Texas Has the Evidence, Now We Need the Leadership: Right Responder, Right Call
I kicked off the summer by following the evidence. In May, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend the 10th Annual American Society of Evidence-Based Policing Conference. For two days, law enforcement, researchers, and academics gathered to discuss the latest policing practices and advancements.
I learned about innovative ways police across the country are recruiting and retaining officers, deploying new technology, and implementing targeted crime-prevention strategies. But more than anything, I was reminded that the leaders most committed to evidence-based policing are also the ones asking a more fundamental question: How can we support officers, strengthen departments, and build safer communities? Then in early June, I was in Chicago for the Advancing the Field of Alternative Response Convening. There, I spent another two days hearing from elected officials, researchers, care specialists, and law enforcement leaders about how alternative response programs are improving their communities. These programs place behavioral-health specialists at the forefront of crisis response, allowing officers to focus time and resources on actual crime.
Panelists challenged us to think bigger: What if we dared to be innovative? Could we reimagine this work not as an alternative, but as an essential function of governance? Certified behavioral health professionals meeting people in crisis, officers freed to focus on real crime — is this not simply what we owe one another?
Back in Texas, that question followed me home. As interim hearings leading up to the 90th legislative session continue, the state’s criminal justice needs are becoming increasingly clear. Legislators have repeatedly focused on capacity and system functionality in criminal justice, behavioral health, and law enforcement. Testimony from law enforcement across the state echoes concerns from state legislators and from experts I heard in Washington and Chicago. Departments are facing a serious recruitment and retention crisis driven by moral injury — the psychological harm officers sustain when repeatedly forced to act against their own values, such as responding to crises they're neither trained nor equipped to resolve — burnout, and financial barriers to entering the profession.
Interim committees have spent hours discussing the need to respond more effectively and efficiently to low-level offenses connected to behavioral health, mental health, homelessness, and poverty. Some recommendations called for greater criminalization through measures such as enforcing the statewide encampment ban, enhancing misdemeanors to state jail felonies, and terminating the use of pre-adjudication diversion programs. Others urged the state to better understand the intersection of behavioral health, public safety, housing, and the services municipalities can and cannot provide. These recommendations include expanding multi-disciplinary response teams, training telecommunicators in crisis intervention, and increasing mental health beds across the state.
As I sat there listening to the hearings, my time this summer with law enforcement leaders, researchers, and community-based responders made one thing clear: the latter approach is evidence-based.
Research shows that even a short stay in jail can have lasting detrimental consequences for employment, housing, and access to higher education. For example, a person detained pretrial on a misdemeanor is 25% more likely to plead guilty and 43% more likely to be sentenced to jail.1 What’s more, in Texas, even an arrest or charge that never leads to a conviction will show up on a criminal background check.2 That means someone who is unsheltered and charged with criminal trespass may leave jail with yet another barrier to accessing housing. And the cycle repeats itself.
Individuals are not the only ones bearing a cost. Taxpayers are funding an expensive cycle that repeatedly fails to address the underlying problem. According to the Executive Vice President for Health and Public Safety at the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, local governments in Texas spend approximately $3.2 billion annually responding to about 18,500 high-need individuals.3
Recent hearings have also highlighted the fiscal burden on counties and the state. In Dallas County, judges have estimated that housing one person costs the county approximately $96 a day. For a population of 7,000 people, that amounts to roughly $672,000 in jail bed expenses alone.4 The same cases also generate repeated costs for police, emergency medical services, hospitals, courts, and jails. As the President of the Sheriff’s Association of Texas, who testified that “pre-arrest diversion is the most effective strategy to reduce jail bookings and connect individuals to care, but diversion resources are uneven across the state. Many counties lack rapid access response care, mobile crisis teams, crisis respite or drop-off centers, and 24/7 behavioral health support.”5
Across the country, communities are investing in programs that make behavioral health professionals first responders to crises. Where communities have invested, the burden on law enforcement and the courts has decreased, while outcomes for people in crisis have improved.
One year after New Orleans launched their Mobile Crisis Intervention Unit, their teams were able to divert 30% of mental health-related calls away from law enforcement.6 In St. Louis, a partnership between the police department and Behavioral Health Response saved approximately 2,000 hours of officer time and prevented 750 hospitalizations in a single year.7 In 2023, 98.7% of cases resulted in a jail diversion.8 Over a three-year period, Chicago’s CARE teams responded to over 1,500 calls, which resulted in no arrests, and where use of force occurred in less than .1% of calls.9
Right here in Texas, Harris County’s HART program has responded to over 30,000 calls in the four years since it has been operating and expanding.10 Of these calls, 21% were related to mental health, 33% were related to homelessness, and 20% involved people with ‘active Medicaid or belief of eligibility’.11 All instances in which the police were never needed. And in Austin, through its partnership with Integral Care, the city integrated trained mental health professionals into its 911 dispatch system. The program has reduced officer time on scene by more than 50% and has also produced significant decreases in use-of-force incidents, arrests, and hospitalizations.12
Texas Appleseed’s own research highlights the significant need to reduce reliance on law enforcement for these calls.13 We analyzed national data across nine cities over two years — a total of 12.9 million calls for service. We found that the third-largest category of calls, at 11%, was wellness and medical. That includes emergency medical calls, welfare checks, homelessness, mental health calls, and reports of self-harm. Of the 1.4 million calls law enforcement responded to in this category, 44.4%, or about 628,000 calls, were specifically related to wellness and mental health.
