Programs that tackle stubborn problems like mental illness, addiction and homelessness, with or without police, are spreading across Wisconsin and the nation. Early results are promising, experts say.

By Peter Cameron, THE BADGER PROJECT

Call the cops. Let them handle it.

As long as nothing was on fire, or no one was having a physical health problem, emergency response in the U.S. has mostly involved sending police to deal with whatever the issue was.

“We over-rely on law enforcement to respond to anything and everything,” said Sarah Henrickson, a social worker in Madison.

But after years of treating most 911 calls with the same medicine, including more complex ones involving people in crisis, local governments in Wisconsin and across the country are now trying more targeted treatments as intractable issues like mental illness and homelessness have risen.

That shift has led to mental health professionals partnering with police officers on some calls, and also programs that remove cops from some emergency response entirely.

‘Very risky’

The missions of police and mental health professionals are very different, said Patrick Solar, an associate professor of criminal justice at UW-Platteville, and a former police chief.

“Cops are neither adequately trained nor educated on how to deal” with mental health crises, he wrote in an email.

“Leaving these issues to the police is very risky,” he continued. “I believe we need to narrow the focus for our police, not expand it even further beyond the basic mission” of crime solving and prevention.

Videos have gone viral of encounters turning bad between police and people in the grip of a mental health episode, leading to the loss of life, as well as millions of taxpayer dollars when police departments get sued for mismanaging a crisis.

Providing skilled intervention services for emotionally disturbed individuals just makes sense, Solar said.

“You wouldn’t call your plumber to fix your teeth,” said Henrickson, the social worker who helped develop and now helps run the city of Madison’s Community Alternative Response Emergency Services (CARES) team, which consists of a paramedic and a crisis worker. “You want the expertise to match with what the issue is.”

Some cities partner crisis workers with police officers to respond to mental health calls. Others like Madison and Milwaukee also offer a nonpolice emergency response team for calls with a low risk of violence. 911 dispatchers must be skilled in knowing who to send for different types of calls, Henrickson said.

CARES in Madison had a budget of about $1.7 million in 2024 and answered more than 3,500 calls, calls that otherwise the police would have had to handle, said Cynthia Schuster, a spokeswoman for the city’s fire department, which oversees the program. In 2025, CARES is expanding into neighboring Sun Prairie, the second-largest city in the county.

In rural areas with fewer responders and resources, and more ground to cover, some law enforcement agencies are improvising. In states like Nevada, Oklahoma and South Dakota, some police officers now carry tablets on which they can video call a mental health professional to help assist with people in crisis.

Impacts

Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford University who studies nonpolice emergency response, said the appeal of these types of programs are based on their “rugged common sense and basic humanity.”

In studying the city of Denver’s STAR program, he found that it was “quite effective” in reducing crime, and generated spillover benefits as well.

Many of the people who get proper treatment from these programs have fewer run-ins with police moving forward, as well as fewer detentions and hospitalizations, Dee noted.

That saves local governments and taxpayers money.

In Madison, only 25% of CARES patients had to be transported to a facility in 2024, compared to 85% of EMS patients, Schuster said. That’s a significant cost savings, though calculating exact numbers is difficult.

And when CARES does need to hospitalize someone, they can transport patients to more appropriate destinations, like detox centers or shelters, reducing strain on overcrowded ERs, Schuster added.

Caution moving forward

The rise and spread of non-police emergency response teams have the benefit of being both pro-police, by relieving stretched law enforcement agencies of a significant number of calls, many of them needing experts, and also being pro-patient, in which folks with mental health issues can have root causes treated rather than their symptoms.

“In these politically divisive times, these policy innovations have a broad appeal across the political spectrum,” Dee said.

Add on top that many law enforcement agencies across the country, Wisconsin included, are struggling to fill officer openings as the profession becomes less attractive to younger generations, and nonpolice emergency response might become even more important.

More study is still needed, but well-run, targeted emergency response programs “seem to achieve their goals,” Dee said. “It’s a really encouraging area of policy innovation in the country right now.”

Yet the professor still offers caution to governments considering launching any sort of alternative emergency response team.

“The success of these initiatives is not a foregone conclusion,” he said. “They require interagency cooperation. They require training.”

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.