Yesterday, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway posted a CARES (Crisis Alternative Response Emergency Services) team update on her blog. At first glance, CARES sounds like a great success. Here is an excerpt:
“On September 1, 2021, the City of Madison launched its Community Alternative Response for Emergency Services (CARES) Team to respond to nonviolent 911 calls for mental health emergencies. The City announced that the CARES Teams, made up of community paramedics and crisis workers, would spend a year learning and innovating before expanding the program in future budgets.
As we mark six months of discovery and innovation with this important alternative response team, I am pleased to announce that the CARES Team is now responding to mental health emergencies on a City-wide basis,” said Mayor Rhodes-Conway. “We will continue to evaluate the effectiveness of CARES and to expand the program over time.
The City can report that CARES Teams have responded to 246 calls for service as of March 11, 2022. The average time on call was 53 minutes. In the absence of the CARES program, these calls would have received a police response. Instead, these calls were fielded by CARES Teams, freeing up police time and resources for criminal activity.”
BUT how much time did the CARES team really save the Madison Police Department? And at what cost?
The Mayor’s update provides some startling facts that should be noted. The words “capacity to broaden their service” suggests they did not have enough to do in the Central District, where mental health calls are the highest in the whole city and where Madison Police spend the most time responding to these calls.
In terms of numbers, the press release states the unit has been in service from September 1, 2021 to March 11, 2022 and responded to 246 calls. Total number of days in this time frame were 191, but that needs to be reduced to reflect a 5-day work week. This means the team worked 136 days. 246 calls divided by 136 days means 1.8 calls per day. The press release states the average time on a call was 53 minutes. So in an eight-hour work day, the CARES Team responded to 1.59 hours (53 minutes x 1.8 calls / 60 minutes/hr) of calls per day, meaning it worked 19.88% (1.59/8 hrs.) of a work day.
Don’t we all want the CARES model to succeed? But when the Mayor says, “In the absence of the CARES program, these calls would have received a police response. Instead, these calls were fielded by CARES Teams, freeing up police time and resources for criminal activity,” did it, really? And are there actually two teams sharing this average 1.59 hour work day?
$250,000 was taken from MPD’s 2021 budget and redirected to CARES and another $83,000 from its 2022 budget. For what? To save them 246 calls (that may not even have needed a law enforcement response in the first place)? MPD takes many more calls than that EACH DAY.
CARES holds some promise, and being expanded can be something to celebrate. But more planning needs to be done, including cost-effective budgeting, how to fund it without taking from the police department doing the actual heavy work, and how to provide service to more people in need.
Perhaps we should consider how the City of Eugene, Oregon funds the CAHOOTS Team which our CARES Team was modeled after. CAHOOTS is entirely funded through private contributions. Because the CARES Team can select the 911 calls they respond to, and they don’t respond to any calls with any risk (or history) of violence or weapons, perhaps a plain clothes officer as part of the team would allow them to use this approach on a much greater volume of calls.