change to these immensely powerful corporations. For Walmart, $100 million over the next five years represents less than 1/250 of one percent of the nearly $3 trillion in income it expects to rake in during that period. Put another way, its gift would translate to a mere $13 extra a year, for the next five years, to each Walmart employee in the United States.

And American CEOs are wealthy almost beyond imagination: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, is worth $150 billion, a figure so much larger than the average median household income of $63,000 that it requires special graphics just to illustrate it.

A Real Fix

If these companies really want to address inequality and improve opportunities for African Americans, there’s a fix readily at hand: they could simply give more money to their own employees, a substantial percentage of whom are black and largely concentrated in low-wage occupations. African Americans, in general, earn less than white workers in this country do, and the jobs they hold are more unstable and less likely to offer benefits, all crucial factors that contribute to our persistent racial wealth gap.

Walmart, with a U.S. workforce of one and a half million, is both the nation’s largest employer overall and the largest employer of African Americans; nearly half of Walmart workers are people of color. Yet Walmart, Amazon, and McDonald’s don’t pay livable wages. Benefits, when offered at all, are paltry (the lack of paid sick leave has become especially visible in COVID times). Schedules are unpredictable and job security tenuous. Working conditions are onerous.

How much do black lives matter to America’s leading corporations? Not enough to put any real money on the table.

Also not to be taken seriously: the desire for “dialogue” expressed by these big business titans and all that “listening” they say they’ll do. There is one meaningful and time-honored way to ensure that workers will truly be heard: through a union. Unions democratize workplaces, giving employees the collective voice necessary to put them on a more equal footing with management, to ensure their concerns are heeded.

For people of color, unions are especially valuable, literally. While unions are financially advantageous for all workers, “the gains from union membership in terms of pay, benefits, and stability are more pronounced among nonwhite families than among white families,” one recent study notes. African Americans who are unionized make more money and are more likely to have benefits like health care and employer-supported retirement plans, translating to greater savings and home ownership levels. Union membership, in other words, is critical to narrowing the racial wealth gap.

So unions clearly empower African Americans—yet Walmart, Amazon, and McDonald’s are unabashed union-busters. In order to crush organizing efforts (very often led by people of color), these companies invest far more in lawyers, consulting firms, and employee surveillance than they’ll ever dish out to promote “diversity.”

For Bezos, Erlinger, and McMillon, and the other CEOs who follow their lead, genuine “justice and equity” for their workers would come at too high a cost: allowing unions in would require them to relinquish the total control that they now exert over their enterprises.

This particular form of hypocrisy may not be much scrutinized by mainstream media, which are, after all, also corporate enterprises. Much recent coverage of business initiatives to address inequity has omitted issues like fairer compensation or union representation. A lengthy New York Times article—“Corporate America Has Failed Black America”—doesn’t mention unions at all and allots only a few sentences to low-wage workers; the main focus is the dearth of African Americans in top management.

And in a stunning act of appropriation, the New York Stock Exchange observed a moment of silence to honor George Floyd. This took place just as the stock market roared back into full recovery, thus alleviating the real anxieties of the 1%, an irony that drew little notice.

Will corporate executives get away with this sleight-of-hand, purporting to be troubled by the structural racism and economic inequality that they, in fact, perpetuate and benefit from? It’s through this sort of misdirection, and by narrowing the “legitimate” terms of debate, that capitalists, as the early labor historian Selig Perlman once noted, exert their “effective will to power” and “convince other classes that they alone, the capitalists, know how to operate the complex economic apparatus of modern society.”

After George Floyd’s death, Black Lives Matter activists and their allies refused to allow business as usual, and through massive protests and direct action achieved the extraordinary: exposing to the world the brutality and racism that define American policing. For the moment, though, it seems that CEOs are maintaining their authority over the “complex economic apparatus of modern society.”

Union supporters must stand up and assert their own “effective will to power,” to ensure that the practitioners of economic oppression are called to account—and forced to make concessions—as well.