Following a series of private meetings, the Knoxville-Knox County Alternative Response Taskforce delivered a 100-page report to local leaders last Fall that recommended the creation of an unarmed alternative response program.
The proposal recommended a team of up to 10 unarmed community responders who are not required to hold a specific license or degree, but rather have lived experiences. In its first year of operation, it's estimated the program could divert at least 4,000 emergency calls related to homelessness and non-violent conflict resolution.
For years, local advocacy group Knoxville HEART has pushed for an unarmed alternative response model for emergency calls related to mental health. Under HEART’s model, a social worker paired with a paramedic would respond to calls. Their advocacy led to the creation of the task force to study the viability of such a program.
“We're happy with the call types that were chosen,” said Brittany Bonner, a member of Knoxville HEART and the task force. “We do wish that it was six [calls]… but we still have the categories with the largest number of calls.”
On Valentine's Day, leaders of HEART and several community members wrote cards to city officials, asking them to consider launching the proposed alternative response program.
“It's people like me who have loved ones that need community response,” said Elizabeth Rowland, a member of HEART’s organizing committee. “They're either afraid of the police or they get triggered by the police, and they want to have an emergency response that feels safe for them when they're in their own personal crisis situation.”
If approved, the program could become the city’s third boots-on-the-ground alternative response program and the county’s first. But the task force appeared split on the idea of an unarmed response team that answers certain 911 calls, with safety listed as one of the top concerns.
“We absolutely can use unarmed response citizens, but we have to be very strategic,” said Mike Gutierrez, a professor at the University of Tennessee and a former law officer who wasn't involved in the task force. “When somebody's assaulting you and you're in this position as just a private citizen, you have no recourse other than to call the police, and now we're back at square one.”
What is alternative response?
Alternative response is a nationwide movement to equip specialists and citizens with the tools and training they need to answer non-violent emergency calls — an alternative to traditional armed police response. The overall goal is to reduce arrests, hospitalizations and reported crime by connecting people to social services.
Knoxville currently has two programs that are considered alternative response. One of them is K-Town Connect, a program where people dressed in neon green shirts patrol downtown Knoxville. These unarmed people are known as ambassadors, and are trained to resolve conflict among homeless people, among other duties.
“Sometimes we may have a cigarette or something on us that can help calm them down or [we] offer them some coffee, and then get to the root of the problem,” said K-Town Connect Ambassador Ivy Patterson.
In K-Town’s model, ambassadors receive calls from their direct line. Police are not involved in every call but are available should a situation escalate outside of an ambassador’s ability. According to their latest quarterly report, K-Town Connect ambassadors responded to roughly 1000 incidents between October and December of last year.
Some downtown business workers prefer to call K-Town Connect than police, knowing ambassadors are on a first name basis with many people they encounter.
“There have been multiple situations where I've either been uncomfortable [or] somebody crossed a line, and they're always my first go-to” said Teryn Espinar-Bastidas, a barista at Coffee and Chocolates near Market Square.
Another program that offers alternative response services is the Knoxville Police Department's Co-Responder Program. Under that initiative, six teams made up of an officer and mental health clinician respond to behavioral and mental health calls. Many of these calls involve threatened suicides. The clinicians are required to hold a master’s degree and are employed at the McNabb Center, a local non-profit organization that offers behavioral and mental health services. Last year, the team responded to nearly 2,200 calls.
KPD Officer Micah Bohan said the teams conduct follow ups on each person, making sure they get the care that they need.
“If something wasn't working for them originally, then we've got options and different resources to maybe push them in a different direction and help them that way,” she said.
Bohan echoed the task force's safety concerns, however. She says some calls can change rapidly from report to response.
“You honestly don't know what you're going into until you are stepping foot in front of it,” Bohan said.
For cities like Cookeville, alternative response looks like a single team of just two people: an unarmed medic and a mental health specialist. Fire Chief Benton Young said the team helps free up officers from calls relating to mental health that can take up to an hour to resolve.
“I saw the people that they’ve helped,” Young said. “These people are now living a normal life and contributing to the community today that they wouldn't have been [able to do] if the program hadn't been there.”
In its first year, the team responded to more than 280 calls and connected over 80 people to social services. The team only responds to calls that pass safety screenings performed by the 911 dispatcher, who provides real-time updates before they step foot onto the scene. A police officer is also on standby should an escalation occur, something that eased Young’s concerns when the program was first introduced.
“I was totally dead against it,” he said. “After we tried it, I’m a 100% believer.”
What does the community say?
Like the task force, community members appear to be split on the idea of implementing an unarmed alternative response team.
That includes former Maryville Police Officer Austin Greene. While he supported the idea of using an alternative response team to answer traffic calls, he said some calls can be unpredictable.
“Things happen so fast,” Greene said. "I can think back to calls where I ended up in a physical altercation with somebody and my backup was literally less than a mile away, and it felt like forever before they got there.”
But people like Elisabeth Pitts think Knoxville needs more mental health workers on the line to respond to certain 911 calls, citing personal experiences with police that she said her mental health conditions may have exacerbated.
“[They] thought I was on drugs because I have ADHD, and I couldn't stand still,” she said. “There were six different cop cars for little old me.”
Knoxville Councilmember Amelia Parker is seeking to allocate $3 million in funding for the program in the city’s fiscal year 2027 budget. She has been advocating for an unarmed alternative response program since 2020.
“This is definitely going to be a tight budget year,” she said. “But one thing that stood out to me in the report – in the plan – are all of the cost savings that a program like alternative response also brings to a city.”
In a statement requested by WUOT, a Knoxville spokesperson expressed appreciation for the task force’s efforts in developing the recommendation and added city leadership are still evaluating the report.
