On a typical day, the White Bird Clinic may respond to up to 70 calls for aid, from providing life’s necessities—food, shelter, money—to de-escalating a potentially life-threatening mental health emergency.
Since 1989, the federally qualified health center has run a mobile crisis unit called the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets, or Cahoots, that’s part of the city of Eugene’s emergency response system.
Similar to how Philadelphia’s model is proposed to work, calls from residents seeking help for emergencies unrelated to crime are dispatched through the city’s 911 emergency system and directed to White Bird.
“When it came to officers on the streets, there was initially some apprehension because it was weird and unusual to think about giving a police radio to a clinician from White Bird,” said Tim Black, director of consulting at the clinic. “But very quickly—because of how we responded and because of what officers saw us doing out in the field—that apprehension has dissolved.”
In a September interview, Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner said his department’s relationship with Cahoots had evolved, and he now considers Cahoots a valuable resource that fills the need for a response beyond what law enforcement normally offers. “We’ve seen something that has really kind of blossomed and matured into what I think could be the model for behavioral health first response for the nation,” Skinner said.
According to a 2019 Eugene Police Department crime analysis report, Cahoots teams were involved in more than 20,000 calls for service, which made up 5% to 8% of all service calls to police that year. In more than 13,000 of those cases, Cahoots was the only emergency response called and dispatched. Around 2% of calls to Cahoots eventually require police backup.
Typical cases involve welfare checks, representing 30% of service calls; 29% are requests for types of non-emergency assistance the police traditionally don’t provide, but instead require counseling or a medical evaluation.
Black said the vast majority of service calls answered by Cahoots are resolved at the scene and don’t require transporting an individual to a mental health or substance use treatment facility.