A Chicago pilot program that dispatches mental health doctors and emergency medical responders to some 911 calls has connected 385 people to care without a single use-of-force incident or arrest in its first year, a promising start to a program designed to potentially reduce dangerous interactions with the police
It’s also been a slow start: Crisis Assistance Response and Commitment (CARE) teams operate just six hours a day, five days a week, and in just four of Chicago’s 22 police precincts. Those districts have together registered nearly 3,400 calls for mental health issues since their respective pilot programs began through September 25 of this year, the most recent date for which data is available from CARE. Not all mental health issue calls are eligible for a CARE response, and program teams are sometimes involved in situations with a mental health component that are not labeled as such in the 911 system, but are based on the main set of calls that CARE responds to. Teams can be sent, they have captured about 11% of the specifically labeled need of Chicagoans in the pilot districts.
.
