No more police for non-criminal calls in San Francisco. Who will take their place?

San Francisco police won’t be responding to calls that aren’t crime related anymore, the city’s mayor announced, and will opt instead for unarmed professionals to answer them.

The city wants to use a gentler tool for the “non-violent” jobs, and it plans to piece that system together over the next year, a release from the office of Mayor London Breed said Thursday.

“We know that a lack of equity in our society overall leads to a lot of the problems that police are being asked to solve,” a release from the mayor’s office said. “We are going to keep pushing for additional reforms and continue to find ways to reinvest in communities that have historically been underserved and harmed by systemic racism.”

The change is part of a package of sweeping reforms aimed at the San Francisco Police Department, coming in response to nationwide protests against racial injustice, triggered by the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and other Black Americans during encounters with police.

“In order to limit unnecessary confrontation between the SFPD and the community, San Francisco will work to divert non-violent calls for service away from SFPD to non-law enforcement agencies,” the mayor’s release said.

Specifically named is the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon.

Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets was formed over 30 years ago as a sort of partnership between local police and the White Bird Clinic — a self-described collection of social workers and “hippies,” according to The Register-Guard.

CAHOOTS takes non-criminal calls rerouted to them by 911, and sends out a crisis worker and a medic, ready to respond to physical and psychological emergencies.

CAHOOTS members are unarmed — no gun, no baton, no Taser — one crisis worker told NPR.

“The tools that I carry are my training. I carry my de-escalation training, my crisis training and a knowledge of our local resources and how to appropriately apply them,” she said.

Sometimes even non-violent situations can escalate, and armed police backup is needed. But those are rare cases, she told NPR.

Calls commonly involve people who are mentally ill, suffering from addiction, or are suicidal, according to the Register-Guard — issues that officers aren’t always trained to handle.

“Oftentimes, law enforcement has been thrust into the mental health field,” Sgt. Rick Lewis, a Police Department CAHOOTS coordinator, told the Register-Guard. ”(People) are calling for police because who else do you call, but clearly, it’d be more beneficial for CAHOOTS to show up.”

Demonstrations calling for drastic changes in American policing are largely fueled by the deaths of Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman shot at least 8 times by Louisville police during a no-knock drug raid on her apartment, and of Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died in Minneapolis police custody after one of the officers, Derek Chauvin, put his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes.