By Hayley Zhao, Next City, October 6, 2021
Dallas, Texas is the biggest winner of this year’s Police Reform and Racial Justice Grant Program, created by the U.S. Conference of Mayors in partnership with Target, taking home $175,000 in grant money for the city’s effort in police reform. The amount will be used to expand the existing Rapid Integrated Group Healthcare Team(RIGHT) Care program that dispatches clinicians and social workers along with police officers when responding to 911 calls regarding mental health issues. The program aims to reduce unnecessary arrests and hospitalization in the city and has shown progress three years in with a 20% drop in the number of people taken to the ER and a 60% decrease in arrests.
The City of Dallas receives over 13,000 behavioral health emergency calls a year and the person in crisis often ends up arrested, hospitalized or on some occasions, fatally shot as police officers are systemically the first responders to the scene. A study by Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute (MMHPI), a non-profit policy research organization in Texas, found that about 17,000 people with mental illness are booked into Dallas County jail each year. The number of mental health-related emergency calls to the Dallas 911 center increased by an average of 18% from 2012 to 2015, with some areas seeing an 85% increase over that time period. To address the surge, the Dallas PD partnered with Parkland Health & Hospital System, Dallas Fire-Rescue Department and MMHPI to launch the RIGHT Care pilot program in January 2018 in the South-Central Division of Dallas PD that serves more than 120,000 residents in the area.
“It’s a high violent crime area and it’s known that a good chunk of the calls come from this particular division in Dallas,” said RIGHT Care program manager Tabitha Castillo. “So it was a good area to set out the pilot program.”
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