There’s a new approach to police response to mental health emergencies. Taking the police out of it

CNN — It’s a sunny afternoon in San Francisco, and an agitated woman is screaming in the middle of the street, urgently pleading for help rescuing her daughter and granddaughter from a locked building on the corner of a busy intersection. “We’ve wanted to stand up a unit like this for some time, but with the events during the summer of 2020 things really reached a tipping point and city leadership decided it was time to get this done.” Since the death of George Floyd, one of the fundamental rallying cries — to defund the police — centers on reallocating money away from law enforcement and into social programs promoting mental health treatment and crisis prevention. “It should not be a death sentence.” ‘There is a big danger in calling 911’ Stacy Torres, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, San Francisco, said it’s imperative for communities around the country to go further in adopting effective non-police, medically informed responses to mental health emergencies. “Right now they’re burdened with a multiplicity of tasks in which they are not trained, and that’s very difficult.” Officers who respond to mental health crises should be trained to try and communicate with the person in crisis or nearby community and family members, says Seth Stoughton, a former law enforcement officer and associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina. “At no point did any officer use a knee, or other body parts to gain leverage or apply pressure to Angelo’s head, neck, or throat, which is outside of our police and training,” Brooks said, adding, “at one point during the handcuffing, an officer did briefly — for a few seconds — have a knee across the back of Angelo’s shoulder blade.” Brooks also said autopsy results fully examined Quinto’s neck and did not find evidence of strangulation or crushed airways.