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City Presents Results of Unarmed Crisis-Response Pilot; Committee Approves Expansion
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Summary
Office of the chief administrative officer reported the city’s unarmed crisis-response pilot has handled more than 19,000 calls since 2024, reduced police referrals to a small share of cases, and the committee voted to adopt the program expansion plan with phased rollout tied to the June budget cycle.
The Los Angeles City Public Safety Committee on Feb. 11 received an update on an experimental municipal unarmed crisis-response model and voted to adopt the committee’s recommendation to expand the pilot to additional zones.
Vanessa Huila of the office of the chief administrative officer told the committee the pilot has handled "más de 19,000 llamadas" from 2024 through 2026, with an approximate time to answer of 27 minutes and typical on-scene engagement of about 19 minutes. Huila said many callers are connected to follow-up services without police involvement and that fewer than 4 percent of calls were referred to police in the period cited.
Huila described five categories of calls the model targets, including suicidal ideation, non-emergency medical problems (for example, medication lapses), psychotic episodes needing therapy rather than emergency medical response, welfare checks and other behavioral-health incidents. She emphasized exclusions for calls involving violence, weapons, or multiple individuals; those incidents are routed to police.
The presentation traced the pilot’s phased rollout: southeast Los Angeles launched in September, Devonshire and Olympic zones began in November, and the West Valley and Wilshire zones will start accepting calls on Feb. 17. Huila said vendor hiring and staffing depend on budget approval in June, with vendor selection and transition work anticipated in July–August 2027.
Committee members asked detailed operational questions about CAD outages and call-routing, interagency coordination with county public-health teams and follow-up procedures for callers. Huila said communications leadership has been engaged where CAD outages redirected calls, that coordinators use an HMS record system to view notes and that staff are working to improve data flows and safeguards.
After discussion, the committee voted to adopt the recommendation on the unarmed crisis-response model; the roll-call shows Councilmember Lee and Councilmember Price voted yes, Concejal Oscar was absent for that vote, and Councilmember Soto Martínez and Councilmember Park voted yes, with the measure approved by the recorded votes shown.
