Why send a cop if one isn’t really needed? Modesto police embark on new approach
Modesto police are going to try something new.
Soon, four employees without guns or badges will help police handle calls involving homeless people. And a separate program further out will feature other non-officer specialists responding to mental health crises.
If this sounds familiar, it might be either because I wrote about this in concept a couple of weeks ago, or because people providing input at the Modesto City Council’s May 22 listening session on police reform urged a look at the same idea.
My May 23 column focused on CAHOOTS, a contract service that diverts from police in Eugene, Oregon all such non-emergency calls. CAHOOTS saves lives and taxpayer money and ought to be tried here, the column concluded.
A few day later, I sat down with interim Police Chief Brandon Gillespie, who said he’s on it.
There are differences, as might be expected. Mainly, Modesto’s approach will not be as comprehensive as Eugene’s, for financial reasons. The CAHOOTS contract costs Eugene, nearby Springfield and Lane County $2.1 million a year, although it saves them an estimated $8.5 million.
Forced to prioritize to get something off the ground, Modesto police decided to focus first on homelessness.
In October, when Galen Carroll was still chief and Gillespie was his assistant, then-City Council members agreed to spend $800,000 from federal COVID-19 stimulus money to kick-start a team of outreach workers. They now are hired, Gillespie said, and in a few weeks — wearing baby-blue polos, not police uniforms — will help respond to reports of panhandling, unlawful camping, littering, intoxication, trespassing, blocking sidewalks and so on. That will free up cops to do real police work, he said.
“We all want to use the right tool for the job,” Gillespie said, “and not every call needs law enforcement action.”
Meanwhile, the City Council on May 25 authorized spending an identical sum — $800,000 — on a separate effort to handle mental health calls with similar non-sworn employees instead of real officers. Gillespie’s team is only beginning to formulate what that program will look like, he said, but he’s looking to partner with Stanislaus County’s mental health services.
Also to be worked out is whether dispatchers someday will send non-officers from either team directly to calls without involving police at all, like CAHOOTS does in Oregon. Until then, these specialists will accompany officers.
Why send a Modesto cop if one isn’t needed?
Looking at recent data, Gillespie sees his officers responding to about 19,000 calls of mental health, addiction and homelessness each year, an estimate that’s likely on the low side. Fewer than 7,000 of those are safety emergencies requiring a sworn officer, said Gillespie , who is in the running for the chief’s permanent job.
That means these specialists might take 12,000 calls a year off of officers’ crowded plates, or about 7% of all calls. That’s not insignificant.
“Officers don’t sign up to deal with the homeless,” Gillespie said. By the way, in another recent interview, Stanislaus Sheriff Jeff Dirkse told me the same thing about his deputies.
It makes sense.
Hospitals don’t assign brain surgeons to set broken ankles; they could figure it out, but it’s not what they were trained to do.
And clinicians with expertise in dealing with mentally ill people are infinitely less likely to end up killing them, as officers sometimes do.
For context, remember that all of this sits against a backdrop of emerging Modesto police reform. The recent listening session will lead to a community committee that will come up with suggestions for improving our police culture.
Although we don’t yet know what those recommendations will be, speakers throughout the listening session said the same things repeatedly advocated on this Modesto Bee opinion page: Establish a civilian review board, hire an independent police auditor and come up with something like CAHOOTS.
Let’s stay on the right track.
This story was originally published June 8, 2021 at 9:30 AM.
