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Since CAHOOTS stopped operating in Eugene in April 2025, our community has been left with a gap in care. We can see this gap when we look at 911 dispatch data. In comparison to Springfield, where CAHOOTS remains in service, the per capita number of welfare check calls coming in through Eugene’s police dispatch has significantly decreased.
Welfare checks represent a wide range of calls, from help for someone sleeping outside who is too cold, to someone experiencing psychosis, to an elderly neighbor who is not answering their door. Each call that is not made represents a person who might not be OK, but for whom no help is sent. It also represents one person who cares but is unable to take effective action. What’s driving this change?
We are University of Oregon researchers who have studied what has happened since CAHOOTS’ services ended in Eugene. Our findings, through an analysis of public data and interviews with residents and authorities, suggest that this gap can’t be filled by Mobile Crisis Services of Lane County or the Eugene Police Department, despite the important work they do in our community.
Since August 2024, Mobile Crisis Services has been operating across all of Lane County, and is designed to exclusively address acute behavioral health concerns. Community members had often considered them to be interchangeable with CAHOOTS.
But when it comes to welfare checks, they’re not. One resident, concerned about someone in a park, recalled to us their experience contacting Mobile Crisis Services:
“They asked me if I had first called the police to do a welfare check. … That bothered me. I’m calling the crisis response because I don’t want the police to come out.”
This response reflects a more limited scope in Mobile Crisis Services’ model. Because they are not designed to respond to calls for welfare checks, they might direct callers to the only other option, the police.
Historically, even when CAHOOTS was operating here, Eugene police handled about 50% of welfare-check calls in Eugene. But the mission and organizational model of CAHOOTS, which combines medical expertise with trauma-informed crisis work, means they are uniquely equipped to provide the kind of broad community care required for welfare checks.
Eugene police officers themselves acknowledged this difference in CAHOOTS’ respective specialties to us:
“Most officers at EPD can’t imagine what it would be like to do police work without CAHOOTS. … People who come here from other agencies are like, ‘This is slick. I’ve never seen the ability to actually have a warm handoff of a person that clearly isn’t appropriate for fire or police.’”
And this idea — that there are some calls not appropriate for police response — is shared by the community. Time and again in interviews with us, Eugene residents shared that they hesitate to call for a welfare check knowing police, rather than CAHOOTS, will respond.
“I called CAHOOTS a number of times for people down. I observed CAHOOTS, I never had to worry about them … they have far more training than police officers. Police should not be answering these calls.”
There are numbers to back this instinct up. In Eugene, after CAHOOTS ended service, the per-capita number of welfare check calls that ended in arrest went up significantly in comparison to Springfield, where CAHOOTS is still operating.
So where does this leave us? We argue that it leaves us with a community that’s impoverished in two ways. The first is more obvious: If there are fewer welfare check calls coming in, and more calls ending in arrest, fewer people are receiving care, and more people in crisis are interacting with the criminal justice system.
The second is more subtle: We have a community where people who want to help their neighbors are stymied, either because they call Mobile Crisis Services of Lane County for a welfare check, which the organization can’t respond to, or because they avoid calling Eugene police out of a belief that it may harm the person they’re trying to help.
Eugene leadership should prioritize restoring a mobile crisis program that operates on the CAHOOTS model and support our community’s efforts to continue caring for each other. Not for nostalgia and not because CAHOOTS is a national model for crisis response, but because it works: Recent UO research finds that CAHOOTS is associated with positive outcomes for individual well-being, public safety and the allocation of police resources.
Similar findings are coming from communities across the country that are implementing the CAHOOTS model of mobile crisis response.
As a community, we are unique in that we have decades of knowledge about how to care for each other when a mobile crisis response program is one of our options for emergency assistance. We have a responsibility to act before we lose this collective memory.
For those interested in research on CAHOOTS, please read the following:
