A mental health crisis should not be a death sentence. Between one-third and one-half of people killed by police are experiencing a mental health crisis on a national level, and Hawaii is hardly exceptional on this front. Just last year, a jury awarded over $2 million to the family of Delmar Espejo, a disabled homeless man who was shot in the back by a deputy sheriff at the state Capitol in 2019. For too many of our neighbors — especially Black, Pacific Islander, Indigenous, houseless, disabled and LGBTQIA+ folks — actions of “help” bring harm and reactivations of trauma either through arrest or otherwise.
In response to growing concern around mental health crises, state and local nonprofits have embraced crisis intervention training (CIT) — a voluntary 40-hour program to help officers better manage crises. But fewer than 20% of HPD officers have completed CIT.
Meanwhile, trained mental health professionals typically spend years mastering the complex skills needed to provide safe, effective care and are vastly underresourced. Why are we settling for CIT as the default official and financed alternative? Armed law enforcement officers are not the best first response for addressing those who are experiencing a mental health crisis.
There has been slow movement toward truly independent, community-led crisis response systems. Oahu has experimented with an alternative called CORE (Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement), which responds to nonviolent, houseless-related 911 calls. But as of February 2025, all its respite centers — which only serve up to 62 people — were at full capacity. Former employees have shared concerns about how social work is sidelined in favor of EMT services, limiting long-term solutions for those they serve.
Advocates have put in decades of work, but failure of the state’s politics, access to public ßeducation around crisis response, and lack of trust in culturally-rooted crisis solutions have led us to where we are now. However, there is hope.
We can build infrastructure outside of policing entirely. We can look to Black-led, community-driven models like the Anti Police-Terror Project’s Mental Health First, which trains residents to respond to crisis situations without involving police. We can resource local organizations already providing peer support, street outreach and culturally grounded care.
But we must also ask the hard questions:
>> Who controls crisis dispatch on Oahu? And can that control be shifted away from police unions and carceral interests?
>> Is 40 hours of crisis-response training adequate to understand the intricacies of mental health, emotional or other crises?
>> Who is shaping these systems — and are they accountable to those most impacted?
>> Are we centering the voices of houseless people, drug users, disabled folks, sex workers, survivors and those navigating the intersections of survival and stigma?
Rather than answer these hard questions, the state is pushing its carceral expansion agenda. The state proposes to increase incarceration with the building of a $1 billion jail, allocating $30 million for planning this fiscal year alone — unless Gov. Josh Green uses his line-item veto. The new jail is being pitched to ease overcrowding at Oahu Community Correctional Center, but nearly 40% of people in our jails are houseless. Having police respond to crisis calls only creates a pipeline to jails and cyclically criminalizes homelessness.
Instead of continuing to pour millions into policing, jails and prisons, we can invest in what actually keeps us safe: accessible mental health care for all, peer support, community-led mobile crisis teams, housing, harm reduction and community education. The folks doing this work on the ground need to be at the table — not as consultants, but as leaders.
We already have the tools and knowledge. What we need now is the courage to interrupt criminalization and reimagine what safety truly looks like. We deserve a future where our neighbors in crisis are met with care and culturally rooted interventions, not control. We deserve systems built by and for our communities — systems rooted in healing, dignity, accountability — and we have the power to do it.
It’s time to stop managing crises with cages and start meeting them with compassion.
Community organizer Keke Walker is part of local efforts to create grassroots, noncarceral crisis response systems rooted in healing justice, such as the Reimagining Public Safety in Hawaiʻi Coalition.
