Last week, Denver City Council reached a unanimous agreement to provide funds and expand Support Team Assisted Response (STAR), a program that sends mental health professionals and paramedics to 911 calls, an initiative that emerged amid calls for police reform during the George Floyd Protests.
Initially, the program started 20 months ago with a two-person group in a white van, responding to 911 dispatch calls only within the Denver downtown area. Currently, there are three vans, but with $1.4 million in funding approved by Denver City Council, it will allow them to expand to at least 6 vans and a dozen workers.
During the George Floyd protests, many community organizers like Vinnie Cervantez, one of the co-founders of STAR, were responding to the need for more community-driven ways to respond to emergency calls outside of the Denver Police Department.
Since the program’s launch, they have responded to a total of 2,700 emergency calls, but with the expansion of the program, superiors are optimistic about being able to respond to more than 10,000 calls within the year. STAR program directors are confident that the expansion will not only allow them to respond to more calls, but they will get a broader scope of calls to respond to, alleviating some pressure off of the Denver Police Department.
In 2020, the program started off with $208,141 in grant money which it used to launch a 6- month pilot program to see if the program would be effective in the long-term and today $3.9 million has been allotted from the city in the 2022 budget.
According to data collected from the STAR, about 68% of the calls were responding to individuals in a state of homelessness and 61% were mental health situations, particularly schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, with nearly a third of those having co-occurring disorders.
One of the main reasons why the outreach of the STAR program has proven to be effective is the individualized response they are able to provide. Most of their workers apply public health and “not a one size fits all response” says Carleigh Sailon, a social worker within the Mental Health Center of Denver who is also a STAR team member.
As the program is able to respond to a higher volume and variety of 911 dispatch calls, it has the possibility of minimizing the workload of the police by dealing with non-criminal crises, but can also prevent many arrests from taking place by taking on a non-judgemental community-based approach.
Politicians like congresswoman Cori Bush, non-profit community organizations, and cities in Colorado and across the country are taking notice of the success of this program and looking to replicate it. The Los Angeles and San Antonio police departments have previously partnered with mental health professionals to assist the police in responding to mental health related crises and Chicago is looking to adopt a similar model this year.
Cervantez modeled the program after the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On the Streets (CAHOOTS) program in Eugene, Ore., which launched in 1989. Cervantes and others from the Denver community traveled to Eugene to see how it operated in 2019 and from there worked with several other small and mid-sized Colorado cities to adopt a similar program.
Aurora, where the murder of Elijah McCain took center stage during the George Floyd Protests, is expected to adopt a co-responder system in March. McCain, who had a blood circulation disorder and chronic asthma, was more vulnerable to the chokehold and dose of ketamine the paramedics gave him. Elijah may have still been alive today if a program like STAR was in place.
Cervantes reiterated the next step as the program expands is to gather more demographic data of which communities are in need of mental health outreach and resources, saying, “how do we really understand the impact of the most marginalized communities if we don’t have the data there?”
