South Tucson Pairs Police With Clinicians in New RISE Program

South Tucson and Pima County have launched a program that sends a behavioral health specialist out on police calls involving people in crisis, part of an effort to route residents living on the street and struggling with addiction into treatment instead of jail. The RISE Co-Responder Program pairs officers with mental health clinicians who respond together to calls for service, and it is paid for with opioid settlement dollars.

Program leaders describe the goal as twofold: getting people off the streets and connected to services, and freeing patrol officers to handle public safety calls they are trained for.

How a co-responder call works

Under the model, a police officer and a behavioral health specialist arrive together rather than in sequence. The clinician can assess for a mental health crisis or a substance use disorder on the spot, offer a treatment referral and help arrange a bed or an appointment, while the officer manages any safety concerns.

Beyond field response, teams working through RISE will also operate through local courts, connecting people who cycle through the justice system with treatment options, housing assistance and recovery resources. That court-side work matters in a small city where the same handful of residents can account for a disproportionate share of emergency calls.

The structure mirrors co-responder and crisis-alternative teams that cities across the country have adopted in recent years, which pair law enforcement with clinicians so that calls driven by mental illness, substance use or homelessness do not default to arrest.

Funded by opioid settlement money

The RISE program is financed through opioid settlement dollars — the payments flowing to states and localities from lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies. Several thousand local governments are now deciding how to spend their shares, and crisis response has become a common choice alongside naloxone distribution and treatment expansion.

Pima County's allocation is one of a growing number of settlement-funded projects aimed at the intersection of street homelessness and drug use, a population that frequently falls outside both traditional treatment and traditional policing.

Why police-only responses fall short

A patrol officer arriving at a call involving someone in a fentanyl-related crisis has limited options: an arrest, a hospital hold or a handoff to whatever service is open. None of those resolves the underlying condition, and each tends to return the same person to the same street corner within days.

Adding a clinician to the response changes what is possible at the scene — an assessment, a referral, sometimes an immediate connection to medication for opioid use disorder or to a treatment bed. Advocates of the model argue that the first hour after a crisis call is often the only window in which someone will accept help, and that it closes fast when the interaction ends in a holding cell.

South Tucson officials have framed the initiative in similar terms, describing the objective as helping people access the services they need while preserving officers' time for public safety work.

What the program has to prove

Co-responder programs are popular with city governments but uneven in results. The models that report the strongest outcomes tend to be the ones with reliable follow-up — a place to take the person, a clinician who stays on the case and a system that tracks what happens after the call ends. Without those pieces, teams can improve individual encounters without changing the number of people who cycle back to crisis.

For South Tucson, the settlement funding buys the staffing and the court partnerships. Whether it changes the trajectory for residents with substance use disorder depends on whether the treatment, housing and recovery capacity exist on the other end of the referral.