An Alternative Approach

CAHOOTS is a 32-year-old Eugene-based mobile crisis response team that’s received national attention as a possible police alternative. A lack of funding and a complicated relationship with police, however, leave the program’s potential for expansion up in the air.

written by ERIN MCMAHON & GRIFFIN REILLY

captured by JOZIE DONAGHEY

illustrations by MAKENA HERVEY

“If you are willing to step away from the weapon you’re holding, the police don’t have to be involved,” Ebony Morgan says. “Then we can do this together.”

Morgan is a registered nurse and program coordinator for Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS). The program is made up of rapid-response mobile teams that intervene when residents of Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, require assistance during a behavioral health crisis. On this night, cellphone in hand, she stands among a group of officers from the Eugene Police Department (EPD) outside a house in which a man, alone and armed with a knife, is reportedly on the verge of suicide.

Morgan calmly continues the conversation over the phone, assuring him that everything will be okay. After a few minutes, the man agrees to put down the knife. As he exits the home, he is unarmed and, as Morgan will recall later, more relaxed than when officers had first arrived on the scene. Once cleared by EPD to leave, Morgan helps to load the man into the CAHOOTS van, where the two continue their conversation.

It’s moments like these, Morgan says, in which the CA- HOOTS’ mission manifests itself. At its core, the organization articulates that armed police are often not the right solution to treat someone in the midst of a complicated personal crisis that requires emergency response. CAHOOTS workers don black vests and carry police radios. And while they offer a much more informal appearance than police, their skillset is anything but. Workers are required to train for 500 hours in de-escalation and social work practices — not counting the additional hours some members train to become emergency medical responders.

Morgan, 31, is no stranger to the type of complex cases she and her CAHOOTS colleagues face. When she was just five years old, her father died during a police encounter. Later, she says she struggled to understand the nature of her grand- mother’s bipolar disorder. The services that existed during the 1990s, she says, weren’t viable for the variety of emergency situations that happen each day in cities like Eugene and Spring- field. But when she joined CAHOOTS in 2020, she found a program right for the times — and right for her. “This idea that there’s someone who will respond to a mental health crisis and isn’t law enforcement was really fascinating,” says Morgan.

CAHOOTS began 32 years ago as an extension of service under the Eugene-based White Bird Clinic, a public health resource that assists the local unhoused population. Today, CAHOOTS receives its primary funding through EPD. Since its launch, the CAHOOTS program has evolved from a small group of crisis workers to a one-of-a-kind mobile emergency response team that provides free mental health care, specializes in de-escalation and mitigates confrontations that can turn violent or deadly. On a typical call, CAHOOTS provides verbal tactics that help stabilize people experiencing behavioral health episodes. Rather than being a presence of armed authority, CAHOOTS provides a source of empathy.

Morgan describes the program as the model for a “third pillar of public safety” — a service that complements police and fire departments.

Last summer, the program gained attention amid nation- wide Black Lives Matter protests that sparked conversations on what potential police alternatives could look like. And, in August of 2020, Ron Wyden, Oregon’s senior U.S. senator, announced a bill that would explore how the CAHOOTS model could be replicated elsewhere across Oregon.

But attention and recognition aside, CAHOOTS workers report that inadequate funding and a need for greater independence from the police department prevent them from consistently addressing the situations that require their assistance the most. Due to repeated miscommunications, the Eugene police-fire-ambulance communications center often sends CAHOOTS to deal with issues of homelessness, which isn’t something CAHOOTS workers are properly equipped for. Even though CAHOOTS’ resources extend to people experiencing a housing crisis, workers are unable to provide shelter for unhoused people.

Chelsea Swift, CAHOOTS agency outreach manager, says she often breaks down in tears when she gets home after a shift. “My job is hard not because of who we work with, but because so often we have nothing to give,” says Swift, who has also been trained as a medic and crisis worker.

FACING THE NUMBERS

Shortly after George Floyd’s murder last May, protestors took to the streets of Eugene. During nightly marches that went on for weeks, protesters called out chants like “defund, disarm and dismantle the police.” They also led teach-ins at which speakers explained the history and formation of the American policing system, which originally began as a slave patrol. The conversations opened the door to imagining what police alternatives could look like.

Many of these speakers urged onlookers to look no further than their own city. CAHOOTS’ three-decade record reveals a number of positive marks — from lives saved to money saved.

