When Angelenos face a situation that requires calling 911 — such as encountering a person in the throes of a mental health crisis — the first responders are usually firefighters or armed police officers.

But a new report suggests a third option holds promise for the future.

For the past year, Los Angeles has been testing a program that dispatches specially trained civilians who don’t carry guns in response to certain calls for help. The report released earlier this month by the city said the early results are encouraging.

“When deployed to non-violent, non-urgent calls for service, unarmed crisis responders have been shown to minimize the potential for escalation and address critical mental health emergencies in a manner that prioritizes compassion and safety,” the report said.

The use of so-called “unarmed crisis responders,” the report found, not only offers specialized care to people who need help — it also allows “LAPD more time to focus on traditional law enforcement efforts.”

The ongoing pilot program has teams of licensed clinicians, social workers, community workers and therapists who work in pairs, responding to calls around the clock, seven days a week. Over its first year, the program handled more than 6,700 calls, largely to conduct welfare checks and respond to reports of public intoxication and indecent exposure.

While the program’s workload of roughly 40 calls a day is still a fraction of what the LAPD handles, the report says it has already saved police nearly 7,000 hours of patrol time by freeing them up for other tasks. With the city’s police force struggling to fill its ranks, officials say such programs could have a larger role in the future.

The report does not touch on what impact, if any, the teams have had on low-level crimes in the areas they cover, but the hope is that it will ultimately make the city safer.

The outreach workers conduct follow-up visits after certain calls and offer specialized services to people who are willing to accept them, including mental health treatment and drug rehabilitation programs.

The Unarmed Model of Crisis Response, as the program is known, is one of two that city officials are operating. The other, called the CIRCLE program, operates out of the mayor’s office with its own call center and dedicated service areas.

Although some skeptics questioned whether unarmed civilians would too often be overmatched by the subjects they encounter, the recent report found that fewer than 4.1% of calls end up requiring police backup. Those cases typically involved individuals who insisted on having an officer present or who turned out to have weapons, the report said.

The findings come as advocates brace for billions in federal spending expected to be slashed from social safety net programs by the Trump administration. The looming cuts have renewed questions about how L.A.’s program and similar ones across the country will scale up and have more impact.

More than half of the calls that the unarmed responders handle involve some type of disturbance, with reports of a prowler or trespasser as the next most common category. On average, the teams take about 28 minutes to respond to a call, and once there they spend about 25 minutes on scene, according to the city’s recent report.

In one case, an unarmed responder team was dispatched to an apartment where a woman identified in the report as “Liz” had been behaving erratically. The team arrived to find her unit’s door open. The woman invited them inside and they saw evidence suggesting she may have overdosed while her gas stove was left on. After turning off the burners and opening windows to ventilate the apartment, the team contacted firefighters and stayed with the woman until they arrived. They eventually convinced her to go to a hospital to get checked out.

The civilian teams won’t go to calls that involve weapons or violence or a need for urgent medical attention. They also do not handle situations where minors are present or when there are three or more people involved in an incident.

Police department officials have said repeatedly that, despite increased crisis intervention training and new “less-lethal” weapons designed to incapacitate rather than kill, officers are not always equipped to handle mental health calls.

LAPD leaders have said in the past that they support the program, while cautioning that any call has the potential to quickly spiral into violence.

The program, run by the office of the city administrator, was initially rolled out to three police divisions spread across the city — Devonshire, Wilshire and Southeast — but has since expanded to three others: West L.A., Olympic and West Valley.

The unarmed responder program launched in March 2024 amid continued public frustration with the city’s handling of the intertwined issues of homelessness, substance abuse and mental health. Much of the criticism was leveled at the LAPD following a string of shootings and other use-of-force incidents that involved individuals experiencing crises.

So far in 2025, LAPD officers have shot 27 people. At least a third of those incidents involved someone who was experiencing a behavioral crisis, according to a Times analysis of incident reports and interviews with families of the people shot.

Efforts to ease the reliance on armed police for emergency responses have been around for years, with several new programs springing up since 2020, spurred by a nationwide movement to redirect law enforcement funding following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. Researchers have tracked more than 100 such programs across the U.S.

Despite showing promise, some city-run initiatives in Los Angeles have struggled to grow. Many similar programs across the country continue to face challenges around how to scale up.

The Los Angeles Fire Department ended its use of psychiatric mobile response teams in vans to calls around the city after officials said it didn’t actually free up first responders or hospital emergency rooms. Another plan to have unarmed Transportation Department workers conduct traffic stops — instead of police — has been dragging on for months.

Even so, proponents of the other ongoing programs are expressing cautious optimism.

“This data proves that care-first approaches work — they keep people safe, cost less, and prevent the expensive liabilities that drain our budget year after year,” City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said in a statement.

Hernandez, who represents neighborhoods on the city’s Eastside and co-chairs a council committee on unarmed responses, added, “I’m proud we’re showing that Los Angeles can expand our public safety ecosystem and save lives, save money, and invest in care instead of harm.”

Godfrey Plata, deputy director of the nonprofit group LA Forward, which has advocated for unarmed alternatives to police, said his organization was pleased with the growth of the program and the City Council’s willingness to increase its funding “even in a budget deficit year.”

With the World Cup and the Olympics on the horizon, the city must continue to explore ways to protect both locals and the large number of tourists expected to arrive for those events, Plata said.

“This is a cost-saving measure in addition to a life-saving measure,” Plata said. “It would be really great to have a system built out by then to be able to absorb the shock of our emergency management systems.”