Zachary Nell signed up to respond to calls involving people in mental crisis, the kind of call that occurs dozens of times a day in Portland. The personable, 33-year-old Air Force veteran feels trained and ready.
But in the eyes of some, including some civic leaders, he and scores like him suffer from a serious flaw: They’re cops.
In this view, the police too often escalate rather than calm a situation – sometimes with dire, even fatal, results. These reformers are looking for an alternative to routinely sending out someone with a badge and a gun.
Criticism of how the Portland Police Bureau deals with people suffering from mental health problems isn’t new. In 2012, the U.S. Justice Department filed suit in Portland federal court, contending, “Too frequently, persons who have or are perceived to have mental illness and are in crisis are subjected to unnecessary or excessive force by police officers.” The city denied the allegations but agreed to make reforms under federal oversight. That process is ongoing.
Among the reforms, the Police Bureau created an Enhanced Crisis Intervention Team. Officers who voluntarily sign up to work on the ECIT get additional training in dealing with people experiencing mental health issues.
Even before the Justice Department settlement, all PPB officers received 40 hours of mental health training. ECIT officers receive an additional 40 hours. They hear from mental health professionals and meet with individuals suffering from mental illness, as well as family members of those people. The officers go through role-playing exercises to experience what different types of crisis situations might involve.
Nell said the frequent simulations were particularly helpful. “Repetition is the key,” he said during a ride-along with Street Roots. Thanks in part to the added training, he added, “I feel super comfortable talking to people.”
During his 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift, Nell, who has been with the bureau since 2011, encountered several people who had threatened to kill themselves and one man threatening to harm others. He also nabbed a bicycle thief, who had no apparent mental health issues because ECIT-certified officers continue with their normal patrol work while on duty. When a 911 call comes in involving someone with what appears to be a mental health issue, a dispatcher calls for an ECIT officer, if one is available. Nell said volunteering for ECIT work, which brings no extra pay, made sense given what he sees on the street.
“We go to so many calls with people in mental health crisis,” he said.
Currently, 129 of Portland’s 365 patrol officers, or 35%, are ECIT trained.
“Officers realize how valuable the skill is,” Deputy Chief Jami Resch said in a recent interview.
The department puts out a newsletter highlighting individual ECIT successes, including where potential suicides were talked down off bridges.
Not all incidents involving ECIT officers end well. In July, officers shot and killed a man who was reportedly carrying a hatchet and trying to break into a vehicle. ECIT officers were among those who responded. On Oct. 14, a Multnomah County grand jury found no police wrong-doing in the shooting of Lane Martin, a 31-year-old white man.
But, such events make some suspicious that the ECIT program hasn’t had much impact.
“Generally speaking, we’re hearing more stories about de-escalation that could have ended up worse, but at the same time, we’re seeing an increase in deadly force against people with mental health issues,” said Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch, a citizens group. Handelman pointed to a 2019 city-contracted report titled “Portland Police Bureau Officer Involved Shootings.” A table in that report showed that from 2004 through 2012, about 55% of the 33 individuals shot by police had been identified as having a mental health issue. From 2013 through 2017, nearly 65% of the 17 shot had such a designation.
The police spokesperson said he couldn’t comment specifically on Handelman’s statements. But he added that the Police Bureau has “put in place much more robust tracking systems that are capturing calls related to mental health better than before.”
The Police Bureau’s mental health reform efforts have received some praise. A 2016 New York Times article noted, “Portland’s approach has served as a model for other law enforcement agencies around the country.”
In a May Compliance and Outcome Assessment Report, the firm monitoring the city’s compliance with the Justice Department settlement found that when an ECIT officer was on scene, a person in mental crisis was more likely to be transported to a hospital. The person was also more likely to go voluntarily.
Frequently, a police officer takes a person in mental health crises to an emergency room, but “once they get that person stabilized they release them,” said Daryl Turner, president of the Portland Police Association, the union representing local officers. Too often, that person is then left far from their belongings and without support services. Such a situation “is not advantageous to a successful offramp to help that person,” Turner added.
The monitor has been pushing for expanded use of ECIT officers. Its May report said that in a six-month period last year, ECIT officers had been dispatched to 1,877 calls, or about 14% of all calls that involved “a mental health component.” In the first six months of 2019, that figure was 19%, according to the Police Bureau.
But the police, given their history of dealing with people in mental distress, often shouldn’t be the ones answering the calls for help, City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said in a recent interview. “I get appalled when we talk about how much progress has been made. You don’t put the people who created the crisis in charge of solving the crisis,” she said.
Hardesty is overseeing a municipal effort looking to have specialists other than police respond to many of the calls now being handled by police. City Council recently allocated $500,000 for that effort.
Street Roots is among the supporters of a greater civilian role. It has proposed an initiative called Portland Street Response, partly modeled on a program in Eugene known by the acronym CAHOOTS.
