Something important has been happening in American policing over the past few years. A consensus is emerging across the country that the police should not be the only professionals responsible for public safety.
Since the police killing of George Floyd in May of 2020 in Minneapolis, an injustice that led to long overdue conversations about policing in America, it has become clear that police officers cannot be expected to resolve every social issue or solve every dispute or problem, whether it’s homelessness, a public health crisis, finding a lost pet or responding to a minor traffic accident.
We have seen in our work that local police leaders have become increasingly vocal about their rank-and-file being asked to do too much. They argue that sending the police to nearly every 911 call is unnecessary, ineffective, wasteful and dangerous. Police resources are strained and 911 callers don’t get the help they need. And all too often, someone gets arrested when it was avoidable or injured or killed when unnecessary force was used.
The unarmed Mr. Floyd was killed by a police officer responding to a report that he may have used a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes in a convenience store. In the ensuing confrontation with the police, an officer pressed his knee against Mr. Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, killing him. His widely reported death put a spotlight on data showing that many police killings happened in response to very minor offenses and that many of the victims had behavioral issues that the police acknowledge they lack the expertise to handle.
Over the past five years, a movement of local alternative response programs that don’t involve the police has flourished and redefined what the 911 system and municipal emergency response can do. The use of trained alternative responders for situations that don’t require the police means safer communities for everyone. The police would focus on serious crimes, and more appropriate responders would deal with mental health crises, fender-benders and quality-of-life issues like noise complaints.
By our count, there are now more than 130 alternative response programs operating across the country. Many of these programs respond to complex situations that require specially trained professionals. They are the sorts of interactions that have proved to escalate risk when an armed officer arrives on the scene. More research is needed, but early published studies show the possibilities. Alternative response teams have the potential to reduce crime, ease the burden on the police and better meet the needs of 911 callers.
In Albuquerque, N.M.; Olympia, Wash.; and Rochester, N.Y., trained teams of social service workers or others respond to a range of problems including domestic violence, homelessness, substance abuse and disputes between family members or neighbors.
Denver has a team of non-police responders trained to investigate property crimes. In New Orleans, the city has hired a company whose agents, all of them retired or reserve police officers, responded to about 10,000 traffic incidents instead of the police in 2024. Mental health counselors in Durham, N.C., have been embedded in the city’s 911 call center to assist in diverting behavioral and mental health calls away from the police to unarmed responders trained to address those crises.
These all involve situations that don’t require an enforcement response. Understaffed police departments are able to focus instead on violent crime and on responding to public safety situations that do require the police.
In 2023, the City of Minneapolis, where Mr. Floyd was killed, invited our organization, the Policing Project, to take stock of its emergency response services as part of a broader effort to reimagine community safety.
We found that the city was already diverting 9 percent of the calls to the police to alternative responders, including for mental health emergencies, traffic issues and animal control. At the same time, we identified other opportunities to divert even more calls away from the police — by changing policy to expand the types of 911 calls that could be sensibly assigned to non-police responders and by increasing the use of technology for the online reporting of minor property crimes.
In response, the city set a goal last year of redirecting 20 percent of 911 calls to responders other than the police over the next 10 years. That commitment — to our knowledge, the first of its kind for a major city — is ambitious, laudable and absolutely achievable.
Which leads to this question: What if over the next five years, even more communities follow the Minneapolis lead?
There are roughly 240 million 911 calls each year in the United States. If just 5 percent of those calls were diverted to alternative response programs — a goal our project is promoting and working with communities to achieve — that would translate to 12 million calls.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Each community faces its own safety concerns, and each deserves carefully tailored programs to meet its challenges, whether it is drugs, gun violence, homelessness, mental health or other problems.
As we have seen, unarmed traffic teams, often limited to issuing parking tickets or directing traffic, could also respond to vehicle collisions that do not involve injuries or criminal conduct. Teams dealing with behavioral health crises could be trained to make wellness checks and respond to reports of substance use. Mediators could address disputes between neighbors. Cities could require verification from alarm companies before the police are deployed for burglary calls, the overwhelming majority of which turn out to be false.
As more 911 calls go to alternative responders rather than the police, more situations will be met with the care and expertise they demand. It would be an important advance in redefining the role of law enforcement in the United States. And it would mean safer communities for everyone.
Barry Friedman is a law professor and the faculty director of the Policing Project at the N.Y.U. School of Law. Max Markham is the project’s executive director and Scarlet Neath is a senior adviser.
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