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I wanted to write about CAHOOTS because it gets at an important part of the conversation around #Defundthepolice: what would unarmed emergency response look like for the kinds of calls that police currently handle? https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/12/cahoots-program-may-reduce-likelihood-of-police-violence/617477/ 1/n
If you get out of the emergency room after being treated for bad burns but live in a tent, who changes your bandages a week later? What if you are getting evicted and you’re having an anxiety attack that could cause you to relapse? 2/n
In Eugene, the answer is often CAHOOTS. CAHOOTS may transport you to an appointment, or just give you a snack. They will administer Narcan, talk your boyfriend down from an angry outburst, or move your car to keep you from violating a restraining order. 3/n
If someone else calls 911 about you sleeping in a park (another CAHOOTS medic called this being a “drive-by Samaritan) - CAHOOTS may drive by, but they’ll also leave you alone if you tell them to. 4/n
This is both a cause and effect of CAHOOTS’ credibility: dispatched by police, but independent, & w/ a different orientation. If I call 911 about my neighbor, police will respond to my call, but CAHOOTS will respond to my neighbor-whether I like it or not. 5/n
What is our 911 system for? The narrow answer is 1) fires 2) medical problems [Fire] and 3) crimes in progress [Police]. The police end of that system gets a lot of calls that aren’t so clear cut, part of what leads to a “skills mismatch” that many others have written about: 6/n
![What is our 911 system for? The narrow answer is 1) fires 2) medical problems [Fire] and 3) crimes in progress [Police]. The police end of that system gets a lot of calls that aren’t so clear cut, part of what leads to a “skills mismatch” that many others have written about: 6/n](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eq7GxelVgAIy7Lc.png "What is our 911 system for? The narrow answer is 1) fires 2) medical problems [Fire] and 3) crimes in progress [Police]. The police end of that system gets a lot of calls that aren’t so clear cut, part of what leads to a “skills mismatch” that many others have written about: 6/n")
What about calls that involve some danger? On paper, there’s a very bright line between “police calls” and “CAHOOTS calls”, but in reality, a lot happens at the boundary between the two: situations change, info in 911 calls is limited and highly subjective. 7/n
That makes it harder to get a clear understanding of how many “police calls” CAHOOTS is diverting.
Is the lesson that 1) CAHOOTS isn’t a good tool for most things police respond to? or 2) there are important public safety needs police can’t address? 8/n
Is the lesson that 1) CAHOOTS isn’t a good tool for most things police respond to? or 2) there are important public safety needs police can’t address? 8/n
If the goal is to reduce police violence, then every diverted call makes a difference. As Eugene's chief of police told me, “The less time I put police officers in conflicts with people, the less of the time those conflicts go bad.” 9/n
But it's hard to tell how much farther you could move the needle nationally (i.e. could CAHOOTS handle 30% of 911 calls?) safely without better data on the makeup of 911 calls in any given city. 10/10 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/12/cahoots-program-may-reduce-likelihood-of-police-violence/617477/
Thank you to @swansburg + Vann Newkirk (what happened to @fivefifths?) for the edit, Ricardo Nagaoka for the photos, and Kathryn Belgiorno for fact-checking...and thank you to everyone in Eugene who spent so much time helping me understand what has made CAHOOTS work.
