Medical stethoscope positioned under closed metal handcuffs.
Amarachi Onyewuenyi is a public health science and biology major with a minor in political science. She is a 2025-26 health care ethics intern at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Views are her own.
If Black Lives Matter has revealed the dangers of policing for communities of color, why do police still serve as the default responders to mental health crises?
Recent racial justice reforms have renewed attention to how Black and Brown communities experience police involvement during moments of mental distress, revealing patterns that raise deeper ethical concerns about the role of law enforcement in health‑related encounters. When officers respond to these crises, their actions are shaped by institutional duties rooted in enforcement, compliance, and control. These viewpoints directly conflict with the moral obligations that crisis response calls for, particularly the duty to treat individuals as ends in themselves rather than as potential threats or criminal suspects.
This tension is most visible during encounters where mental distress is misinterpreted as defiance or danger, producing disproportionate harm to marginalized communities. Through a duty‑based ethics lens, these patterns suggest that police‑centered crisis response is structurally incompatible with ethical care. This raises a broader question: Can police serve as first responders to mental health crises when these encounters consistently result in unreasonable harm for individuals of color?
Why Do Systems Rely on Police to Respond to Mental Health Crises?
The United States has long depended on law enforcement as the default responders when someone is in distress, regardless of the underlying cause. This arrangement became apparent in the decades following the deinstitutionalization policies, when psychiatric hospitals closed without a corresponding investment in community‑based mental health services. As a result, many regions lacked the clinical infrastructure needed to support people experiencing acute psychological distress. Alongside this gap was the overall structure of the 911 dispatch system, which notoriously routes most crisis calls to police rather than specialized mental health treatment teams who could be better equipped to properly intervene. Over time, this standard has created a system in which officers—rather than trained clinicians—become the first point of contact for individuals in severe mental anguish.
For minority communities, this dynamic is further shaped by a broader history of racialized policing practices that frame certain characteristics as inherently suspicious or dangerous. Research consistently shows that Black Americans are highly targeted by aggressive police encounters, including unreasonable stops, searches, and uses of force, even when no crime was committed.
While these encounters can inflict immediate harm through aggressive tactics, the long-term effects of such authoritative mistreatment are equally significant. A 2017 correlational study found strong evidence that experiencing police mistreatment at least once in life was associated with elevated rates of anxiety, trauma symptoms, and other adverse mental health outcomes among African Americans.
What Happens When Mental Distress Is Treated as a Threat?
The ethical concerns surrounding police‑centered crisis response become clearer when examining encounters in which mental distress was wrongly interpreted through an enforcement lens. These cases, frequently referenced in racial justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, demonstrate how institutional duties of maintaining authority can often overshadow the moral obligations of care.
One case that has sparked national debate and is routinely cited by BLM advocates is the death of Sonya Massey. Massey had called 911 after she feared someone was attempting to break into her home, yet the responding deputy fatally shot her moments after arriving. Released footage shows that she appeared frightened and disoriented, and her family later shared that she had experienced a mental health crisis the day before the incident. Assessments of her case illustrate how implicit bias and rushed threat assessment can lead officers to misinterpret clear symptoms of distress, which in a clinical setting would be understood as indicators of vulnerability rather than danger.
A similar pattern appears in the death of D’Andre Campbell, a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia whose family called for help during a mental health crisis. Although Campbell remained inside his home and did not advance toward officers, police used lethal force within moments of arrival. Campbell’s case reflects a broader structural issue, where mental illness is wrongly filtered through an enforcement‑based framework, and behaviors linked to mental illness are routinely perceived as aggression.
What Ethical Duties Should Guide First Responders?
The severity of these cases reveals a deeper ethical problem: current crisis response models assign police responsibilities that conflict with the moral obligations owed to individuals, especially individuals of color with adverse psychological health. To better understand these challenges, it is important to consider how ethical theories like Kantian ethics might inform first responder duties.
Kantian ethics, originally developed by philosopher Immanuel Kant, is a central form of Deontological ethics that evaluates actions based on the duties they represent rather than their outcomes. At its core, Kantian ethics holds that moral actions must treat every person as an “end in itself” rather than simply a means to an end. Doing so treats all individuals as possessing an inherent dignity and establishes the principle of respecting that dignity.
Many components within this framework are especially relevant to crisis response. The duty to respect persons includes recognizing the humanity of individuals, even when they are in distress. Kantian ethics also prioritizes the duty to treat individuals as ends, requiring that the well-being and safety of an individual guide the interaction. Crises of racialized encounters also invoke an obligation to care for others, requiring patience, de-escalation, and a comprehensive understanding of how mental illness shapes behavior.
These duties contrast with the institutional principles that structure policing. A typical role in law enforcement prioritizes identifying potential threats and maintaining control, an orientation shaped by structural conditions that have historically associated Black and Brown individuals with heightened risk.
When officers arrive at a mental health crisis, these traditional standards are often the cause of misunderstandings and the use of undue force. This conflict is only exacerbated within marginalized communities, as racial disparities in police encounters involving mental illness continue to reveal patterns of racialized duty failures in which individuals of color are treated as potential threats rather than autonomous beings.
From a deontological standpoint, a current crisis response model that consistently violates these moral obligations, especially when those violations follow predictable racial patterns, cannot be considered morally permissible. Evaluating first responder roles through a Kantian framework shows that the duties of respect, care, and treating individuals as ends in themselves are not reliably upheld when crisis intervention is structured around enforcement.
What Would an Ethically Defensible Crisis Response Look Like?
Evaluating current crisis response models through a deontological framework clarifies not only where existing practices fall short, but also what an ethically defensible alternative must prioritize. A crisis response system that aligns with the duties of respect, care, and treating individuals as ends in themselves requires structural changes that shift the focus from enforcement to well-being.
One possible recommendation is the removal of police from crisis calls that don’t involve criminal activity. Research on community-based crisis intervention programs, such as the CAHOOTS model, exemplifies that non-police responders trained in mental health support can resolve the majority of crisis situations without force. Because these teams center their work on meeting an individual’s needs rather than asserting authority, they more closely reflect the deontological duties of care and respect for persons that should guide crisis intervention.
Expanding community-based organizations is another consideration for a solution grounded in deontological obligations. Crisis teams developed through the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model operate as a police adjacent approach, where officers receive training to better recognize signs of psychological distress and engage individuals through calmer, more informed communication. Alongside these programs, many cities have also implemented non police alternatives that dispatch unarmed, trained civilian crisis responders to calls involving non-criminal well-being concerns. Studies find that around 19 percent of 911 calls could be adequately handled by civilian teams without police involvement, illustrating how these distinct models offer different pathways for upholding duties of care and respect.
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
Can the use of police as first responders to mental health crises truly be justified when these encounters so often produce unreasonable harm for individuals of color? When enforcement meets distress, especially in communities highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement, the result is too often fear, escalation, or silence. If the moral obligation to treat individuals as an end is adhered to, crisis response must shift toward models rooted in care rather than control. A just system is one where seeking help does not endanger those who need it most.