OKC Police Chief Discusses Drop In Mental Health Calls And New Crisis Response Efforts

The Oklahoma City Police Department is reporting a significant drop in the number of mental health-related calls answered by officers over the past 13 months. This follows the Department of Justice’s ongoing investigation into civil rights complaints across the state, which began two years ago, focusing specifically on Oklahoma City and its police force.

Chief Ron Bacy explained the city's efforts to reshape the response to mental health crises, noting that improvements were already underway long before the DOJ's investigation began.

"In 2020, we, as a city, started looking at what we could do better to serve our community," Bacy said. "We hired 21 CP Solutions to take a look at us, and they came out with 39 recommendations. From that was born the public safety partnership, one of the initiatives from that addressed creating a crisis intervention advisory group, who are subject matter experts who advise us at a citywide level, co-responder units, and increasing our iPad program and just our partnerships with mental health facilities and transports."

Bacy emphasized that the changes were not in response to high-profile deadly encounters with law enforcement, as some might have assumed.

"We had the mayor's law enforcement policy task force looking at several issues. We had a community policing working group working towards these 39 recommendations, and mental health being a huge component of that," he said. "Just figuring out the best way to provide the best response to people in crisis."

The department has long been seen as a "Swiss army knife" for solving any problem, Bacy added, but he recognized that police officers are not always the most appropriate responders for mental health crises.

"As those resources came online, we started partnering with those and utilizing public education to direct people toward the correct resource," Bacy said.

Oklahoma City’s police force has seen a 57% reduction in mental health crisis calls, a significant shift that Bacy believes has had a positive impact on the department’s operations.

"That allows those officers to respond to other calls and priority calls and get there faster," he explained. "It allows us to be proactive, to be preventive."

Bacy also pointed out the benefits for officers’ safety, as fewer officers are put in situations where their presence could escalate a crisis.

"I think that it allows us to not be the subject matter experts in certain situations that don't require our physical presence," he said. "Having people who are specifically trained to address people in crisis produces a better outcome at times. There will always be those times when life safety is an issue and we need to be a co-responder, a responder or a primary responder, and so we definitely want people to call us when that is the case."

Bacy added that in many situations, mental health professionals or the 988 crisis hotline are more appropriate resources than police.