Dan Kornfield: DC’s next mayor should expand 911 mental health responders
As we approach DC’s first mayoral transition in over a decade, it is worth taking stock of how the city is performing on public safety, and how the next mayor can continue to move us further toward being one of America’s safest cities.
Mayor Muriel Bowser — whose administration I staffed for five years as a senior budget analyst, sworn reserve police officer, and head of crime analysis at the Metropolitan Police Department — often said we want a city that is both fair and safe. To finally reach that goal, the city must continue to lower violent crime rates, while honoring the dignity of all involved and still attending to nonviolent calls for service. Supporting that, we must get beyond a TV-style representation of guns-out policing: We need to understand how patrol officers normally spend their time, which can shed light on law enforcement’s benefits and limitations.
To that end, I’ll recount one of my normal days as a police officer in DC. It was a September evening in the Fourth District. Over one shift, we responded to nine calls: two minor traffic accidents, a disorderly conduct report that turned out to be people doing nothing wrong, multiple mental health calls, a theft dispute, a protection order, a hang-up, and an armed robbery. Most required mediation, translation or basic problem-solving, not enforcement. In one case, a woman reported that peppers had been stolen from her garden; in another, a mental health call resulted in no one found. Even the robbery call ended with victim support rather than an arrest.
This mix — routine disputes, behavioral health needs and occasional serious crime — is typical. Officers move quickly from one situation to the next, often without the time or tools to fully address the underlying issues.
Police officers are relied on daily to respond to dozens of nonviolent personal and cross-cultural disputes and mental health calls that could benefit from human services support rather than an armed police response. Police do their best, but don’t have the time or training to do interpersonal counseling, nor to fully follow up on the most serious calls — much less do proactive problem-solving in the community to avoid these frictions from escalating in the first place. Since my time on the force, staffing has become even tighter as MPD, like other police departments, struggles to recruit enough officers to make up for retirements — prompting a reliance on excessive overtime.
A really helpful step in the right direction would be to have unarmed behavioral health and mediation-trained responders handle many 911 calls instead of, and sometimes jointly with, police (or emergency medical services). This frees up police officers to focus more on serious crime, while avoiding the downsides of unnecessary enforcement response and reducing uses of force, hospitalizations, lawsuits and arrests. According to Law Enforcement Action Partnership, 91 cities have launched such community responder programs, and so far they have a fantastic safety record. I’ve had the privilege to launch, train and support several of these through my work at Dignity Best Practices. Nationally, Durham, North Carolina; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Dayton, Ohio, rank among the cities leading the way in building a “Fourth Branch” of community safety alongside police, fire, and EMS (actually a “Fifth Branch,” if we give 911 dispatch its due).
I’m proud of the steps Mayor Bowser has taken toward a best-fit response to 911 calls. Two initiatives are the Nurse Triage Line, which allows low-acuity callers with medical needs to speak to a nurse instead of getting an ambulance response, and the Mental Health Emergency Dispatch Program, which allows appropriate mental health 911 calls to be transferred to Department of Behavioral Health phone counselors (988), with in-person support being sent via rapid response from a pair of social workers who are part of the Community Response Team (CRT). These are both fantastic initiatives.
Even so, there have been implementation challenges amid competing distractions. The CRT has been significantly understaffed for years. Challenged by hiring, they are down from a peak of around 60 responders to just 12 or so (compared to about 2,000 MPD officers on patrol). The Office of Unified Communications, which operates the 911 call center, has had multiple leadership transitions. The actual volume of calls transferred from 911 to 988 has been closer to one per day rather than its potential of 20 to 90. We need a new round of cross-agency leadership attention toward staffing and performance metrics to help this groundbreaking program realize its potential.
DC could become a true national leader in best-fit response to 911 calls (safe and fair), but we aren’t there yet. I call upon the next mayor (as well as their deputy mayors for public safety and public health) to pick up the right-response baton and invest in the CRT and its relationship with 911 and MPD. This would give the people of DC more threat-reduction policing — and a caring non-police response at the same time.
Dan Kornfield is a former DC police officer and the executive director at Dignity Best Practices.
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