Opinion | PSU researchers release 2-year evaluation, find police-alternative works, needs investment, support
Portland Street Response is achieving what it set out to do. Portland Street Response is in danger of being dismantled.
Both are true.
These are my takeaways from the two-year evaluation of the first responder system for non-criminal crises, which the city approved in 2019 and launched as a pilot in March 2021. The team consists of mental health crisis responders, medics, community health workers and peer support specialists.
Greg Townley of Portland State University Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative leads an evaluation of the program every six months. This is the fourth such evaluation.
PSR went city-wide in March 2022, operating 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Based on the program’s success, Portland City Council approved funding to expand PSR to a 24/7 service by March 2023, an effort Commissioner Rene Gonzalez stifled when he began blocking new hires in February. The program now also has dwindling access to supplies.
Yet the program continues to meet its goals of reducing police and other first responder involvement by sending responders specifically trained for non-criminal crisis calls.
PSR reduced calls to the police by 3.5% during hours of operation, and most of these are welfare checks and so-called “unwanted person” calls. Since expanding to city-wide operations, PSR has responded to five times the number of calls compared to the prior year.
When a PSR team isn’t available, dispatchers still send police. That’s a large and largely unnecessary portion of police calls. In the lead-up to PSR, Willamette Week reported half of all calls for police in 2019 were welfare checks and unwanted person calls.
There was only one arrest when PSR responded — one of the 2% of calls that involved a police co-response. In stark contrast, police conducted 371 arrests when responding alone to welfare checks and unwanted person calls during PSR hours.
That is, well, 371 times the number of arrests.
It might seem counter-intuitive that police arrest people when responding to a non-criminal issue, but this happens too frequently because people have old warrants, often for crimes related to homelessness. Encounters with police can escalate already traumatized people, with police shootings as the most tragic outcome.
Townley and his co-author, Emily Leickly, pointed out PSR is fulfilling a number of recommendations from people experiencing homelessness, including unarmed, non-police responders in distinct uniforms with training in mental health, trauma and deescalation. These recommendations were gathered in “Believe our Stories and Listen,” a 2019 report Street Roots compiled with Townley and a number of partners by surveying 187 people.
Reducing police contact — and thus arrests — for non-criminal matters is essential. Half of all Portland arrests targeted homeless people from 2017-2020, the last year studied, according to multiple reports from The Oregonian and Reveal Magazine . Legal entanglements create barriers to housing and employment.
Townley interviewed workers from PSR, Portland Fire and Rescue, PPB, the Bureau of Emergency Communications (for which 911 call takers and dispatchers work) and people who received PSR services. He also surveyed people experiencing homelessness with ambassadors from Street Roots, part of our larger effort to gather information from homeless Portlanders to inform policy.
The evaluation included high marks from people who received services, who described the team as taking a “kind, compassionate, client-centered approach.”
Still, this could all be lost if PSR is rendered ineffective through a lack of expansion and resources. Firefighters, police and BOEC workers all pointed out the limitations of staffing and hours to the program’s impact. The “spending and hiring freeze within the Portland Fire Bureau announced by Commissioner Rene Gonzalez in February 2023 came at a critical juncture as new PSR staff were preparing to be hired, onboarded, and added to the team to prepare for its expansion to 24/7 coverage,” the report found.
Not only does PSR need to expand to meet current needs, but its teams are the appropriate responders for other call types handled by police, such as welfare checks at residences, a need that will amp up in extreme heat. It is also important that people can respond to calls in the street and calls involving suicide. They need to be able to transport people.
All of this would be in line with meeting PSR’s goal of reducing police calls when no crime is being committed, as well as reducing transport to emergency rooms when medics can treat wounds and health needs in the field.
Yet, the report authors warn the recent order for PSR to engage in sweeps is mission creep “antithetical to the program’s core mission and thwarts their efforts to build trust among people in crisis.”
“PSR should never be used to carry out sweeps of unhoused people, enforce camping bans, or require individuals to engage in shelter or service use,” the report found. “Their role is to discuss options with people and guide individuals to make informed decisions that match their unique needs and life context.”
There are some other questions to work out. Is Portland Fire and Rescue the best place to graft this burgeoning program that will, ultimately, grow into a separate bureau? Townley and Leickly describe a tension of cultures between the fire bureau and PSR. This has been exacerbated by a competition for resources Gonzalez spurred, stopping hires for PSR in the name of concerns over Portland Fire and Rescue overtime usage. Try as I might, I can’t understand this logic.
One possible new home, the report concludes, is the Community Safety Division, or CSD, and specifically the CSD Alternative Response and Prevention unit. This division is currently housed under Mayor Ted Wheeler.
Additionally, 42% of homeless respondents describe apprehension dialing 911. While 911 is a key pathway to these services, it’s important to explore an additional avenue.
This is the last evaluation PSU is contracted to complete. City Council owes our community continued evaluations so we can see the development of PSR through.
PSR was on a strong path, but Commissioner Gonzalez seems to have fumbled the ball, indicating he’s not the leader for the task. Yes, it’s an enormous undertaking to see through a “permanent and co-equal branch of the first response system.”
That’s the horizon on which my gaze is cast, and I’m not alone. PSR is built from enormous public will, a people’s program, and it’s clearly time for all of us to fight for its future.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots . Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today .
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