Parrot: Mental Crisis Response

Jonathan Sawyer

Mental Illness impacts 20 to 40 percent of the population in the United States, and when people experience a mental health crisis, police are the primary responders. This is due to a severe lack of mental health resources and funding that has caused the treatment of mental crises to shift onto the Justice system, rather than state hospitals or community clinics. Mental health altercations with police often lead to outcomes that are disciplinary in nature, with the person in crisis arrested, forcibly hospitalized, or in some cases, killed by police. In 2016, of the 963 people killed by police, 241 of those people had a mental illness. [1] It is imperative to establish better guidance for family, friends, and loved ones responding to a mental health crisis. By developing a new model to help people who are experiencing mental illness, it is possible to refute the assumption that mental crises are all dangerous?

Only six cities in the United States send teams of mental health workers to respond to scenarios involving a person in crisis instead of police officers. The results of these programs are highly effective but have yet to be adopted in a majority of the United States. It could be a long time before 18,000 police departments throughout the United States change how they respond to mental health crises. However, the mobile app, Parrot, is designed for civilians to directly request mental health workers. Parrot addresses the problem on a national scale instead of only in a city or state. It is instrumental to break down the stigma against people with a mental illness, who are often labelled as dangerous and unpredictable. This negative stigma directly translates to how police deal with mental health crises, and how the general public justifies these violent encounters. According to Michel Foucault, punishment for a crime shifted from a public spectacle to long sentences in the confines of a jail cell, resulting in inmates becoming “out of sight, out of mind”. [2] Thirty-five percent of the inmate population in Colorado have a mental illness [3]; this won’t improve without an ethical response to mental health crises.

Experiencing a mental health crisis shouldn’t be met with a jail cell. However, when a person in crisis is unnecessarily met with police officers, this often results in more individuals with mental illnesses being placed in the criminal justice system. Prison shouldn’t be the primary course of action when someone is having a mental health crisis. These situations need to be responded to with a path to resolution and treatment, not punishment. Families, friends, and loved ones must have proper alternatives to armed police response when experiencing a mental crisis.

[1] Michele P. Bratina, et al., “Crisis intervention team training: when police encounter persons with mental illness,” Police Practice and Research 21, no. 3 (2020): 283, DOI: 10.1080/15614263.2018.1484290.

[2] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, Inc., 1977) 9.

[3] Colorado Health Institute, Responding to Behavioral Health Needs: An Evaluation of the Colorado Office of Behavioral Health’s Co-Responder Program (Denver, CO: 2020).