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Wilson Harding lives in the leafy southeast Portland, Oregon, neighborhood known as Westmoreland Park, home of Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden and Eastmoreland Golf Course, and adjacent to Reed College, a fiercely liberal and storied private university. Harding can be found most days pushing his worldly possessions in a shopping cart up and down 28th Avenue, a winding road that separates the university campus and the entrance to the garden. 

Harding, a pseudonym to protect his identity, is known as one of the friendliest people in the neighborhood. However, Crystal Springs employees have had to develop tactics for dealing with Harding’s sometimes eccentric, mercurial theatrics. 

Every day, Harding uses the Crystal Springs water fountain to fill his plastic water jugs and makes regular use of the garden’s portable bathroom. Around the third day of each month, Harding donates around $300 in cash to the garden. Despite employees’ insistence that he save his money, Harding won’t hear it. If his money is refused, he becomes agitated, throwing dollar bills through the gatehouse window slot until he receives a receipt. 

Last summer, during one of the heat waves now becoming more common in the region, Portland Street Response (PSR) was called to the garden to attend to Harding, who was visibly suffering from a heat stroke in the parking lot. PSR administered basic care, including fluids and snacks to boost his energy levels. However, despite their best efforts, the team could not convince Harding to consent to hospitalization. He spent the rest of the day recovering on a stone bench outside the garden. 

The potentially lifesaving care administered to Harding illustrates the importance of PSR, Portland’s first non-police first responder program formed in 2021 primarily to assist people experiencing mental and behavioral health crises. However, inside the public safety sphere of city government, the group is often sidelined, revealing a broader misunderstanding and lack of respect for alternative public health and safety systems.

A delicate balance

After years of police shootings and misconduct, PSR was formed largely at the behest of then-Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who was spurred by the 2020 uprisings focused on racial justice, police accountability, and alternatives to police. In recent years, PSR’s effectiveness and the trust the program has built in the community have risked erosion due to Portland’s shifting political landscape, particularly after Hardesty’s replacement, Rene Gonzalez, ordered Portland Fire and Rescue and PSR to participate in encampment sweeps and end their practice of distributing tents and tarps to people living outdoors. However, other members of Portland’s newly expanded city council see the value in PSR. 

City Councilors Sameer Kanal and Angelita Morillo, both of whom sit on the Community and Public Safety Committee, told Prism that they see PSR as an integral part of providing effective community safety. They also want to see the group expand to 24/7 availability in the city. Currently, PSR operates from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week. 

Morillo pointed to a Portland State University (PSU) study on PSR that framed the group as the blueprint for effective, unarmed crisis response. “It is a highly effective use of taxpayer dollars,” said Kanal.

During March public safety committee meetings, City Council members discussed the potential for diverting calls historically responded to by the police to PSR or Community Health Assess and Treat (CHAT), the medical call response team housed within Portland Fire and Rescue.  

As part of Portland Mayor Keith Wilson’s proposed 2025-2026 budget, PSR would expand to hire 14 additional team members. The proposal was on the heels of another PSR expansion that occurred in the spring following recommendations issued as part of the PSU report that called for allowing the group to shuttle people to homeless shelters and addiction treatment centers, respond to calls that occur inside commercial and government buildings, and respond to emergencies in partnership with other first responders, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.  

Expanding PSR’s services and scope of work is a delicate balance. The program has cultivated community trust by virtue of not being police and not responding in tandem with police. Coupling the group’s work with other local agencies requires careful consideration. Another local unarmed public safety response team provides a model for how to navigate the complexities of this work. 

In crisis

Down Interstate 5 from Portland, Eugene’s Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) has been the standard for unarmed response teams for more than 30 years.

CAHOOTS pioneered an effective and targeted approach to public safety, public health, and behavioral crisis response. Unlike Portland Street Response and other recent models, CAHOOTS was a bottom-up development that met people before they interacted with law enforcement or were referred from probation or parole. 

First initiated by White Bird Clinic, an essential service provider of medical, mental, and behavioral health services, CAHOOTS’ original model was simple: One van and two responders, with one trained in mental health response and the other with the more traditional skills of an EMT. As of November 2024, CAHOOTS Program Coordinator Justin Madeira told Prism that they employed 35 people, the organization’s “functional bare minimum.” 

Broadly, retaining qualified mental health professionals can be challenging, in part because of the certification process. Madeira told Prism that Oregon-trained mental health responders are very attractive candidates for jobs that pay far better than CAHOOTS.

Making the group’s work more challenging, Eugene lost one of its only emergency rooms in 2024. The closure meant that patients in need of emergency room services had to drive about 30 minutes away to Springfeld’s PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend. 

While CAHOOTS’ work has been chronically underfunded, in recent months, the challenges became insurmountable, and in April, the response team abruptly called it quits. 

