Mobile Crisis Response Teams Support Better Policing: Evidence from CAHOOTS

This paper studies the use of mobile crisis response teams—a non-uniformed pair consisting of a mental health worker and a medic—as a component of emergency response to 911 calls. We provide the first evaluation of the longest-running program in the United States, Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets (CAHOOTS) in Eugene, Oregon, which responds to calls involving mental illness, homelessness, and addiction either instead of or in addition to police officers. We use two complementary research designs to understand the effects and possible scope of these programs. First, we find that a series of program expansions into new areas and times reduced the likelihood that a 911 call resulted in an arrest and increased access to medical services. The arrest reduction likely reflects CAHOOTS’ role in de-escalating tense situations and resolving incidents without coercive measures. CAHOOTS is most often dispatched to the same calls as the police, acting as a supplement rather than a substitute. Second, we exploit idiosyncratic variation in CAHOOTS availability in the post-expansion periods to estimate the effect of additional marginal program expansions. We find that they are used mostly for calls that would otherwise go unanswered, suggesting that the program has reached a scale where it can respond to the most urgent calls. We conclude that crisis response teams play an important role as a complement to the police rather than acting only as substitutes.