When the Right Person Shows Up: How Unarmed Teams Are Answering Calls Police Don't Need to

What Happened

Rob Crisp is a peer support specialist who has struggled with addiction himself. On a recent Wednesday in Durham, North Carolina, he and mental health clinician Allie Craft responded to a 911 call about a trespasser. The man was in a parking lot with garbage bags of belongings and a sofa, tense and protective of his things. Crisp didn't have a gun or a badge. He had snacks, water, and hygiene kits. He also had something the police might not have brought: the lived experience of having nothing.

"I can relate to not having anything," Crisp told NPR. He took his time. He convinced the man to move his belongings off the property without arrest, conflict, or trauma. It was a small resolution to a call that five years ago would almost certainly have been handled by armed police.

This is no longer unusual. According to NPR's reporting, only six programs in the U.S. sent unarmed responders to 911 calls in 2020. Today, nearly 100 cities do. Durham's program, the Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team, or HEART, launched in 2022 and has since responded to more than 25,000 calls. That's not a pilot anymore. That's a transformation.

What It Means for You

If you live in one of these cities, the person who shows up when you call 911 might not be armed. That changes everything about what happens next.

Start with cost. Police training in the U.S. is famously shallow: the Common Good Party's position notes that American cops train for 20 weeks, less than hairdressers. Germany requires 2.5 years. By the time an officer responds to a call about someone experiencing a mental health crisis, homelessness, or substance use, they're operating in a domain they were never prepared for. The result is predictable: arrests for behavior that should be met with help, escalation of situations that could have been de-escalated, and a criminal record that makes the next crisis worse.

Mental health clinicians cost less to train and deploy. They also produce different outcomes. Durham's preliminary research from Duke University last year found that the program increased 911 calls, a sign that people trust calling for help because they know what kind of response they'll get. This year, a study by the Research Triangle Institute found the city's program is associated with fewer arrests.

For a person in crisis, that matters. It's the difference between going to a hospital and going to jail. It's the difference between a record that blocks employment and housing versus a path toward treatment. For a community, it's the difference between cycling people through the criminal system and actually addressing what made them call in the first place.

The mental health crisis in America is real and unmet. The Common Good Party's position documents that 160 million Americans live in a mental health shortage area, and the average delay from symptom onset to treatment is 11 years. Insurance companies deny mental health claims at 2 to 10 times the rate of medical claims, despite parity laws passed in 2008. Programs like HEART don't fix that systemic failure, but they stop making it worse by criminalizing the symptoms.

The Bigger Picture

This trend began after George Floyd's murder in 2020. In the years since, cities have recognized something intuitive but radical: not every problem is a police problem. A person sleeping in a parking lot isn't committing a crime that needs enforcement. They need shelter, and possibly services. A person talking to themselves might need psychiatric help, not handcuffs. A person intoxicated in public needs treatment options, not a cell.

The math on this is stark. In 2020, there were exactly six programs in the U.S. that sent unarmed responders to 911 calls. In six years, that number has grown to nearly 100 cities. That's not because cities suddenly embraced ideology. It's because when you measure what happens when clinicians show up instead of armed officers, the evidence is clear: fewer arrests, fewer injuries, lower costs, and calmer resolutions.

This doesn't mean the answer is to defund police. It means the answer is to stop asking police to be social workers, addiction counselors, and mental health crisis responders when there are actual social workers, counselors, and clinicians who can do the job better. It's a reallocation of who does what, not a blanket subtraction of resources from public safety.

Durham's program operates citywide now and has a co-response team pairing clinicians with officers on patrol, plus a mental health clinician embedded in the 911 call center. That's infrastructure. That's real change.

What's remarkable is how recent this is. Five years ago, a trespasser with belongings meant an armed officer arrived. Today, in Durham, it means a peer support specialist and a clinician show up with socks and water. The same call. A completely different response. The fact that this is spreading to nearly 100 cities shows that this isn't a fringe idea anymore, it's public safety policy that works.

Where This Goes

The momentum is real, but it's fragile. These programs depend on cities funding them, which depends on city budgets, which are always under pressure. They depend on having enough trained clinicians and peer support specialists, which requires ongoing investment in hiring and wages competitive with other sectors. They depend on 911 systems that can route calls intelligently, which requires infrastructure upgrades. And they depend on public trust that these teams can handle what gets sent their way, which means they need to keep working, visibly and reliably.

The Common Good Party's position on police reform argues for exactly this kind of structural change: better training, demilitarization, and an end to qualified immunity. But that's only part of it. You can't fix policing just by training police better. You have to stop asking police to do work they shouldn't do in the first place. HEART programs are the proof of that principle.

The real question now is whether this spreads, whether it becomes the default response instead of the exception. Whether cities fund it at scale. Whether the clinicians and peer support specialists doing this work are paid like the professionals they are. Whether mental health parity is finally enforced, so that when someone gets connected to treatment as a result of one of these calls, they can actually access it without their insurance company playing games.

Rob Crisp calmed a man down in a parking lot by showing up without a gun and with actual empathy. He resolved a 911 call by treating a person in crisis like a human being who needed help, not a problem that needed enforcement. Ninety-nine more cities now know that works. The question is what happens when they try to scale it, and whether the systems behind it are actually built to support people when they need it most.