Michelle Perin joins us from CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Street) to discuss their model in place for creating social safety nets within our communities. 

Full transcription and references here

Michelle: CAHOOTS is actually part of a larger organization, White Bird Clinic, which started out of the counterculture of the 1960s. So about 1969, in Eugene, Oregon. The founders were looking for more humanistic service model for social and medical issues that were occurring during the day. And they didn't really see anything that was matching what they wanted. So they started one. So they wanted to make sure that they were providing these services, which included crisis services, they had walk in and telephone crisis services at the time. Around 1989 they had a small crisis unit that was starting to go out into the field to meet people, and a conversation got started with the police. The name is kind of tongue in cheek, you know, the police were going to be in cahoots with a bunch of hippies and the hippies were going to be in cahoots with a bunch of police. So it kind of stuck [...] So that's kind of how we became a department of Whiteboard Clinic. They've continued to provide a lot of services that are really important to us doing our work in- homeless department, medical, dental, behavioral health and substance use counseling, day use centers, and still have a very robust walk in and telephone crisis services.

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"In 2019, CAHOOTS went out on 20,746, public initiated calls for service--so just under 20,800 calls. Of these 13,854 were CAHOOTS only calls. So 13,854 times the police did not go and talk to somebody, we just went and talked to somebody. And often we don't need to have anything. We don't need to have another responder come out to handle whatever the situation is." Michelle

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Noelle: When we think about this, you know, the type of approach that you guys are using, some people may think it's more expensive to provide stabilization, psychologic crisis management services. It seems like adding an extra layer. But the truth is that it actually could save police departments a lot of money, it's just more about diverting services to the correct places and having the correct people respond. So from a financial standpoint, can you share how much of taxpayer dollars were actually saved in Eugene, from having this type of a program?

Michelle: It's really hard to quantify. It's hard because it's not really apples or oranges. I know in the beginning, there was talk of funding 24 hours of Cahoots was the same as funding like two or three officers, but it's hard to try to figure out what that actually looks like, as far as cost. I did read somewhere that somebody had estimated that it's about an $8 million savings, and we only charged a million dollars. So we're pretty inexpensive considering if you're just looking at the dollars. And also there, we do have numbers that show that we did save an additional 8 million in health care costs, because we definitely look at what we do as a public health crisis. Like this is a public health crisis. It's not just a public safety issue. 

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Join us for season 1 as we explore bias,  systemic racism, the roots of oppression, and barriers found within education and the criminal system. Show us some love by liking, subscribing and reviewing our podcast; and to stay up to date, follow us on Instagram  the_unpackedproject.