“Cops and clinicians” seems to be working
A new batch of data suggests the city’s pairing of certain police officers with social workers (a.k.a. the "purple shirts") was a good move
SEPTEMBER 5, 2023
“Here are three calls that officers of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department responded to over the past year:
A suicidal woman “locked inside her vehicle with a loaded gun.”
A man “who would cause commotion in stores and would refuse to leave areas—attempting to get into fights…”
An “extremely escalated” woman who was “hearing voices” and “cycling from crying to yelling.”
In all these cases, the officers didn’t respond alone: Each arrived with a “purple shirt”—the nickname given to social workers from Behavioral Health Response, a nonprofit contracted by the city to participate in its crisis response unit, or CRU. (The verbiage quoted above comes from an internal report that the nonprofit recently gave me.)
Variants of the CRU program, which some at City Hall refer to as “cops and clinicians,” exist in other cities such as Eugene, Oregon, Houston, and Denver. The logic is this: Folks in crisis need help more than they need jail time, while police want to divert resources to more serious incidents. Here in St. Louis, the SLMPD is overstretched as it is. It’s budgeted for 1,275 officers but has only about 950, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The 911 call center is also understaffed.
CRU kicked off in early 2021. After the first year, BHR did an evaluation with help from a data service donated by Mastercard. The evaluators found, among other things, that CRU had saved 2,000 hours of police and EMS-worker time and had averted 750 hospitalizations.
After the second year, I was curious how things had progressed, so I asked for and received the most recent data. It contains signals that things are moving in the right direction, though some caveats are in order.”
Read the full story at St. Louis Magazine:
