Angelenos are calling for unarmed responders
October 21, 2023
Welcome to the third issue of Report Forward by journalist Alissa Walker.
THE BIG REPORT
Members of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Crisis Response Team are deployed to the Woolsey Fire in 2018. Photo: LA Mayor’s Office
In the first 10 days of 2023, three men — Takar Smith, Keenan Anderson, and Oscar Leon Sanchez — were killed by LAPD officers as they experienced a mental health crisis, eliciting an emotional response by newly elected Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. “Especially as a former health care professional, I am deeply troubled that mental health experts were not called in, even when there was a documented history of past mental health crisis,” read Bass’s statement. “When there is no immediate risk to others, law enforcement must not be the first responder when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis. I believe officers and Angelenos agree on this.”
Bass is correct: Angelenos strongly endorse this idea and the officers do, in fact, agree; in a statement two months later, the Los Angeles Police Protective League argued that LAPD should not respond to 28 different types of non-emergency incidents, specifically “non-criminal mental health calls.” And yet, despite the efforts of councilmembers working independently to bring unarmed crisis response to LA, Bass’s budget passed with no additional funding for these programs. What’s more, LA’s City Council voted to increase police spending earlier this year, leaving less money for the handful of alternatives currently being piloted, even, as Bass herself noted, there is widespread support for increasing these services throughout the city.
In Los Angeles, people who are homeless or having a mental health crisis are more likely to become the victims of police violence. According to an LAPD use-of-force report from 2022, of the 23 people shot by police, 6 were experiencing homelessness and 9 were perceived to be experiencing a mental health crisis. Additionally, new City Controller data shows a troubling spike in arrests for violations of 41.18 — the municipal code amended by the City Council in 2021 to make sitting, lying, sleeping, or storing property in the right of way illegal in certain parts of the city — and nearly half of those arrests are misdemeanors, meaning they could result in potential jail time. Aside from the increased potential for fatal escalation that comes with a responder being armed with a deadly weapon, simply being in the wrong place and attempting to seek help from an LAPD officer could just as easily end in incarceration.
City officials seem to understand the problem, but the challenge has been reallocating money to unarmed response in the volumes required for effectiveness. In 2021, the city launched an unarmed response pilot named Crisis and Incident Response through Community-Led Engagement (CIRCLE) which was designed to divert non-emergency 911 calls specifically related to homelessness. But two years later, CIRCLE is only operating in certain parts of the city, where the demand outstrips the availability of the teams to respond. CIRCLE is also not staffed by the city; it contracts through Urban Alchemy, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, whose training and approach has been heavily criticized by homelessness advocates. Elected representatives may say they want to invest in alternatives, but their budget gives money to traditional policing jobs and contract workers. And that’s unacceptable when city employees are striking for higher wages, Black Lives Matter LA co-founder Melina Abdullah recently told KCRW. “Especially when we talk about intervention workers and prevention workers who work for the city making close to minimum wage, we cannot be giving away another what's estimated to be $1 billion in contracts to LAPD.”
A map of where CIRCLE is currently available for the City of LA; view the entire map here.
Abolitionist groups including Black Lives Matter have long argued for a diversion of police funding, and since 2020 a majority of Angelenos have shared this sentiment, according to the 2023 Police and Community Relations Survey, a multi-year survey conducted by the Thomas & Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “The data do show that the majority of Angelenos would support a reallocation of some of LAPD’s budget to social workers, mental healthcare, and other social services — or just redirecting money elsewhere in general,” says StudyLA’s managing director Brianne Gilbert. “However, residents want to see money allocated elsewhere and still want the LAPD to have a presence in so many areas.” (Although Gilbert notes that there’s less support for that presence among Black and Latinx Angelenos.) Notably, she says, Angelenos are most supportive of LAPD officers being accompanied by trained clinicians, known as “co-response,” when it comes to nonviolent calls. “Angelenos recognize the need for a police presence in case an issue escalates, but they are looking for a different intervention strategy than solely a police presence.”
What’s important to note, however, is that LAPD technically already has its own co-responder model, at least in name: the Mental Evaluation Unit (MEU) and Systemwide Mental Assessment Response Team (SMART), designed to deploy officers with clinicians from LA County’s Department of Mental Health. According to 2022 LAPD data there were 22,565 calls where a SMART team was requested, but a SMART team only responded to 26 percent of those calls. (During the LAPD shooting of Takar Smith, whose wife told officers he was having a mental health crisis, SMART was available but not called.) LAPD says it requires more funding for mental health clinicians for its program to work. However, a representative from LA County’s Department of Mental Health confirmed that, while they are seeking additional capacity for co-response, the county is actually prioritizing investment in its Psychiatric Mobile Response Teams (PMRT), unarmed teams that do not include law enforcement, because they see more demand for response without an armed officer.
If LA is already paying to dispatch its own mental health intervention efforts, shouldn’t we have a better understanding of the effectiveness of existing programs before starting new ones? This week, a City Administrative Officer report shared the status of LA’s efforts to create a citywide unarmed model of crisis response, which includes analysis of current programs. And an assessment of LAPD’s MEU unit is currently underway, says Dinah Manning, Director of Public Safety for the City Controller’s office, which is also working on a second, related effort: a white paper summarizing existing alternative response pilots in the city with comparisons to similar programs in other cities like Denver and Eugene, Oregon. The goals of both of these projects are to begin to attach some real metrics to the outcomes they produce. “Our team has requested and is reviewing aggregate incident-based data to identify team response times and the impact, if any, of LAPD’s alternative response efforts on uses of force,” says Manning, as well as “ensuring that city dollars are spent on city programs that help mitigate the use of force against individuals experiencing mental health crises.”
Unlike other cities, which have a centralized 911 dispatch, LA’s is couched within the LAPD, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; 2020 data shows that the vast majority of civilian-initiated 911 calls are not about violence or crimes — or even necessarily a good fit for LAPD to respond to. After observing how 911 works with unarmed teams in four cities, Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez is focusing on making changes to how LA’s responders are deployed. “I’ve visited our dispatch centers and I was left with a lot of concerns about the lack of capacity that our current 911 dispatch system has,” she says. “We can build out as many different crisis response teams as we want, but if we don’t have a dynamic 911 dispatch system that has the capacity and support to triage and dispatch all the different resources we want to bring online then we won’t see the results that we want.” Right now, calling 911 defaults to a police-based emergency response, when what callers actually need to connect with are a wide range of options. “Our dispatchers are an overlooked part of the emergency response system,” says Hernandez. “They are the first point of contact for people who are experiencing a crisis.”
An LMU survey shows Angelenos overwhelmingly agree that the city should not respond only with LAPD officers for calls about sexual assault, substance abuse, mental health crises, and people experiencing homelessness.
Reforming LA’s dispatch system should also include a completely new approach to non-crisis response, says Brett Feldman, Director of USC Street Medicine, which operates a mobile health clinic that serves the city’s unhoused residents. “We spoke with the Department of Public Safety and people at LAPD and a lot of their emergency calls for people experiencing homelessness were not criminal — in fact, a lot were not even crisis calls,” he says. “A lot of them are coming from concerned neighbors: I saw this guy at the bus stop and his leg doesn’t look good.” And many of the calls which are categorized as “mental health crisis” are, in fact, the result of substance abuse disorders, which Feldman’s team responds to as well. He recalls one patient grappling with the effects of fentanyl use disorder who finally agreed to start suboxone, a medication used to treat opioid addiction. Feldman’s team was able to fill the prescription at a pharmacy around the corner and bring it back to the patient within a few hours.
Bass’s budget does include $1 million for a street medicine program, although a request for a therapeutic van was not funded. Through a pilot managed by Hernandez, Feldman’s team — consisting of a supervising physician, psychiatrist, nurse, physician’s assistant, and a community health worker — is deployed in Council District 1 five days a week, with two of those days spent in MacArthur Park. Feldman’s team maintains regular contact with patients, sometimes for years, keeping up with them as they relocate throughout the city (on average, he says, his patients move or are moved three times a month). He estimates one team can treat 400 people per year, which seems like a worthwhile investment to stop small issues from escalating to an emergency. “One of the gaps we’ve seen between armed response and unarmed response is that unarmed response is usually only sent out when they think someone is in crisis,” says Feldman. “It often ends the same way: either there wasn’t a crisis, or when the immediate crisis has resolved, people are back on the street with no follow-up care. Our approach is crisis prevention — and post-crisis management to prevent the next crisis.”
Learn more about the CAO’s report on creating a citywide unarmed model of crisis response and other efforts to bring unarmed response programs to the region at the next Report Forward Live! Join a Zoom conversation with LAFI Deputy Director Godfrey Plata, members of LA Forward’s unarmed crisis working group, and me, journalist Alissa Walker, on Monday, November 6, from 7 to 8 p.m. RSVP here
PROGRESS REPORT
Even though the Los Angeles Police Protective League says officers should stop responding to most nonviolent calls, there’s one area where LAPD has not volunteered to step aside: traffic enforcement. Nearly three years after a council motion, and thanks to decades of work from advocates, LADOT is set to receive a final report of recommendations for “alternative models and methods that do not rely on armed law enforcement to achieve transportation policy objectives.” The current approach is clearly not making streets safer: traffic deaths, which were already on the rise, skyrocketed in LA during the last three years as speeding and other reckless driving behaviors worsened during the pandemic. Yet, as the report notes, even though speeding is the top traffic-safety concern, since 2019, only 16 percent of stops are for speeding, and fewer speeding-related tickets have been issued overall. Traffic stops are also overwhelmingly concentrated in three areas — Hollywood, Downtown, and South LA — and despite a major change to the city’s pretextual stop policy in 2022, Black drivers continue to be pulled over and subjected to additional actions, like a vehicle search, at higher rates than any other racial group.
As the report notes, the number of LAPD stops for speeding don’t correlate with the areas that experience high collision rates.
The proposal envisions a new type of civil servant, similar to the city’s unarmed parking enforcement roles, who could cite drivers for infractions while focusing on the city’s high-injury network, the handful of LA streets where a vast majority of fatal crashes occur. (The same employees could also respond to crashes, which LAPD no longer does unless there’s a criminal element or damage to city property.) Although the report acknowledges the potential benefits of automated enforcement — a new state pilot, which officials have deemed especially important for school zones, is coming to LA — there are concerns that cameras will introduce new surveillance and privacy issues. Which is why the most important policy recommendation has little to do with enforcement: adequately funding “self-enforcing infrastructure” — efforts to reclaim the city’s wide streets and dangerous intersections for safer walking and biking, and make it more difficult, if not impossible, for drivers to speed.
LOCAL REPORT
Campaign donations from majority white ZIP codes were 2.28 times greater than from ZIP codes with a majority people of color in LA’s 2022 elections, according to Los Angeles for Democracy Vouchers. A comprehensive new report offers a revealing 20-year survey of where most of the city’s political contributions come from (whiter, wealthier communities) and a slew of proposals that will ensure fairer access to financing campaigns and increase participation in local elections.
Of the estimated 500,000 businesses that operate in the city of LA, 98 percent are categorized as small businesses, many of which are seeing pandemic-era support end. A 90-day progress report on Karen Bass’s Executive Directive 4 contains a list of actions to help those small businesses, including expanded counter services, a streamlined interdepartmental permitting portal, and the establishment of a Small Business Cabinet.
LA set a goal for 35 percent of all trips to be taken by walking, biking, or transit by 2025. In 2022 that number dropped to 16.2 percent. It’s not the only sustainability metric in the city’s Green New Deal that’s lagging, says the City Controller’s office, which is calling for a total reboot of the vague and largely unevaluated climate goals set by the city in 2019: “It’s time to embrace a new vision for Los Angeles, committing to renewable energy, more housing, fewer cars; and emphasizing equity.”
STATE REPORT
No More Freeways: NextGen Policy’s “California at a Crossroads” report highlights exactly how much the state is falling short at reducing driving, despite a goal to reduce vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) by 25 percent by 2030. Instead, the state is expanding freeways, which the report calls “last century’s pave-the-earth approach” to transportation planning. "People aren't used to thinking of freeways as fossil fuel infrastructure, but they are,” says NextGen Policy’s senior policy advisor David Weiskopf.
Really, No More Freeways: An 18-month investigation by NRDC finds that California only allocates 18.6 percent of its state dollars to low- or zero-emission modes like walking, biking, and transit. While some state programs are dedicated to getting people out of cars, they quickly run out of requested funding, while over 80 percent of California’s transportation budget still goes to — you guessed it! — maintaining and expanding roads and freeways.
A Green New Deal for Renters: Electrification upgrades and energy retrofits for residential buildings are critical, but making those improvements can sometimes place more economic burden upon renters — and even be exploited by landlords as a rationale for eviction. A new report by Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), shows how closing loopholes and integrating tenant protections into decarbonization efforts can ensure a just transition for renters.
FIELD REPORT
Raise the wages, lower the rent! Photo courtesy of ACCE
A rainy Saturday couldn’t stop the labor and housing movements from showing solidarity in a giant march throughout downtown LA. Among their demands: a housing minimum wage, enforcement of the city’s Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance (TAHO), and the development of more permanently affordable housing.
LA Forward Institute continues to host candidate forums for the even-numbered LA City Council seats up for grabs in the 2024 election. At forums for Council District 4 and Council District 14 last month, candidates answered questions from community members about unarmed mental health crisis response, charter reform, social housing, and mobility justice. Full videos of these forums — as well as forums for Council Districts 2 and 10 — can be watched at https://www.laforward.institute/forums
Coming up next…
LAFI’s Housing Justice Reading Group is reading Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta by Dan Immergluck, exploring how runaway growth intended to revitalize the city’s urban core created a new breed of racial inequality. Read the book and join us for an in-person reading group meeting in the Silver Lake/Echo Park area on Sunday, October 29 at 7:00 p.m. We’ll explore the book’s relevance to Los Angeles, and discuss the lessons for policymakers, activists, and residents. RSVP here
Join the next Report Forward Live! and hear more about efforts to bring unarmed crisis response programs to the region. Monday, November 6 from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. on Zoom. RSVP here
REPORT IN
Hi, Alissa Walker here — I’ll be compiling Report Forward every month. Please send reports, studies, white papers, and big policy wins to me at reports@laf.institute — and forward this to someone working to make LA a better place.
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