AUSTIN, Texas — Austin leaders want the city to do a full-scale review into how multiple departments respond to mental health crisis calls to potentially lessen the role of police.
The measure, which council members will consider at their Thursday meeting, comes in the aftermath of the unprecedented October conviction of now-former Austin police officer Christopher Taylor who shot and killed a man with a knife during a mental health episode.
At the core of the effort, city officials want to know if there is a way to put more mental health calls in the hands of counselors and other social workers, taking them out of the hands of police.
The move comes after a jury convicted Taylor on a charge of deadly conduct last year in the death of Mauris DeSilva, who had a knife and was suffering from a mental health episode. Taylor has been sentenced to two years in prison but is appealing.
“What the Christopher Taylor case did is highlight the issue for the entire community,” Austin City Council Member Chito Vela said.
Vela is proposing a resolution that would instruct city staff to analyze data and trends related to the number of mental health calls the city receives to 911 and 311, the number of police hours spent on those calls in 2022, 2023 and 2024, and the number of 911 calls diverted to a mental health call center each year.
The proposed resolution said that “the use of the Austin Police Department as the default response for multiple social issues can complicate the focus on its core mission of law enforcement and lead to serious unintended consequences for those in mental health crisis and the community at large.”
“When we want law enforcement to respond to mental health calls, to people in mental health crises, we get negative outcomes, and the Officer Taylor case is really a primary example,” Vela said.
If the city council passes the resolution to do this review, Vela says he hopes it is completed in the next few months – in time for next year’s budget that will be drafted over the summer.
The efforts come amid a national conversation about how and when police should respond to mental health calls – to make them safer for both citizens and police.
Shannon Scully, director of policy initiatives for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said research and on-the-ground experience have found that “mobile crisis teams” made up of counselors or specially trained paramedics are more effective in getting people to mental health care.
“Law enforcement, for better or for worse, have been the primary responders of the mental health crisis in this country, and if you talk to a lot of law enforcement leaders like I do, a lot of them know they don’t belong,” she said.
For a decade, Austin has partnered with Integral Care to have mental health teams respond to certain calls, but those teams are not on duty 24/7. And Austin still responds to about 8,000 mental health calls a year.
Vela said part of the goal of the resolution is to examine whether it is more appropriate – and safer – to shift more calls to crisis response teams rather than police. Officials may have to hire more counselors, for example, to expand that effort.
He said if the city can eventually shift the majority of mental health calls to non-police agencies, “I will consider that just a huge policy victory.”