In its first year, Los Angeles's Unarmed Model of Crisis Response handled over 20,000 calls that might have once brought armed police officers to people at their most vulnerable — and about 96% of those encounters were resolved without any police or fire department involvement at all.
This matters because one of the most fraught questions in American policing is how cities respond to mental health crises. A 2024 LAist investigation found that nearly one-third of LAPD shootings since 2017 involved someone living with mental illness or experiencing a mental health crisis. Los Angeles decided to try something different: sending trained clinicians instead.
Since launching in 2024, UMCR has expanded across nine police divisions — Devonshire, Wilshire, Southeast, West L.A., Olympic and West Valley — working through partnerships with three nonprofit organizations: Exodus Recovery, Alcott Center and Penny Lane Centers. The crisis response workers are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They arrive trained in de-escalation, mental health, substance use and conflict resolution. They don't carry weapons and can't order psychiatric holds, but they can spend time with people in crisis, connect them to local resources, and follow up in ways that law enforcement typically cannot.
The results speak for themselves. In just the program's first year, the clinician teams responded to more than 6,700 calls for service, from mental health crises to welfare checks. Average response times stayed under 30 minutes. The interactions ranged from taking food to a woman who was crying and hungry, to working with a business owner to help engage with someone sleeping in a parking lot, to sitting with a family for nearly three hours to help resolve a conflict involving a relative. Only about 4% of calls needed to be redirected to police.
The Los Angeles City Council's newly approved budget now includes funding to expand UMCR significantly. The program will grow from nine police divisions to 15 by June 2027, though city officials have not yet announced which six additional divisions will be selected. "In a year where many programs continue to fight for service funding from the city, it's so great that we are able to continue prioritizing this," said Godfrey Plata, deputy director of the LA Forward Institute, a progressive policy advocacy group.
Support extends beyond the city council. In recent budget hearings, the Los Angeles Fire Department expressed enthusiasm for the program, which it has worked with since September 2025 to divert calls away from fire first responders. In March alone, UMCR took 144 calls that would otherwise have gone to LAFD. "We've found them to be an incredible asset and ally to addressing some of the issues in the field," LAFD Chief Jaime Moore told council members.
City officials are eyeing an even bolder vision: expanding UMCR citywide by the 2028 Olympics. With the current expansion to 15 divisions by June 2027, the program would need to move into six more divisions to blanket the entire city. That ambition suggests Los Angeles is willing to invest in a model that treats mental health crises as public health matters rather than police matters — and the numbers so far suggest that bet is paying off.