Much of my research over the past several years has focused on alternative crisis response models, a broad and increasingly common term for approaches to crisis response that seek to reduce (or remove) reliance on police.
Alternative crisis response is not one universal model. In fact, one of the first things you learn when studying this field is just how difficult it is to neatly define it. Alternative crisis response is a highly heterogeneous field, with programs differing substantially in who responds, how teams are dispatched, what types of calls they attend, how they are embedded within local systems and what role police continue to play.
Earlier this summer, I co-led a workshop at the Advancing the Field of Alternative Response Convening in Chicago. The Convening brought together people working across the field of alternative response to think about where the field is headed. One of the conversations that emerged in our workshop was what exactly counts as alternative response?
There is no single answer. And perhaps that is not particularly surprising.
Alternative crisis response is an emerging field being developed across different communities, service systems and political contexts.
So, for my own research, I have needed to draw some boundaries around what I mean when I use the term. Broadly, my research has focused on two types of alternative crisis response: co-responder and civilian-led teams.
Co-responder models pair police officers with mental health professionals, such as social workers, nurses or other clinicians, to respond to crisis calls together. In our scoping review of co-response teams, we found that these models were consistently tied to efforts to re-evaluate the role of police in crisis care, reduce reliance on police-only responses and shift crisis intervention toward a more health-oriented approach. At the same time, because police remain part of the response, co-response raises important questions about how far these models actually move crisis care away from policing.
Civilian-led models are staffed by non-police responders, such as social workers, mental health clinicians, nurses, peer workers or other trained crisis professionals. While team composition varies considerably across programs, civilian-led models seek to remove police involvement in situations that can be addressed through a non-police crisis response. In our scoping review of civilian-led teams, we found that these models varied considerably in how they were designed and operated. Across the literature, three broad areas stood out: efforts to decentre police from crisis care, decisions about how teams are dispatched and which calls they respond to and the conditions needed to sustain these programs over time.
So, alternative crisis response is not one specific intervention, but a broader shift in how communities are approaching crisis care. Some models work within existing emergency response systems, while others move crisis care more fully outside of policing. What they share is a broader effort to reduce the role of police in crisis response.
This blog post brings me to the end of the first part of this series. Across my first three posts, I have tried to establish some of the groundwork for understanding this field, including what mental health crises are, the historical conditions that helped position police as default crisis responders and what the field of alternative crisis response is.
With that foundation in place, the next part of the series will move more closely into the questions and tensions that emerge in the field, such as how ideas about risk and safety continue to shape crisis response and what it might take for alternative approaches to become lasting parts of crisis care systems.
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash
