Alternative police response models to crisis calls

A crisis call is when one or more individuals suffer from a mental-or behavioral health-related issue that may require a police response. Many police departments have introduced specially trained crisis response teams to replace the traditional police response with new response paradigms that may involve sending different or multiple types of vehicles to a crisis call. We introduce queueing models and performance measures to capture the dynamics of new response paradigms. We evaluate the queueing models using discrete event simulation with a case study based on data from Madison, Wisconsin, and we compare the crisis response to a traditional response to elucidate performance across a range of input parameters.