In Austin, mental health/wellness calls account for about 17,281 calls per year, and officers spend about 71 minutes per call (that includes response time and on-scene time), totaling roughly 20,500 officer hours annually (the equivalent of 10 full-time officers).14 More than half of these calls resulted in no report or police action, while over a third led to a written report.
In Fort Worth, mental health/wellness calls account for roughly 14,400 calls per year. Law enforcement spends, on average, 90 minutes traveling to and responding on-scene per call. That amounts to over 22,600 hours of officer time being dedicated to responding to calls for wellness and mental health checks (the equivalent of 11 full-time officers).15
Together, these findings show the scale of the opportunity before us. Texas communities are dedicating tens of thousands of officer hours to calls that often do not require an arrest, a criminal investigation, or any other traditional police action.
A behavioral health-led response is not a soft-on-crime or anti-law-enforcement response. It is an evidence-based public safety strategy that responds directly to the problems Texas leaders have identified: officer shortages, jail overcrowding, court backlogs, unmet behavioral health needs, the growing unsheltered population, and strained local budgets.
Judge Autry put it best: “Communities are not getting safer. People are not getting better. The same calls keep coming in. The same officers respond, and the same offenders return to jail. We cannot arrest ourselves out of this situation.”16
For the safety and dignity of all Texans, we must answer the growing need for mental health treatment with tools that actually match the problem. Approximately 37% of people in state and federal prisons, and 44% of people in local jails have a mental illness.17 Since 2015, people with a known mental illness have accounted for 21% of those killed by police, underscoring the need for crisis response systems that connect people to appropriate care before encounters escalate.18 Mental illness is not a crime, but our shortage of treatment options turns law enforcement into the default responder for a job the system never resourced them to do.
Good leadership in public safety means having the courage to follow the evidence, the conviction to invest in what works, and the vision to build systems that keep communities safe without asking police to solve every crisis alone. Texas has no shortage of that leadership — sheriffs, legislators, and advocates already pushing for better-resourced crisis response. As I settle back in to prepare for the upcoming legislative session, I am excited to work with them.
1 Heaton, P., Mayson, S. & Stevenson, M. (2017). The downstream consequences of misdemeanor pretrial detention. Stanford Law Review, 69, 711-794.
2 Tex. Bus & Com § 20.05 Retrieved from https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/BC/htm/BC.20.htm#20.05.
3 Intergovernmental Affairs Committee Meeting. (2026, June 24). [Video]. Texas Legislature Online. https://house.texas.gov/videos/22726; B.J. Wagner with the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute testifying.
4 Intergovernmental Affairs Committee Meeting. (2026, June 24). [Video]. Texas Legislature Online. https://house.texas.gov/videos/22726; Judge Steven Autry with Dallas County Criminal District Courts testifying.
5 Senate Health and Human Services Committee Meeting. (2026, July 7). [Video]. Texas Legislature Online. https://senate.texas.gov/videoplayer.php?vid=22729&lang=en; Brian Hawthorne with the Texas Sheriff’s Association testifying.
6 Resources for Human Development. (2024). New Orleans Mobile Crisis Intervention Unit: 1-year evaluation. https://www.rhd.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/MCIU-1-year-evaluation-FINAL.pdf
7 Phillips, N. (2023, September 5). “Cops and clinicians” seems to be working. St. Louis Magazine. https://www.stlmag.com/news/solutions/cops-clinicians-purple-shirts-CRU/
8 Behavioral Health Response. (2023). Annual Report 2023. https://bhrstl.org/docs/2023BHRAnnualReport.pdf
9 CBS Chicago. (2025, January 10). Chicago’s CARE program expands to provide alternative response to mental health crises.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/care-program-mental-health-response-team-expansion/
10 Harris County Public Health. (n.d.). Holistic Assistance Response Teams. https://publichealth.harriscountytx.gov/About/Divisions/Community-Health-and-Violence-Prevention-Services/Holistic-Assistance-Response-Teams
11 Ibid.
12 Integral Care. (2025, May 27). Austin Redefines 911 Crisis Response [Press release]. https://integralcare.org/en/news-room-in-the-news/2025
13 Data on file with Texas Appleseed.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Intergovernmental Affairs Committee Meeting. (2026, June 24).[Video]. Texas Legislature Online. https://house.texas.gov/videos/22726; Judge Steven Autry with Dallas County Criminal District Courts testifying.
17 Center for Policing Equity. (2023). The relationship between policing and mental health crises: Recommendations for responding to behavioral health emergencies. https://policingequity.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/CPE-WhitePaper-MentalHealth.pdf
18 Ibid.