It’s afternoon on the Venice boardwalk when the call comes in. A dispatcher describes a person in crisis: “White male in his 30s wearing black shoes and jeans, black hoodie … and a red hat. Looking to start the housing process.”
It’s a call that might have gone to the police before.
But now it comes to two women who are already out walking the boardwalk: Monse Mota and Crystal Miron. They are unarmed and wear black vests that say CIRCLE Team on the back, which stands for Crisis and Incident Response through Community-led Engagement.
It’s a program former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti started not long after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, part of a nationwide call to re-imagine policing. Mayor Karen Bass’s office runs it now.
The idea is to divert some 911 calls from police to civilians.
There are similar programs in cities around the country, but what’s different about the LA version is that workers here only take 911 calls that involve unhoused people.
That means the program is trying to do two things at once: Reduce the number of interactions between non-violent people and police, and house more people.
Mayor Bass says it has to do both: “If you look at police calls, there's a huge percentage that are from people experiencing homelessness. So if you can get to them in advance where law enforcement is really not needed, but more a social service response, then that's the point.”
Deputy Mayor of Community Safety Karen Lane says there are a few ways to measure whether the program is working: “Are we decreasing the number of unhoused individuals going into the criminal justice system for nonviolent incidents or offenses? Are we actually connecting Angelenos to services that they need?”
The city is also evaluating whether the program is giving time back to police, so they can focus on preventing and responding to more serious offenses.
For this reason, the LA police union supports programs like the CIRCLE team. One LAPD captain who would only comment on background says, “We’ll take all the help we can get.”
Meeting metrics like those takes many hundreds of interactions all over the city by dozens of black-vest wearing CIRCLE team members, some of whom are only a few steps removed from homelessness themselves.
Monse Mota of LA’s CIRCLE team approaches an encampment. Photo courtesy of the CIRCLE team.
At Venice Beach, Mota and Miron walk up to the man in the red hat. He’s pretty calm, sitting on a bench.
His name is Greg Teele. He says he has addiction issues, and he tells Miron that he just got kicked out of the van where he was living.
“I can get you into a rehab, that’s quick,” Miron tells Teele. “But you gotta follow the program. It’s worth it if it gets you on your feet and gets you going.”
The team makes some calls to an inpatient addiction program, requests a housing referral for Teele, and adds him to a city-wide database so they can track interactions he might have with their agency or other agencies as he waits for housing.
Mota says there are so many moments like this – when people just don’t need the police.
“What has been happening all over the country with police brutality – this program is an advantage in that we get to divert that from happening,” she says. “Police brutality has an impact in my life. My brother was shot by the police. So this work makes it rewarding.”
Mota’s brother, Saul Tapia, was shot in the face by LA county sheriffs in 2010, but survived. She says he had a pipe in his hand. The cops say they thought it was a weapon.
Mota herself was unhoused during the pandemic and lived in a shelter with her four young kids. She and Miron are both in addiction recovery. Miron is now working on a psychology degree.
Their backgrounds are not unusual for the CIRCLE program, which employs people with what they call “the lived experience,” many of whom were formerly incarcerated.
CIRCLE team outreach worker Monse Mota takes a selfie with mental health clinician Frank Sehi. Photo courtesy of CIRCLE team.
Venice Beach and Hollywood were the first neighborhoods to pilot the CIRCLE program. Now it’s also in Downtown LA, South LA, Sherman Oaks, and the San Pedro/Harbor area.
CIRCLE employs 99 people, and since 2021, the City of LA has spent a little more than $19 million on it.
The city says it diverted nearly 6,000 911 calls in the second half of 2023. The total times they provided services, not just when responding to calls, were 12,000 for social services like food, water, and clothes; 4,000 for housing referrals and placements; and nearly 1,000 for medical or mental health.
The CIRCLE program is staffed by a nonprofit organization from San Francisco called Urban Alchemy.
In 2018, the group was hired to operate public toilets in LA, then “safe sleep villages” where folks get a tent, showers, and meals.
In 2021, it was hired to help house people before police cleared them from an encampment around Echo Park Lake.
This led many to say the group is too close to the police.
On a recent ride-along with the team that covers Echo Park Lake, the team gets a call from a city council member who has seen one tent and wants it cleared out.
So the team approaches the man in the tent and tells him he has to move. The man agrees to move his tent, and the team says they’ll make some calls, and see if they can get him into a shelter.
Critics say this is not just outreach, but doing the bidding of city officials.
Others say it’s still better than having the police respond.
There have been other issues. A handful of former employees have sued Urban Alchemy, claiming sexual harassment and labor violations.
In January, in a story that was widely covered by local news, a video was posted of an Urban Alchemy staffer spraying a sidewalk near an unhoused woman on Skid Row. The staffer was fired. The city controller is investigating.
Kirkpatrick Tyler, chief of community and government relations for Urban Alchemy, says he is not surprised by the criticism of his company “because we are a young organization, because we are a primarily Black-led, formerly incarcerated organization who is making a change and a difference.” He continues, “And we're doing it in places where a lot of organizations have been working for a really long time, and we've not been able to see this type of progress.”
A recent study by Stanford University saw a big reduction in crime and drug use in the parts of San Francisco where Urban Alchemy operates.
LA Mayor Bass’ office says they meet with the group monthly. Its three-year contract is up this June, with the option for renewal.
Meanwhile, Urban Alchemy is growing. It already has similar programs in Portland and Austin.
So for now, the answer to the question of whether the CIRCLE team can reduce police interactions and homelessness is: It seems it’s trying to do both.
Even though it’s still really hard to house people in LA.
Out with the CIRCLE team in South LA, I spend hours with them walking around, talking to people, just socializing the idea of getting housed.
Then a call comes in. The dispatcher describes a “female, Black, with a pink shirt, no pants, indecent exposure.”
But by the time the team gets to the location … the woman isn’t there.