Portland Street Response envisions having teams consisting of a medic and a trained peer-support specialist available 24 hours a day to focus on calls involving homelessness and behavioral-health issues. The peer-support specialists would have personal experience with mental health, homelessness or addiction issues and know how to connect people with needed services. These teams would be dispatched through the 911 system or non-emergency help lines.
“Not every call requires a badge and a gun,” says a Portland Street Response flier. “It’s time for a better response.”
There are currently some civilian-response teams available in Portland and the rest of Multnomah County as part of a program known as Project Respond. It’s operated by Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare, a local nonprofit, under a contract with the county. From one to six teams, typically with two people each, are available on a round-the-clock basis to respond. Last year, the teams went to about 2,400 calls.
Advocates of a broader civilian response say Project Respond, while laudable, simply isn’t enough to meet the need and too often relies on police help. On about 70% of the calls where Project Respond teams have an opportunity to ask for police assistance, they do.
CAHOOTS, the Eugene civilian-response program, says a police officer accompanies its two-person teams on fewer than 30% of their calls. CAHOOTS, which handled more than 23,000 calls last year, handles more than just calls involving mental health issues.
In an interview with Street Roots earlier this year, Barbara Snow, Cascadia’s clinical director of crisis services, said many of Project Respond calls involve “incredibly complex, dynamic situations.”
Unlike police officers, Project Respond team members can’t put their hands on someone if he or she begins to hurt themselves or gets violent. They also can’t transport anyone to an emergency room or other facility. Sometimes, Snow said, the presence of a police officer actually calms a situation. The aim of every call is “keeping ourselves safe, our clients safe.”
In an effort to keep its employees safe, American Medical Response, the ambulance provider for Multnomah County, has begun requiring its paramedics and emergency medical technicians to take a self-defense course, as reported in The Oregonian.
“On a regular basis we encounter people that become violent or unpredictable,” one paramedic told the paper. “It’s becoming more and more of a concern on a daily basis that we get to go home unscathed.”
Deputy Police Chief Resch said she could envision civilians replacing police on certain types of calls where there’s no indication someone is violent or committing a crime. Like others, she noted that the demands on patrol officers have gone up substantially as the size of the force has remained relatively static despite a large rise in Portland’s population and the number of 911 calls.
The 911 system receives thousands of complaints a year about a homeless person being on or near someone’s property, according to a recent Willamette Week investigation. Such “unwanted person” calls have risen sharply in recent years, the paper reported. Reform advocates say that these are the types of calls that could often be better handled by civilian responders.
However, one worry is that even a seemingly benign call “can turn violent and that can happen in a second,” Resch said. Deciding what calls need an officer and what calls don’t can be “a delicate balance.”
Physical force is rarely used, according to police statistics. In the more than 93,500 calls in the second quarter of this year, force – ranging from grabbing someone to firing a weapon – was used in a little over 0.2% of the encounters. Of 6,200 people taken into custody, about 3.5% experienced force.
As Nell drove around town with a Street Roots reporter on a recent evening, he said he’d be happy to have the load of calls on him and fellow officers lessened. At the same time, he, too, expressed worry about not being able to predict what calls might turn ugly.
Some calls answered by Nell clearly, at least in retrospect, wouldn’t have needed a police officer. One involved an elderly woman living in a board-and-care facility who had called a county help line saying she was looking to hurt herself and soon. After a few minutes of conversation with Nell, she asked to be taken by ambulance to an emergency room. A few hours later, a similar scene played out involving a young woman who had been running in traffic downtown near the Willamette River.
Another call carried a greater possibility of hazard. A man had called 911 saying he was looking to harm himself with a knife and warning police not to try to enter his home. In such situations, the police officers try to establish communication with the person by phone, Nell said as he drove across town toward the man’s house. By the time he arrived, the man was outside talking with other officers. An officer had reached the man by phone and persuaded him to come outside. A search of the home found no weapons. Nell returned to his car and drove off as other officers continued to talk with the man. An ambulance was waiting nearby, if needed.
On another call, no action was the chosen action. A patient of a downtown county health clinic had contacted the facility threatening to shoot staffers. Driving to the apartment building where the man was living, Nell consulted his vehicle’s computer. The man was a felon on probation for unlawful use of a weapon. The man reportedly had mental health issues and had once chased someone with a machete.
“Not a very stable guy,” Nell remarked.
He reached the apartment building about the same time as another officer, where they met an official from the county health clinic. The trio were soon joined by two women from Project Respond. They tried calling the man in his apartment, but it went to voicemail.
After a short discussion, the five agreed the best course was to leave the matter alone for the time being. The clinic official said the man was normally very quiet and respectful. He’d apparently largely been staying in his apartment for the past few days. Plus, the clinic was closed for the evening and the staff had gone home. All feared that if the officers went up to the apartment and confronted the man, it could provoke an unnecessary crisis. In response to questions several days after the event, a spokesperson for the county said the man hadn’t followed through on his health-clinic threat.
Sometimes, it’s better if you “don’t try to solve a problem right away,” Nell said. By trying to quickly fix it in ways police traditionally have, “you can shut someone down” and create a bigger problem, he said.