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The System Provides Wanted Attention for Unwanted Results: Community Policing Alternatives and the Case for Functional Replacement

A. C. Applebee, L. N. Combe · 2026

Abstract

Modern policing rests on an assumption that has never been tested against the data: that every public safety call requires an armed law enforcement response. Analysis of police call data across jurisdictions consistently shows that 70–90% of calls involve non-criminal situations — mental health crises, homelessness, substance use, welfare checks, noise complaints, neighbour disputes. The Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) program in Eugene, Oregon, has operated since 1989, deploying unarmed two-person crisis teams to these calls. In 35 years of operation, handling approximately 24,000 calls per year, CAHOOTS has killed zero people and requested police backup fewer than 150 times annually — less than 1% of calls. The program operates at roughly 2% of the police budget while handling 20% of all calls. This paper examines the evidence for community-based alternatives to armed policing. We review CAHOOTS in depth, alongside the STAR program (Denver), B-HEARD (New York), MACRO (Oakland), Crisis Intervention Teams, Australian Indigenous community policing models, and the Rojava Asayish system. We present cross-national comparisons of police use-of-force data, cost analyses, historical context on the origins of modern policing, and the psychological mechanisms by which community response systems outperform armed response.

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