Unarmed mental health response teams are all the rage among progressive politicians. Data say they won't make a substantial difference in reducing police violence.

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

49% : Programs like CAHOOTS are crucial for removing law enforcement from situations that mental healthcare professionals are better trained to respond to -- but they also demand more nuanced and thoughtful discourse from city leaders.
48% : Advocates and politicians alike have called for specially trained, unarmed teams to respond to mental-health calls in lieu of law enforcement.
48% : Bruno, who has worked in law enforcement for more than two decades, said that a co-response between such teams can address higher-stakes mental-health emergency calls that require law enforcement.
48% : "The intention of the program when it was started was to reduce the potential for folks in our community experiencing addiction or behavioral-health crisis to have an encounter with law enforcement in the first place," said Tim Black, director of consulting for White Bird Clinic and a former CAHOOTS crisis worker.
45% : Until solutions are thoroughly researched and effectively implemented, armed law enforcement will continue to be the default response in many mental-health crisis calls.
42% : "Many law enforcement agencies have not followed the fidelity of the CIT model," he said.
41% : Despite police departments' ostensible support for initiatives designed to curtail use of force, law enforcement agencies do not collect or publish detailed data on their interactions with civilians.
39% : "If you do not meet the demand with those non-law-enforcement crisis-response teams, then law enforcement is going to become the default responders again."

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