Partners in Crisis: Improving Police Response to Individuals in Moments of Crisis by Providing Service Alternatives, Roanoke Valley, Virginia, 2022

This project was an experimental evaluation of a collaborative partnership among the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University (CEBCP-GMU), Roanoke Police Department (RPD), Roanoke County Police Department (RCPD), Salem Police Department (SPD), and Vinton Police Department (VPD) as well as Blue Ridge Behavioral Healthcare (BRBH) in Roanoke Valley region of Virginia to conduct a place-based cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the effects of the co-responder model on subsequent outcomes of individuals who were experiencing a crisis and involved in mental health-related calls for service. Responding to incidents involving individuals with mental illness has been a challenge for police officers.
While co-response teams have been embraced as an effective
police response strategy, most prior evaluation studies on co-response teams
focused on outcomes that are not directly related to individuals' subsequent
mental health state. Additionally, the lack of experimental research hinders
our ability to draw causal conclusions on the effects of co-response teams. To
address this knowledge gap, this study evaluated the effectiveness of co-response teams on hospitalization outcomes of individuals in crisis using a
place-based randomized controlled trial in southwest Virginia.