Madeira told Prism that the underlying problem was funding, a longstanding issue worsened by changes in city leadership. “Eugene and Springfield arrived at different reimbursement rates with different previous leaders negotiating these contracts separately,” Madeira explained. “Eugene’s rate was not enough to fund daily operations fully, and White Bird made up the ‘difference.’” However, White Bird also faced a funding crisis this year that was triggered by the Trump administration’s funding cuts, making it impossible for the organization to help CAHOOTS make up for the difference.  

Instead of continuing to operate with limited services two days a week for 12 hours a day, the city of Eugene alleged that White Bird Clinic was in violation of its city contract and terminated the relationship, Madeira said. Though CAHOOTS still operates in Springfield, an institution for public health, safety, and crisis disappeared for Eugene residents. 

CAHOOTS’ work became so ingrained in how the city of Eugene operated that one local resident, who asked to be anonymous due to the sensitive nature of their work, was shocked to learn that unarmed crisis response teams are a novelty in other areas. “You mean other cities don’t have a version of CAHOOTS already in place?” they said to Prism.

Eugene, a city of about 178,000 people, now joins cities nationwide that are lacking an alternative to armed public safety responders. 

Real public safety 

At the base of the Sandia Mountains, one Southwestern city has managed to support a thriving unarmed response team: Albuquerque, New Mexico.  

While operating in a different cultural, geographical, and societal makeup than Portland, the police force in both cities was previously under a Department of Justice consent decree for police killings and use of force. Albuquerque’s decree was lifted last year, and the city is now in full compliance with federal oversight and mandates. 

As the compliance efforts were underway, the Albuquerque Community Safety (ACS) formed in 2021. ACS is an unarmed response team operating as an essential branch of the city’s public safety unit. 

The organization operates out of one of the city’s densest and poorest neighborhoods on San Mateo Boulevard SE, away from the police department downtown or near city hall. Known as the International District by some and “the war zone” by others, the location of ACS is intended to convey the group’s commitment to public safety, health, and wellness in a holistic, community-centered way. 

ACS currently has 114 employees; the number of employees may soon rise again, as the group is budgeted to employ 141 people. Not all who work for the organization are behavioral health specialists.

Among the unionized workforce, there are also employees who perform street outreach, interacting with unhoused community members to improve how essential services and resources are provided.

“We are not the homeless police,” said ACS Deputy Director of Field Operations Walter Adams. “When we started, there was this idea that we were created to end homelessness.”

According to ACS Director of Community Safety Jodie Esquibel, the group’s mission is to respond to behavioral health crises alerted through 911 calls. Esquibel told Prism, “We understand that homelessness is a complex issue which will take the entire community to help address.”

Part of the community-wide response ACS facilitates starts with its violence prevention and intervention units, which aim to address cycles of violence and crime that often lead people to live on the street. Some of the organization’s peer-support specialists were previously incarcerated, enabling them to operate as credible messengers to the people they help. 

ACS’ school-based Violence Intervention Program operates out of West Mesa and Atrisco Heritage High Schools, with plans to expand to other public schools and provide more mentorship and resources to at-risk youth.

As part of their Community-Oriented Response and Assistance, ACS also has crisis responders who provide healing and continued outreach in communities that have experienced traumatic events such as shootings. 

Their second campus, scheduled to open later this summer, is situated on Albuquerque’s Southwest side, one of the fastest-growing areas in the city.

One of the group’s keys to success, according to Esquibel, is ACS’ working relationship with the Albuquerque Police Department (ADP). 

“Every community is going through something different, but we wanted to work with our police department and not against it,” she said. She noted that not only is ACS an integral component of public safety, but the group also reduces law enforcement’s caseload. 

ACS’s budget for 2025 is $19.36 million. Portland Street Response’s proposed budget for 2025-26 is around $10 million. When compared to the police budgets in their respective cities, these figures are modest, but they also show a difficult dynamic that unarmed response teams often navigate: The armed divisions of public safety units often grow alongside them. 

In 2021, the year ACS was formed, the Albuquerque Police Department budget was $180 million. The police’s proposed 2026 budget is $275 million. In Portland, the police budget was $230 million in 2021, the same year PSR formed. The proposed Portland police budget for 2025-2026 is $318 million. 

For Greg Townley, lead researcher and author of the PSR evaluation through PSU, these expansions “don’t make sense philosophically or financially.” If unarmed response teams are true co-equal branches of the public safety sphere to shoulder some of the load traditionally reserved for the police, then continuing to expand police budgets is a questionable practice to pursue, he added. 

People like Wilson Harding are often harmed, harassed, or otherwise surveilled by armed responders. Every time a trained, unarmed responder can answer a call regarding a mental or behavioral health crisis, it lessens the likelihood of state violence. Yet, despite these so-called reforms, multiple organizations that track police killings found 2024 to be the deadliest year in the last decade. 

True alternatives to policing require significant investment in public housing, public health care through community-based care providers, public parks and green spaces, and public education. Without the expansion of services that actually aid in public safety, advocates say that reforms in the shape of unarmed response teams are just the latest ruse to hide inflated police budgets.

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor