When Lieutenant James Domine was getting his start with the Detroit Police Department in the late 1990s, he said, officers weren't taught how to respond to the mental health needs of the community around them.
Domine said officers just didn’t know how to deal with people who were having a mental health crisis.
“I came on the police department and early on I was shocked at how ill prepared most officers were with dealing with someone who was in crisis,” he said. “Not because they didn't care or they weren't trying to do the right thing. They just didn't have the right tools.”
It wasn’t indifference, said Domine — it was a lack of training and support.
He said Detroit police did the best they could with the tools they had, but they were only addressing immediate dangers to the public. It didn’t address any root causes or attempt to prevent problems in the future.
Now, Domine leads a team for the Detroit Police Department that he says puts the department far ahead of where it was in the '90s.
The Detroit Police Department’s centralized mental health co-response unit was established two years ago with 18 officers. It was an attempt to respond to the mental health needs of Detroit, with then-police Chief James White saying the city was in "a mental health crisis." Officers were responding to 40 mental health calls a day, on average. That number has been pretty consistent, with over 16,000 mental health responses in 2024 by early December.
The mental health unit's staff has more than doubled since 2022. It now has 25 officers, nine behavior specialists, and one case manager, in addition to two sergeants, plus Lieutenant Domine and Captain Tonya Leonard.
These officers have gone through crisis intervention training. They don’t wear a typical police uniform but instead don khakis and polo shirts. The police cars have green lights instead of the flashing blue and red.
But most importantly, Domine said, his officers know how to talk to people and defuse situations. And they have the training and knowledge to connect folks with the resources they need.
“We're teaching officers how to handle people in crisis, how to intervene, how to deescalate, how to verbally persuade and and help calm people down and how to identify when you're in crisis,” he said. “And it's amazing. I mean, there's times it still doesn't work, but quite a large percentage of the time it really does.”
The Detroit Police Department is responding to all kinds of mental health calls: some for folks going through crisis or dealing with mental health disorders like schizophrenia or depression. It can be domestic issues, or people threatening or attempting suicide.
And often, these folks aren’t happy to see police coming to intervene.
“Most of the time they see us coming when they're in crisis … and now it's added that they're fearful,” said Domine. “They see the police and they're scared, even though in our minds, we're coming there to help them.”
“They see us coming and they're like, 'they're going to throw me to the ground. They're going to hurt me.' And maybe sometimes they can't even identify who we are. So they get scared,” he said.
Detroit Police aren't working alone
The Detroit Police Department isn’t doing all of this work alone. It partners with the county mental health agency Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network, known as DWIHN (pronounced “dee-win”). In October, former DPD Chief James White, who helped start the mental health co-response units, left the department to become CEO of DWIHN.
The health network says it serves over 120,000 Detroit and Wayne County residents.
When a new DWIHN crisis care center in Detroit was announced earlier this year, White, who then was still police chief, said it was important because "many people in crisis have limited options available to them, often having repeated law enforcement contacts instead of receiving the care they deserve."
The facility "is a welcome addition to the important work that (police) do," White said.
Detroit’s not the only city in Southeast Michigan finding a growing need for mental health services in policing. The Oakland County Sheriff’s Department and Livonia Police Department both sometimes send mental health professionals to 911 calls, for example.
Alternatives to police
But the sheer volume of mental health calls in Detroit is leading some grassroots organizers to question whether a law enforcement response is really the answer.
That’s a question Grey Weinstein is trying to answer. They’re one of the people working on new ways to respond to mental health calls with methods that are specifically and intentionally detached from police interactions and forced hospital stays.
“We're all abolitionists. We all believe in the abolition of the prison industrial complex, and we see psych wards as a part of the prison industrial complex,” Weinstein said.
Weinstein is part of a group called Detroit Peer Respite. It’s currently fundraising to be able to offer at-home (or home-like), volunteer-based care for folks going through crisis.
Weinstein said even the best-intentioned police response to a mental health crisis still carries the risk of arrest or involuntary hospitalization.
“I came to this after a loved one of mine had a very scary experience of being incarcerated in a psychiatric ward against their will and seeing the way that their experience had them interacting with police,” Weinstein said. “And they were very violently taken into the psych ward against their will. And that interaction with police was just the beginning of their autonomy being overridden and not allowing them to have the right to consent or refuse treatment.”
Weinstein said that’s not a unique experience in Detroit. They said all of the people in Detroit Peer Respite have been directly affected by mental health crisis responses. That’s why they're trying to establish a system for people in crisis to get mental health resources at home or a home-like environment called a respite house.
But it’s expensive. Organizers with the group say it’ll cost $5,000 to support a 10-day stay in a respite house for a person going through a crisis. Volunteers would work around the clock, in 4-hour shifts, meaning that around 60 people would help support a person in crisis during their stay.
That’s not attainable yet. So for now, the group is still fundraising.
And Detroit Police are still responding to thousands of mental health calls each year and figuring out new ways to meet that need.
Captain Tonya Leonard said the department is making welcome changes after years of advocacy, especially recently.
“I am over the moon at the fact that we have this unit, that we have the ability to be able to have officers that are dedicated to respond to these types of calls, then have the specialized training and skills,” Leonard said.
Leonard said the unit’s goal is not to make arrests. It’s to help people get help.
Sometimes that starts with the response to a 911 call. The department has outreach coordinators in the call center to help identify mental health calls and get the right officers headed there.
Leonard said those officers’ responses look different based on the situation. Her team has flyers with resources for folks going through a crisis. Officers are trained to connect people to services, case workers, or hospitals if they feel treatment is needed.
Leonard says it’s meant to make a difference in the long term.
“Our hope is to be able to get people connected to the resources that they need and keep them connected to the resources they need so that we don't have that revolving cycle of them coming in and out of the 911 center or the response teams responding out. Certainly if there is a need, we're happy to do so. But we want to make sure that people are really getting the services, the help, the resources that they need.”
But both the community organizers and Detroit police agree: It’s going to take more than a law enforcement response to address the city’s mental health crisis.
