11 hours ago
Denver’s pioneering effort to send mental health clinicians and paramedics to answer some 911 calls instead of police officers now has a proven result — people contacted by the teams were less likely to be arrested or encounter police over the following year than people who saw a traditional police response.
People who encountered Denver’s Support Team Assisted Response, or STAR, teams were 16% less likely to be arrested or contacted by police in the following year than people who received a police response for similar incidents, and that effect was more pronounced for homeless people, according to a multi-year study by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization.
That translates to an average of about 200 fewer police contacts with Denver residents every year, according to the study.
“One of the things the Urban Institute report shows us is that this is very much a needed resource and it is working and beneficial for the community,” said Tandis Hashemi, STAR’s operations manager.
Still, STAR teams responded alone to just one in five 911 calls in Denver that were eligible for a STAR response between 2020 and mid-2024, the study found. The program was limited both by STAR’s small capacity and longstanding norms in public safety that default to sending police officers to calls, researchers found.
Police officers — not STAR teams — answered the majority of STAR-eligible 911 calls between 2020 and mid-2024, the study found. That’s not what the program’s creators had hoped for, said Vinnie Cervantes, executive director of the Denver Alliance for Street Health Response, an organization that helped start the program. They envisioned STAR replacing police responses.
“There’s a huge disconnect in what people came together to create and how it is being executed today,” he said.
Currently, STAR runs six or seven vans daily for citywide coverage between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., Hashemi said. Each van is staffed by a mental health clinician and a paramedic or EMT; the program relies on 13 such crews. That’s understaffed; full staffing would be 16 crews and eight vans.
The teams respond to 911 calls that do not need a police response — most commonly for welfare checks, trespassing, suicidal people, disturbances and substance use, the study found. The idea is for STAR teams to connect people who are not dangerous to resources through a network of providers, freeing up police officers for other calls.
“A STAR contact is so much more than a police contact,” said Sarah Gillespie, an author of the Urban Institute study. “A STAR contact means a mobile van team of two clinicians is coming, taking their time, doing some problem-solving, trying to connect that person to some kind of follow-up service in that moment. …They are not police who need to quickly go on to the next call. They can take their time, they can try to solve the problem. So they are not leaving someone in the same situation they found them.”
Between 2020 and mid-2024, nearly 49,000 911 calls in Denver were eligible for a STAR response, the study found. STAR teams alone responded to about 9,800 calls, or about 20% of those eligible calls. The teams responded to an additional 2,700 calls alongside police officers, about 6% of the total, according to the study. Police officers answered 27,700 of the eligible calls — 57% — without STAR teams.
STAR teams also responded to an additional 10,000 incidents that were not originally classified as STAR-eligible by 911 dispatchers, but other first responders asked for STAR teams after arriving on scene, the study found.
The STAR program began in 2020 as a pilot within the Denver Police Department, which, early on, created an expectation that police were the automatic default, said Andrew Dameron, Denver 911 director. The agency, in the years since, has taken pains to culturally move away from that attitude in favor of an approach that sees STAR as a standalone response option on equal footing with police, firefighters and paramedics.
The STAR program is now housed within Denver’s Department of Public Health and Environment.
“Denver is still at the forefront nationally in trying to truly separate and professionalize alternative response,” he said. “…The kind of approach we are taking to it is, if we had a call about a bank robbery, we are not going to send the fire department. And same thing: If we have someone in a mental health crisis, or someone reaching out about a quality of life or a resource need, if police are not the most appropriate responder, then that’s not who we should be sending.”
One of the structural barriers to that change has been the 911 center’s dispatching software, which is not designed for alternative response and automatically prioritizes emergent 911 calls over the inherently non-emergent STAR calls. Researchers found in a separate November study that 911 centers’ strict protocols around qualifying calls for alternative response teams were limiting in both Denver and San Francisco.
Dameron said that study relied on information from very early in the STAR program’s tenure. Since then, the agency has increased training on STAR and focused internal quality assurance processes on the dispatching process. The city also created a radio channel dedicated solely to STAR, and Dameron hopes to dedicate a dispatcher solely to STAR calls in the next several months, allowing the dispatcher to handle STAR calls separately from emergent police calls.
The STAR program was budgeted for $6.3 million in 2026, including $4.5 million from the city of Denver and another $1.8 million from a Caring for Denver grant, according to the city’s 2026 budget. That’s down $500,000 from 2025, when STAR was budgeted for $6.8 million. Hashemi said the budget cut will not decrease the services provided by STAR, and that the cuts to the program’s budget were for an amount that “has historically been underspent.”
The city has been contracting with Denver Health and WellPower to provide paramedics and mental health clinicians to staff the STAR vans, but this summer will transition to using city employees to fill the mental health clinician roles, Hashemi said. Doing so will allow the city to offer competitive pay and benefits to hopefully keep the program fully staffed, she said.
Cervantes said the move will also give the city more control over how STAR operates day to day.
The Department of Public Health and Environment “is the entity that theoretically runs the program, but doesn’t have any control over certain aspects of the program,” he said. “They can only enforce things through the contract. So this will be a way to get closer to what we are looking for in STAR and to get closer to our original vision for the program.”
The city plans to continue contracting with an outside vendor to provide the paramedics, EMTs and vans. A request for proposal for such a vendor is currently active, with any transition to a new vendor slated for August. The request for proposal seeks only 12 EMTs or paramedics and six vans for an initial contract that would span the second half of 2026, and notes those figures could increase to 16 paramedics and eight vans “in future years.”
Denver Health spokeswoman Deydra Bringas declined an interview request from The Denver Post but said in a statement that STAR has “proven to be a successful model of providing care.”
“We will encourage the city to continue to fully fund this model of care in a manner that decreases barriers to care,” she said.
Cervantes said the money set aside for the STAR program isn’t enough for the effort to fulfill its potential. He still envisions a robust alternative response system deeply rooted in the community that operates 24/7 and answers eligible calls without police involvement.
“Especially for a full, citywide emergency response program — there is no way, with the money it is budgeted for, that it can do that work,” he said.
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