Well before this summer’s historic protests against police brutality, the CAHOOTS program of crisis response teams had been advising similar projects and pilot programs in cities such as Denver, Oakland, Portland, and Olympia, Washington, which voted to create an unarmed Crisis Response Unit in 2017. But the experiences of CAHOOTS and its spinoffs have gained a new instructive pertinency as municipalities nationwide look to divest parts of their public safety apparatus from police departments. The idea is that armed police officers are simply called to address too many situations, often ones in which trained mental health or social workers would be more effective and more humane.
