1/ All right, this week we looked at some programs @BucksDa and @BucksCountyGovt are looking at to make some changes to how local law enforcement deals with individuals with a mental illness bit.ly/3abvzkd
2/ I wanted to take some time and review some 911 data provided through a series of Right to Know requests to @911BucksCounty. Let's start with some baseline information on the 4.5 million call database of police and EMS calls between 2012 and April 10, 2020
3/ Police make up the bulk of the 911 data, and these are all calls that pass through the radio room. EMS calls only make up about 10% of all calls, but the radio room is also logging everything from traffic stops to homicide investigations. 
4/ In fact, traffic stops alone make up about 14% of all police calls in the data, and phone message make up about half that number but still take the second highest place for call types
5/ Altogether, police in Bucks County have logged the equivalent of 225 years’ worth of work in about 8 years, while EMS have logged about 36 years’ worth of time. That's a lot for both agencies.
6/ Most central and lower Bucks County towns bear the brunt of police call volume, but most communities have between 40,000 and 80,000 calls
7/ As far as total time, police officers have logged several years’ worth of calls in each municipality. Some have logged decades.
8/ The data isn't a comprehensive or definitive guide to incidents handled by police. For instance, we can't look at this data to know how many arrests occurred. It's more like a rough idea of the types of issues either officers or a caller believed was happening at the time
9/ I focused on logged as psychiatric emergencies, check on well-being, suicide attempts and "mental subject." These calls have collectively increased to over 14,000 at the end of 2019. Since I don't have a complete year for 2020, I approached that comparison a bit differently.
10/ The upward trend continues, and 2020 would presumably be the highest year for those calls if that holds through the year.
11/ @marioncallahan and @cmenno_intell wrote an excellent story in 2017 about training efforts to better equip officers to handle mental health emergencies.You can read that full story bit.ly/33LXfuT.
12/ Back then, we only had one year's worth of data. We found about 0.2% of all police calls in 2016 were labeled as "psychiatric emergency" calls. That's grown over the years, though not drastically. This chart below compares total psych calls to all calls that year so far.
13/ While our current data only has the first few months of 2020, we can see this is a countywide issue. Lower and central Bucks County towns have seen at least 120 of these calls by March.
14/ Again, we can't really delve in to how many of these calls were legitimate mental health issues, and we can't say by this data alone how many of those with mental illnesses were arrested as a result of these calls.
15/ Police officers are dealing with an ever increasing number of suspected mental health calls, that much is clear. The co-responder program and a mental health court could help get those with mental illnesses the treatment they need.
16/ Also: here’s Bucks County Suicide Prevention Task Force resources @buckscountyhoym Text: ‘BCHOPE’ to 741-741 Call: National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255 Bucks County Crisis: 1-800-499-7455
17/ As always analysis and charts were done using @Python_Pandas and @matplotlib. Maps done with @geopandas. Link to my @github below for a jupyter notebook of today's anaylsis. Data file was too large to upload :( bit.ly/30HheZE @threadreaderapp
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