Pat,
While these changes may seem good on paper the reality is a different story. I'm a firefighter in a major metro area and have direct street-level experience with how things work in the field.
1) Sending mental health professionals/crisis response is a popular subject right now, but their realistic capabilities are severely limited. They can handle the most basic of mental health calls but anything involving real crisis/violence/hostile people is way out of their abilities
2) Saying that someone will still be responding to every type of call is a nice sugar coat. In reality, with no police responding with us to suicidal/psych/overdose to provide us cover, we will not be responding and I can guarantee you the "mental health team" will not be going either. It's already written POLICY effective 7/25/21 that we are to not respond if we cannot reasonably guarantee our safety. So yes, there will be many people in crisis getting no more help than what they can receive over the phone from 911.
3) Due to the above point, we now have to make the hard decisions on what are and are not comfortable with going in to. It's a roulette wheel on which time we're wrong and someone is hurt or killed. At the fire station we're seriously wondering how many EMS responders getting attacked/killed it will take to get this ridiculous law revoked.
If you want to see some more unintended consequences, you should check out the Pierce County Sheriff's Office facebook post from 7/29/21 regarding the homicide at Kohl's in Puyallup where a man was freshly murdered in the parking lot and was seen running away from the scene by witnesses but the K9 could not do a track on the suspect because they could not establish probable cause. Prior to the new law it was sufficient to have reasonable suspicion and they would have tracked. Now...not so much.
These laws may seem nice to those that are completely unaware of the realities of the streets, but for those of us that live it we know that there is a price that will be paid in blood.
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