During Mental Health Crises, California Police Are Still First Responders. It’s Not Working

In August, a Richmond man called 911 for assistance: his brother, Angel Montaño, was armed with a knife in the family home, threatening to kill members of his family.

“My brother became aggressive. He has mental issues,” Montaño’s brother, whose name has been redacted, told the emergency dispatcher in an audio recording released by the Richmond Police Department.

Responding officers rushed to the scene, waiting out of view for less-lethal weapons as Montaño’s family tried to de-escalate the situation. But when the caller said Angel, 27, had grabbed a second knife, they rushed to the door and shot him. Montaño, a U.S. Marine reserve officer, died of his wounds on the scene.

Following the shooting, Richmond Police Chief Bisa French had a clear message about mental health and public safety: “Something has to change.”

“This is an extremely unfortunate and tragic event,” French said at a press conference the week after the shooting. “I don’t have the answers of what can be done differently, but I do hope that there will be some conversation around legislation and laws to get the people that actually need some mental health assistance the help that they need so that we do not end up in these types of situations.”

The sentiment isn’t a new one. Experts have debated how to more effectively respond to mental health crises for decades, and most recently, a movement to move away from law enforcement responses entirely gained momentum after George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

While police remain the de facto responders to mental health emergencies in many places, including Richmond, experts say there are still a number of reforms law enforcement agencies could implement to improve their responses. Many, though, remain sluggish or stagnant.

“What kind of precedent are we setting when families of individuals experiencing a mental health crisis are now afraid to call 911 because they’re forced to weigh the impossible decision between getting help or keeping their loved ones alive,” asked one of Montaño’s former classmates at a Richmond City Council meeting shortly after Montaño’s death.

Since 2020, jurisdictions nationwide have piloted mental health response teams based on a program out of Eugene, Oregon known as CAHOOTS, or Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets.

If a nonviolent mental health call came in, 911 dispatchers in the city could send a two-person team made up of a medic and mental health worker to respond instead of police.

None of these teams’ responders carried weapons or had law enforcement training.

Richmond was one of the cities inspired by CAHOOTS, but its version, the Community Crisis Response Program, still isn’t operational. While some residents blamed the City Council for not activating the program more quickly, Richmond police spokesperson Lt. Donald Patchin said even if the civilian-led team was operational, it would have passed Montaño’s case to the police, since he was armed.

Because “the civilian was already exhibiting a threat of deadly force, that means that there’s a better argument for the police at that point coming in with potential deadly force,” said Robert Weisberg, who heads Stanford’s Criminal Justice Center.

“These are often very scary, very heated, intense situations,” said Jen Skeem, a UC Berkeley psychologist who studies mental health and criminal justice. “[Citizen-led] programs usually get just a very small assortment of the calls that have already been triaged, they don’t involve any risk and they’re not going to get responded to [by police] because there’s no, as they say, ‘blood and bullets.’”

Still, Skeem said there are other reforms within police departments that could improve their mental health responses. More than 2,700 departments nationwide have units whose officers complete crisis intervention training and others have piloted programs that embed a mental health counselor into an existing police squad.

More than 70% of officers in San Francisco’s police department have taken a 40-hour crisis intervention training course, according to department data. SFPD said that the training led to a 68% decrease in officer use of force and 18 consecutive months without a police shooting between 2016 and 2020.

The training, first developed in 1988, focuses on expanding officers’ understanding of mental health conditions, emphasizing de-escalation and creating connections between officers and people with relevant lived experiences, according to the Department of Justice.

Richmond police did not respond to questions about whether its officers underwent crisis intervention training. The city’s website said that it has a crisis negotiation team trained in “negotiating with armed subjects, barricaded subjects, suicidal subjects and incidents where hostages have been taken.”

Some cities, including Mobile, Alabama, now hire mental health clinicians who ride along with police officers to the scene of the crisis.

“You have a clinician who’s trained in, hopefully, dealing appropriately with people and de-escalating situations, along with a police officer who’s really trained to respond to situations that can involve danger,” Skeem said.

Experts are also studying how providing mental health training to 911 dispatchers affects outcomes.

Skeem said she and other researchers are assessing the efficacy of training dispatchers to convey information to officers or other responders “in a way that will not trigger a lot of stigma or fear … that can make the response ineffective or involve more force than maybe it needs to.”

Dispatchers also learn how to ask questions to extract better information from callers and more accurately assess how much imminent risk is involved.

Skeem said she’s observed that when a mental health clinician responds, they tend to treat the caller as an expert in the situation, since they are usually a friend or family member of the person in crisis.

“They can get more information about what’s helped in the past, what might be helpful now, if there’s someone in the house that has the most positive relationship with the person that might try some way of approaching the issue,” Skeem said. “It’s leveraging the expertise of the caller to really inform the way that the response goes.”

Richmond’s police department did not respond to questions about whether it had implemented any of these alternative response methods prior to Montaño’s death, or if it is considering further reform moving forward.

All U.S.residents can call the 988 crisis line, an alternative to 911 that connects people having psychiatric emergencies with non-police options where they’re available.

Richmond’s Community Crisis Response Program, which the City Council approved in 2023, hopes to begin responding to incidents later this year after opening applications for crisis intervention specialists in May. When it launches, the team will only respond to nonviolent incidents.