FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA — For Lee District Supervisor
Rodney Lusk, reviewing how Fairfax County dispatches public safety personnel
seems like a good first step if you're looking to improve how police respond to
calls for service.
"That's where everything starts," Lusk
said, in an interview with Patch. "Most of the calls that aren't going to
fire and rescue end up going to the police. And the question is, do the police
need to get all of those calls, especially for those that have low-level
substance abuse, low-level issues with mental health, where there's really no
criminality involved? The person is just having an issue."
Lusk and Hunter Mill Supervisor Walter Alcorn
submitted a board matter Tuesday calling for a review of the county's 9-1-1
call system. The idea behind the measure is to identify incidents in which
police officers are not necessary, and where it would be better to dispatch
unarmed medical, human services, and mental health professionals instead.
In his board matter, Lusk referenced other
jurisdictions around the country that have established models where dispatchers
routinely divert mental health and similar calls away from the police department
to more appropriate responders. In particular, Lusk pointed to the CAHOOTS
model employed by the City of Eugene, Oregon.
"It's been around for like 30 years and it's
been extraordinarily successful," he said. "If you look at the
numbers for it, you can see that they've been able to divert 20 percent of
their police calls through this process. With that 20 percent allocation of
calls that are going directly to this behavioral, mental health platform,
you're only having like 1 percent of them needing [police] backup."
If Fairfax County adopted a program like CAHOOTS,
it would not immediately see the same level of success, according to Lusk.
For one thing, the county does not have a level of
staff it could dedicate right now to respond to those types of calls.
Currently, if a police officer responds to a call that she determines to be a
mental health or substance abuse situation, she could either bring the subject
to the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center or call in the Mobile Crisis Unit.
"We're going to probably have to work
ourselves to be able to clearly triage and identify which cases are those
low-level ones, and then send out those kind of behavioral, mental health folks
and not have to have backups," Lusk said. "But there will be instances,
I'm more than certain, where there will be a need for backup. And that's why we
don't want to defund the police, because you still need to ensure the safety of
those workers and the citizens, when something devolves and becomes much more
serious and much more dangerous than it was originally anticipated."
Adopting a CAHOOTS-like program in Fairfax County
would also free up officers from certain types of cases and allow them to focus
on their core mission.
"If the police aren't dealing with these kind
of issues, they can deal with other issues of criminality, other issues that
are more of important to the community for public safety," Lusk said.
"So to me, I think it allows them to do their best work and to be focused
on the issues that are most pressing within the community."
In regards to deescalating violent situations,
Lusk is in favor of all FCPD officers receiving Crisis Intervention Training —
currently, only 40 percent of the department has received such training.
"Even with this new model, you just never
know what circumstances they're going to be put in where you might think that
this call that they get sent on is not a behavioral health call," Lusk
said. "It might turn into one when they get there. ... I think that's the
thing that we've done wrong. We've put them in the front when they probably
should be in the back only as support."
Like other places around the country, the death of
George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police has proved to be a
tipping point for Fairfax County when it came to police reform, according to
Lusk.
"If you'd asked me right after George Floyd,
I would have been like, 'I don't anticipate that we would have this happen in
Fairfax County,'" he said.
But that all changed about a week after Floyd's
death when a Fairfax County Police officer responded to a call in the Gum
Springs neighborhood.
Body-worn camera footage showed Tyler Timberlake,
an eight-year veteran of the force, kneeling on a man's back and tasing him in
the neck. Tyler was subsequently charged with three counts of misdemeanor
assault and battery.
At its June 9 meeting, the Board voted unanimously
to approve a statement of support for those in the county calling for racial
justice and to find funding to implement the next phase of the Fairfax County
Police Department's body-worn camera program.
"I think there is a recognition that we will
not have business as usual," Lusk said. "I also think that the body
worn camera has changed this forever into the future."
In the interest of greater accountability, the Board
has also pushed FCPD to be more open about the data it collects. The department
recently issued arrest and traffic data demographics for 2019.
Lusk said the Public Safety Committee will be
bringing in the Citizen Review Panel and the Independent Police Auditor to
present their annual reports, as well as the University of Texas, which is
conducting a use of force analysis study for the county. He's also planning a
series of public information sessions, including one with representatives from
the City of Eugene, Oregon, to talk about the CAHOOTS program.
"I think there's a lot of the interest from
the Board members, and I think even the work that my committee, the Public
Safety Committee, is doing, we have strong advocates in these
communities," Lusk said. "They're very specific about what things
they think should be changed. They articulate those recommendations
extraordinarily well."
At Tuesday's board meeting, the supervisors
unanimously approved Lusk and Alcorn's board matter. Now, county staff, including
the Deputy County Executive for Public Safety and the Deputy County Executive
for Human Services, will review the county's 9-1-1 dispatch and response system
to deploy tried unarmed medical, mental health, and human services
professionals to respond as needed. A status update must be shared with the
board no later than Oct. 1.
