On the anniversary (well, off by one day) of the first day of service of CAHOOTS, the Eugene, OR, emergency mental health service often invoked rather than police, CNN, rather tardily, publishes an article on them. Readers may recall that I lamented that I couldn’t find an assessment of CAHOOTS performance, and while there’s nothing like a formal assessment in this article, they do have a few numbers:
Per self-reported data, CAHOOTS workers responded to 24,000 calls in 2019 — about 20% of total dispatches. About 150 of those required police backup.
CAHOOTS says the program saves the city about $8.5 million in public safety costs every year, plus another $14 million in ambulance trips and ER costs.
Although Eugene may be somewhat atypical in the United States:
Lane County, which encompasses Eugene and neighbor city Springfield, has staggering rates of homelessness.
The county’s per-capita homeless rate is among the nation’s highest. Recent data from the county also suggests mental health crises are widespread, too — the suicide rate, at around 17 deaths per 100,000, is about 40% higher than the national average.
Police encounters with the homeless often end in citations or arrests. Of homeless people with mental health conditions, anywhere from 62.0% to 90% of them will be arrested, per one journal review of homelessness studies. They may end up in jail, not in treatment or housing, and thus begins the cycle of incarceration that doesn’t benefit either party.
CAHOOTS was created in part because of another disturbing statistic — around 25% of people killed by police show signs of mental illness, according to a journal review of the Washington Post’s extensive officer-involved shootings database.
It’s an interesting article. Retired CAHOOTS co-founder David Zeiss notes that every city is different, and every solution must be local and organic. As a member of the Instant Gratification Generation, I found this a little disheartening, to be honest:
[CAHOOTS is] not an immediate fix. Zeiss said it took a lot of “patient plotting” for CAHOOTS to really have an impact.
“At this point, we’ve patiently waited out an entire generation of police officers,” he said. “There’s nobody on the Eugene police force today who can remember being a Eugene police officer without CAHOOTS. It’s been that slow of a process.”
Which suggests distrust and even resentment, which I suppose should not be surprising. But it’s important to understand that Zeiss himself does not agree with the Get rid of the police! movement:
But a growing group of dissenters feel there’s little room for police in the movement to fundamentally change the American criminal justice system. Services like CAHOOTS, they say, may function better and more broadly without the assistance of police.
Zeiss isn’t sure he agrees.
“Partnership with police has always been essential to our model,” he said. “A CAHOOTS-like program without a close relationship with police would be very different from anything we’ve done. I don’t have a coherent vision of a society that has no police force.”
He said the current movement has seemingly pitted service providers like CAHOOTS against police, which may stoke suspicion among police over “whether we’re really their allies or their competitors,” he said.
“In some sense, that may be true. But I think we still need to focus on being part of a system, and a system that includes police for some functions,” Zeiss said.
I think I’m with Zeiss. I, personally, view the police, in some form, as essential. That form does not look a lot like today’s form, though. I think leaders must ask themselves why we need a heavily armed organization that sometimes seems to be on a hair-trigger, and, from the behavior and statements of the current Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) police union president, Bob Kruller, views its duties as inherently violent and right-wing. Other problems include an atmosphere of extreme mutual protection, even in the face of illegal behavior by members, and the use of a funding source, civil forfeiture, that is prone to corruption. The militarization of the police has been a national topic of debate, and I’d like to see most or all of the heavy weapons removed from police armories.
Leaders need to very carefully select metrics for measuring police performance. Those metrics must not measure quantities that do not advance community interests, or are easily inflated quantities. Funding sources must be completely outside of the control and influence of the police as well. The idea that taxation is always bad needs to be jettisoned as the community wrecker that it is. Improper funding of anything will lead to corruption, so we need to come to an agreement on proper funding levels, adjust as needed, and implement the funding through taxation. Enough with hiding behind dubious sources and proclaiming how you’ve kept taxes low.
And, since it’s a related topic, we should also ban private prisons, as they can lead to behaviors by the corporations providing the service that are deleterious to the community, while only benefiting the coffers of the company.
Off the soap box. I’m getting dizzy from the altitude.
