The announcement comes just a week after Mayor Gainey and Gov. Shapiro touted the program at a press conference.
In a surprise move this week, Pittsburgh officials announced that they are terminating the city’s “co-response” program that controversially sent social workers into the field with police officers to handle emergencies deemed to be mental health related.
“Through trust-building and the provision of services, Co-Response seeks to reduce the propensity for individuals who experience mental and behavioral health crises to engage in violent behavior and become involved in the criminal justice system,” the city’s website explains.
The city says its new plan is to send social workers separately, in teams of two dubbed “Crisis Response Teams,” to respond to needs after police officers secure the situation of any immediate threats. Assistant Public Safety Director Camila Alarcon-Chelecki says this approach will allow social workers to respond not just to police, but also to calls from fire and EMS, expanding their reach beyond criminal situations.
“A lot of the time,” Alarcon-Chelecki explained, “these crises take over an hour to de-escalate and mitigate, and police are kind of stuck in the car with us, and they could really be responding …to emergencies that don’t require a social worker.”
She added that co-response teams never historically ended up being first, or even second, on the scene: “What we were seeing is there would be like, three to four units there before we got there.”
The co-response program was launched after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests centered around police use of force. Left-wing activists touted the co-response concept as social workers de-escalating tense situations without officers necessarily needing to get involved, claiming that events like the death of George Floyd would have been avoidable had a social worker responded instead of a police officer.
But five years in, and with just four co-responders currently on duty, Pittsburgh’s co-response program never achieved its promised goals. Alarcon-Chelecki expressed candidly that the model was wasting social workers’ time and effort, saying, “We just saw that it wasn’t an effective and efficient use of resources.”
Pittsburgh’s anti-police activists, however have been quick to express their disapproval of the decision.
Beth Pittinger, executive director of the Citizen Police Review Board, claimed that, despite the city’s five years’ worth of evidence, “the most effective model is the co-response, having a mental health clinician in the vehicle with the officer to respond immediately to the person in crisis.”
Pittinger also told the Post-Gazette that she was disappointed about the “human cost” of the co-response program’s end – that is, “people buying into this whole idea, which was a tough sell in this town.”
Some observers feel that the timing of the announcement that the co-response program has ended is ironic. Just a week ago, Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey stood with Gov. Josh Shapiro on the North Shore, touting the program as part of Pittsburgh’s public safety success story. But Gainey’s proposed 2026 budget quietly slashed funding for several co-response clinician positions, proving that the program’s end was coming one way or another.
