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AltaPoint, Mobile Police partner use wrapped outreach vehicle to ease crisis response
Summary
A staff member with AltaPoint said the nonprofit and the Mobile Police Department have been using a newly wrapped outreach vehicle to better identify crisis responders, shorten stops by about 20 minutes and increase trust with people experiencing serious mental illness and homelessness.
A staff member with AltaPoint said the nonprofit has partnered with the City of Mobile and the Mobile Police Department to reduce how often law enforcement is the first responder for people with serious mental illness.
“For the last few years, we have partnered with the city of Mobile and MPD working to cut down on how often law enforcement is the first responders for our seriously mentally ill population,” the staff member said.
The staff member said the program uses a visibly marked outreach vehicle rather than an unmarked Tahoe, which previously caused bystanders to ask whether the team were police officers. “With just just a plain Tahoe, quite quite a few times we would show up and there would be questions as to whether or not we were actually law enforcement,” the staff member said. “Now it it definitely helps identify who we are and what we're trying to accomplish.”
The staff member described operational effects: “The vehicle, as you can see, aren't wrapped in our traditional police response unit. This takes about 20 minutes off of every stop. They trust us a little bit more. They realize, hey. He's not here to arrest me or kick me down the street.” They said the change has affected interactions with people experiencing homelessness, who now more often recognize the vehicle as a help resource: “When people bring up the homeless now, they see the truck and they're like, oh, cool. There is somebody trying to help.”
The staff member also said AltaPoint serves as an in-field touchpoint to reduce barriers to care: “AltaPoint provides me as in the field touchpoint. Hey. There's no barriers. You know, come with us and we will take you straight to the solution, and we will just tear down all those barriers for them.”
The remarks framed the effort as a collaborative response model: “As a police department with AltaPoint, we're trying to understand that the whole idea of law enforcement isn't that we're police officers so that we can respond to the mentally ill. We are the ones that show up regardless, and we can excel at that and be very good at that response,” the staff member said.
The transcript provided these comments as a discussion; it did not record any formal votes, policy changes, funding amounts, or implementation deadlines tied to the remarks.
