Hey, this is Will James. One thing we talk about in lost patients is how our systems for managing

mental health care and our systems for managing crime have blended together. Police here in Seattle

responded to nearly 10,000 scenes of people in crisis last year. One of the only remaining

paths into Washington State's largest psychiatric hospital is through jail.

But some cities around the U.S. are trying to change that equation.

They're trying to disentangle mental health care from policing,

setting up new branches of emergency services that specifically handle mental illness, addiction, and homelessness.

These changes have, not surprisingly, created some friction.

We're talking in many cases about taking responsibilities away from police and giving them

instead to unarmed mental health care workers.

I wanted to share a recent podcast series that tells this story.

The team behind the podcast tradeoffs has teamed up with the Marshall Project to put out

a special three-part series called The Fifth Branch. It tells the story of what happened when

one city upended the way it used to handle emergencies and built a new branch

of mental health specialists. Here's the first episode of the fifth branch. It's called

Convincing the Cops, and it covers the origin story of a new community safety department

in Durham, North Carolina, and the conflicts and challenges that emerged in those early

days. You can find all three episodes of the Fifth Branch wherever you get your podcasts.

The phone rings a little after six, a sunny August evening in 2022. Police Chief Patrice Andrews

picks up.

One of my deputy chief said, so we have a barricaded person?

The deputy tells Patrice the man had a history of mental illness.

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