In 2017 alone, the White Bird Clinic reports that CAHOOTS saved the City of Eugene an estimated $12 million through call diversion. “Using the number of calls that would otherwise be handled by police, including suicide risk, homicide risk, self-harm, intoxication, welfare, rage and transport, CAHOOTS has saved the EPD an average of $8.5 million each year from 2014-2017,” the City of Eugene’s 2017 report reads.

According to a 2016 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 20-50% of fatalities in police response involved someone suffering from mental illness. In CA- HOOTS’ 32-year history, however, not a single fatality or serious injury has come as a result of its response. Further- more, less than 1% of CAHOOTS’ responses required a call for police backup.

CAHOOTS, says Morgan, is designed to “swoop in to take a [portion] of EPD’s calls so that police can focus on what they are designed to do.”

CAHOOTS is formally contracted through EPD, which al- locates a portion of its funds every year to the program and provides dispatching services for its van drivers. Members of the CAHOOTS team, about 40 in total, use information relayed by EPD dispatchers via radio in order to respond to local behavioral and mental health crises.

From July 2021 through June 2022, CAHOOTS received $1,083,137 — which amounts to just 1.6% of the $66.85 mil- lion the EPD received for the 2021 fiscal year. In turn, CA- HOOTS responds to approximately 5-8% of emergency call to the EPD. In 2019, that percentage amounted to 18,583 calls — about 51 per day — according to the EPD website.

Despite these numbers, CAHOOTS remains without its own permanent headquarters and is equipped with two vans: one 24/7 response van, with the second covering another seven hours each day.

Workers also willingly share that regardless of tenure, they’re each paid $18 per hour, a wage that Morgan says is insufficient.

“That wage is not adequate or sustainable,” says Morgan. “We don’t retain people at that wage.”

A WORKING RELATIONSHIP

In addition to wages and workload, CAHOOTS workers say that another significant barrier they deal with is the way they get called to an emergency. Oftentimes, 911 callers specifically request CAHOOTS. But Swift says that it’s not always clear to callers what response they’ll receive in times of crisis. CA- HOOTS also doesn’t have its own console for dispatch, which is a specific response center for its calls.

“Because we don’t self-dispatch, we actually don’t have control over [dispatch] because the decision has already been made,” says Swift.

Chris Skinner, EPD’s chief, says that the current dispatch system features an elaborate process with a “battery of questions” to evaluate how a call can be properly addressed. Sometimes, regardless of what force is requested, information provided by the caller may require a different response than the caller had intended. “Whether the calls were for CAHOOTS, all those calls have to be triaged for the right response,” he says.

Swift, on the other hand, thinks with some calls, back- ground noise could depict a chaotic and violent scene, and the dispatcher could feel the need to involve police when it may not have been necessary.

“I do think there is a lack of transparency sometimes, where a dispatcher knows the law enforcement is going to or could be sent instead of CAHOOTS and perhaps is not taking that moment to acknowledge that with the caller,” says Swift. Situations like these, says Swift, have fostered a sense of dis- trust between some residents and CAHOOTS.

Skinner says that while dispatch does all it can to find the right response to a situation, he can’t guarantee that callers are always informed of the service that’s headed their way. “I can’t say that it happens 100% of the time, but there typically is that interchange [between callers and dispatchers] about what the response will be,” he says.

Although CAHOOTS workers must be accompanied by po- lice in situations deemed violent or that include weapons, this assessment of what makes a situation “dangerous” presents a gray area for both organizations.

Ayisha Elliot is one Eugene resident known for speaking out about the issues that can arise when an EPD unit arrives on a call intended for CAHOOTS. On February 17, Elliott spoke at a meeting of the Ad-Hoc Committee on Police Policy. The committee meets every two weeks via Zoom to provide a platform for citizens and activists alike to share concerns regarding policing and legislation in Eugene. Elliott related an incident that took place early one morning in July 2015. She said she called the non-emergency phone number for CA- HOOTS reporting that her son, Quentin Richardson-Brown, was experiencing a psychotic break and was potentially violent. Rather than receive a response from the CAHOOTS workers she had asked for, Elliott and her son, a young, Black male with known mental disabilities, were met by two officers. Elliott says she wanted the officers to leave her property, but that they refused. Soon after, she says, the officers “escalated the situation” until one of the responding officers deployed his taser and punched Richardson-Brown in the face.

“I didn’t even know if my son would make it to the hospital,” said Elliott, describing the moment she watched her son being taken away in the police car. “Everything had gone so wrong. How could I have trusted that they would keep my son safe?”

