CAO: UMCR responded to 19,220 calls; committee concurs with phased expansion plan
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Summary
The CAO's office reported UMCR responded to 19,220 calls since March 2024, with average response times of about 27 minutes and 3.8% of calls escalated to LAPD. The committee concurred with the ad hoc recommendation to continue phased expansion and to seek prequalified vendors tied to the city budget cycle.
The City Administrative Officer's office told a City Council committee on Feb. 11 that the city's Unarmed Model of Crisis Response (UMCR) has handled 19,220 calls for service between March 12, 2024, and Feb. 4, 2026, and the committee voted to concur with an ad hoc recommendation to move forward with phased expansion.
Vanessa Willis, who presented the update, said UMCR teams average about 27 minutes to arrive and spend roughly 19 minutes on scene. "Only 3.8% of calls were redirected to LAPD for a higher level of intervention," Willis said, citing the program's call outcomes and triage. Willis described outcome categories such as "assisted on scene," "no crisis identified," and "gone on arrival," and said dispositions are recorded as codes rather than narrative case notes.
Willis outlined a 'pilot within a pilot' that tested LAFD call diversion to UMCR. She said LAFD estimates roughly 9,600 mental/emotional/psychiatric incidents and 8,600 unknown/person-down calls in its annual call load, and that about half of the person-down calls could be UMCR-eligible — "which brings the total to about 14,000 potential UMCR calls from LAFD annually." Between Sept. 2, 2025, and Feb. 3, 2026, Willis said LAFD diverted 143 calls to UMCR under the pilot arrangement.
Committee members raised operational questions. Willis said UMCR uses exclusionary criteria that require escalation to LAPD when violence, weapons, or groups larger than two are involved, and that UMCR responders will return a call to LAPD if they cannot obtain voluntary compliance. She also described dispatch arrangements: UMCR receives a clone of LAPD's CAD; when the clone is down communications staff call incidents to UMCR dispatch, which can reduce UMCR's call volume during outages. On data sharing, Willis said UMCR dispositions are copied back into LAPD's CAD as the final result but do not include narrative case notes.
Council members asked about coordination with county services. Willis said county FIT teams operate as consultative, countywide mobile resources with average response times she characterized as "about 2 and a half hours," and UMCR requests county assistance when acuity is beyond UMCR's scope. Willis described planned next steps: a request for qualifications to establish a pool of prequalified service providers tied to the June budget process, task order solicitations thereafter, and a July'August 2026 transition period to support launches following contract expirations.
After questions, the committee voted to concur with the ad hoc recommendation on UMCR. The clerk recorded the roll call and the item was approved by recorded vote.
