Durham begins answering some 911 calls with unarmed responders, clinicians in new program
In its first week, Durham’s new crisis-response program is already changing how the city and county respond to 911 emergency calls.
The new initiative, called Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams or HEART, has put mental health professionals in the 911 center and the field to help people experiencing non-violent behavioral and mental health crises.
HEART, run by the city’s new Community Safety Department, consists of four pilot programs, including three now underway.
The current calls eligible for phase 1 include nonviolent mental health crisis, suicide threat, trespass, welfare check, intoxicated person, panhandling, indecency and verbal disturbance, according to the department.
Calls for future consideration include disturbances, drug use, sex work and noise complaints.
▪ Community Response Team
On Wednesday, HEART began dispatching three-person civilian teams, instead of armed police officers, on certain non-violent 911 calls, the city said in a news release.
Each team has a mental health clinician, a peer support specialist and an emergency medical technician trained to work with people in crises and ensure a “caring handoff” to service providers, the city said.
The responders will be trained in de-escalation and situational awareness.
In its first two days the response team has already responded to trespass and welfare checks and successfully cleared the calls without involving law enforcement, Community Safety Director Ryan Smith told The News & Observer.
This pilot will primarily serve an area seen in an online map composed of downtown, the areas south and east of downtown, and large parts of northeast Durham. The service area also includes parts of Duke University’s East Campus.
This service area, according to the city, was based on the high volume of “eligible” emergency calls there.
“Our hope,” Smith said in a news release earlier in the week, “is that this will reduce the number of repeat calls to 911 for the same unmet needs, which will increase capacity for our law enforcement, EMS, and 911 call takers to be able to respond to higher priority calls for service.”
The Community Safety Department selected what types of 911 call qualify after consulting other first responders and reviewing local data on the calls. The city cited “evidence from other cities with a track record of safely dispatching unarmed responders,” like Denver, San Francisco and Eugene, Oregon.
Cities traditionally undercount these type of calls, said Smith. One reason is that “law enforcement officers may not have the training to identify some calls where a behavioral health need was involved.”
The HEART pilot programs will not respond to calls involving weapons or violence. The teams’ locations in the field will be monitored by emergency dispatch services, and they will be able to radio for backup from law enforcement, if needed.
“Through these pilots, over time, we should get a better and more accurate sense of the volume of calls involving these kind of needs, but it will take time,” Smith said.
▪ Crisis Call Diversion
The city says Durham will be the first in the state to launch this pilot, which will embed mental health clinicians within the Durham Emergency Communications Center to connect 911 callers to mental health professionals in emergencies citywide.
“We are also the first city in NC to dispatch through 9-1-1 unarmed mental health responders as first responders to calls that previously were responded to by law enforcement,” Smith said in an email to The N&O. “Other cities employ clinicians but these cities use a co-response model that pairs clinicians with law enforcement when operating in a first response capacity.”
In its first week, a HEART clinician spoke to people who called 911 about loved ones who contemplated harm to themselves or who were experiencing a mental health crisis, according to Smith.
“Evidence from other communities that have launched similar programs gives me confidence that alternative responders can reduce some of the current, heavy call load on our police officers, meaning we can free up those officers to focus on violent crime — the area where we need them the most,” City Manager Wanda Page said in the news release.
▪ Care navigation
In this week’s third pilot, people who meet with HEART responders will receive a follow-up meeting within 48 hours in person or by phone to connect them with mental and behavioral health care.
The pilots will initially operate from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and expand into evenings and weekends later this summer.
“While we are the first in our state to place mental health professionals inside our 911 Center and to dispatch unarmed response teams to mental health calls, we are not the first in the country,” Smith said in the release. “Other cities are already showing the promise of these new approaches to public safety, and this gives us confidence that these pilots can help us do an even better job of caring for our neighbors in crisis in ways that are safe for all involved.”
A fourth pilot program slated to launch later this summer, titled Co-Response, will dispatch mental health professionals alongside police officers in situations of greater safety risk.
Similar programs in the Triangle include Chapel Hill’s Crisis Unit, a 24-hour co-response team that supports town police officers on crisis calls, as well as the Raleigh’s ACORNS (Addressing Crises through Outreach, Referrals, Networking, and Service) team, which operates in the same way.
Durham allotted $4 million to create The Community Safety Department with 15 full-time positions. Its role is to “enhance public safety through community-centered approaches to prevention and intervention as alternatives to policing and the criminal legal system,” according to the city budget.
More funding needed, activists say
Durham Beyond Policing, a police accountability activist group, praised the launch of HEART and credited years of activism and advocacy work to build support for a publicly funded programs like these.
In a statement posted to its Instagram page, however, the group said HEART should have been better funded by the city.
“Electeds will say it’s just the pilot year,” the post stated. “But limited staffing reduces the geographic scope that unarmed community response pilots could have capacity to address, and puts unfair strain on these important first responders during a pandemic, mental health crisis, and economic downturn where Durham residents are crying out for skilled care and the resources we need to live.”
Manju Rajendran, an organizer with Durham Beyond Policing and member of the Community Safety and Wellness Task Force, told The N&O they would have preferred to see funding for about twice as many staff during the initial pilot rollout.
The Community Safety Department offered a presentation to the City Council in January that showed 15% of 911 calls that Durham police respond to qualify for response by a HEART Community Response Team.
Rajendran said it amounts to about 19,023 calls per year, or 1,585 calls per month, with law enforcement units spending an average of 11,655 hours per year during the encounters.
More funding for the pilots with a larger reach in the city “would have been well justified by the widespread enthusiasm [for the programs] across Durham City and County residents,” the group said.
“Durham-based Black communities, Latino communities, and other communities of color and migrant communities have seen firsthand the dangers of overpolicing and mass incarceration,” said Rajendran. “It’s our justice organizing that led to the creation of the Community Safety and Wellness Task Force and the new Community Safety Department in the City of Durham.
Durham residents can stay informed about the HEART pilot programs through the monthly reports that will be placed on the department’s website. The city is scheduled to publish a first report reviewing the program’s early results in August.
The city has made information on HEART and frequently asked questions available on the city website.