In 2017, Elliott sued the City of Eugene, alleging excessive force, false arrest, illegal search and seizure, battery, negligence, and race discrimination. Though the police auditor’s review of the incident cited excessive force, a federal jury ruled in favor of EPD.

The ruling of the suit aside, Elliott would still like to see CAHOOTS be given more autonomy in regard to responding to calls. “CAHOOTS, being the entity that responds to mental health issues, I would think allowing them to decide whether or not police are necessary would be a good thing,” said Elliott during the February meeting.

Skinner, who’s served in his position since 2018, says he can’t speak directly to the Elliott incident, as it happened prior to his tenure. He says that EPD’s mission, however, is “constantly seeking to fit a resource to a need.” In many cases, Skinner says that CAHOOTS is better equipped to handle a situation than police. “We make sure to try to send officers only to the situations that are really dangerous or where weapons are present or there’s been behavior present that is combative or violent,” he says. Skinner describes this relationship between his force and CAHOOTS as “symbiotic.” His goal, he says, is to create a police department and public safety response team that the community can trust — one that’s “not deeply rooted in territorialism and protectionism.”

“There’s a lot of police agencies that just shiver at the possibility of someone else going to their calls for service. And we just aren’t built that way,” he says.

And while Morgan says that CAHOOTS could benefit from its own dispatch console, she says that it’s crucial that her pro- gram and EPD maintain a cooperative working relationship. “They share a lot of resources with us in order for us to be accessible to the community,” says Morgan.

MOVING FORWARD

Despite struggles with funding and response, CAHOOTS remains a public service that other counties and states are seeking to model. In front of the White Bird Clinic last August, Sen. Wyden announced his introduction of the CAHOOTS Act, a bill that would grant federal funding via Medicaid to create small-scale local mobile crisis response teams similar to the program based in Eugene.

“Americans struggling with mental illness don’t always require law enforcement to be dispatched when they are experiencing a crisis. CAHOOTS is proof positive there is another way,” said Wyden.

The Act reveals the positive impact that CAHOOTS has had on the Eugene community, as well as how it has laid the groundwork for a national conversation on police alternatives in a year defined by both social unrest and health crises.

For similar programs to be viable and sustainable in other cities across the United States, Morgan says there needs be more of a dedication to establishing trust among citizens, law enforcement and public safety response teams.

Because CAHOOTS is accessed through EPD or the Springfield Police Department, there are people who don’t feel comfortable calling in for service, says Morgan. Creating a new dispatch console, however, goes beyond just funding. It deals with re-structuring a much larger system.

“The public safety system was never designed to have an extra part involved, says Morgan. “So the way you’re supposed to advocate and push for change and also not disrupt the existing structure too much is an experience.”

According to Laurel Lisovskis, a medic and crisis worker at CAHOOTS, the program requires 40-60 hours of basic training which involves, but is not limited to, writing reports, suicide risk assessments, restorative justice and an emergency vehicle operations course. She said after this the trainee will participate in ride-alongs with a two-person team, then graduate to two to three months of working with a cross-trained worker.

Ibrahim Coulibaly, the president of the Eugene/Springfield NAACP chapter and a former hospital worker, applauds CA- HOOTS’ efforts in behavioral and mental health aid, but questions why EPD and other police forces aren’t placing more of an emphasis on these training methods. In his experience, Coulibaly says that police try to establish control in a situation as a first step.

“CAHOOTS workers are not from a different planet. What are the skills they have to de-escalate that police officers can- not learn?” asks Coulibaly.

Skinner says that his officers receive up to 40 hours of in- class de-escalation training, but that he can’t be sure how similar those classes are to the ones used in CAHOOTS’ training.

So, while it may benefit all response teams to prioritize de-escalation and empathy in their approaches, Swift and Morgan articulate that CAHOOTS workers prioritize empathy at the core of their approach above all else.

For Lisovskis, this model has allowed her to resolve conflicts in the heat of the moment on many occasions. She, like most CAHOOTS workers, can recall a particular incident where the importance of her job started to click.

Lisovskis describes a particular time when her eyes met with a suicidal caller who stood, alone, on the edge of a body of water on the outskirts of Eugene. As she walked over to her client, her first instinct was to approach the situation as a human being. Once they got talking, Lisovskis served as a source of warmth and comfort as her CAHOOTS training had taught her.

“It doesn’t take a lot. Just being super decent and being able to have a difficult conversation with someone about where they’re at and not evade the subject,” says Lisovskis. “Hold space for human decency.”