Absolutely, I don't think the level of experience or training with mental health issues is consistent among police. Innocent people have died because of officers refusal to commit an individual that was having a mental health crisis. I think a team like this (with police present to execute a 5150) would have been successful in this instance.

https://www.10news.com/news/team-10/body-camera-video-shows-...

Maybe the 3-4 people in Denver are fine. The issues come with scaling this up nation wide to where you have tens of thousands of variously trained "health professionals" where outcomes will not necessarily match what you're seeing in a pilot where they obviously handpicked competent people to run it...

We already have this in the form of child protective services. Social workers are plentiful and paid quite poorly for a degreed professional. Cops with GEDs and social workers with bachelors degrees make very comparable salaries. For an extra 5 grand or so you can get one with a masters degree. So there's no sane reason to hire variously trained "health professionals" with scare quotes. The really tough part is getting tens of thousands of independent, ossified bureaucracies onboard with the idea of and giving up/redirecting some of their responsibilities/power/budget.

Simply require a healthy percentage of staff be program successes. People who have been there and have come back.

Those people will know how this all needs to work in order to do the healthy, hard, very human work required.

They know stuff, hard earned, rough miles type stuff, that is both necessary and not taught effectively in any school other than when the bell rings at the fine school of hard knocks.

Naysayers should work at, or observe one of these programs in action before coming to conclusions. I have this experience and know those people and what they can do. Think of them as the immune system to defend against the potential disease discussed above.