Denver Proves Liberals Wrong With Their STAR Program

Last year despite what the Biden Administration is claiming now, BLM and Liberals took to the streets demanding the police be defunded. Unfortunately in many cases, they were successful in cutting police budgets. Some Liberals claimed that social workers should be used instead to deal with the mentally ill and non-violent cases. Denver, Colorado took on this policy with their  Support Team Assistance Response (STAR) Program. But it turns out it mostly just for show. Since the program's beginning, Denver has only used it 3% of the time and even then the police were present for at least 450 of the calls. And Liberals think they are more useful than the police?

"First of all, NBC News claims that not a single one of the more than 1,300 calls STAR responded to resulted in a need to call the Denver PD for backup. That may be technically true, but what they’re not saying is that more than a third of those calls (more than 450) were received from Denver PD officers who arrived at the scene first and decided to let STAR try to handle it. There was no need for backup because the cops were already there and hung around to make sure the STAR team could deal with it.

Also, the program screens the 911 calls as carefully as possible. The full report states that the 911 center received 6,400 calls during the period the program has been running that would have been eligible for a STAR response, but they only dispatched a STAR van in 3% of those cases. They do not send out STAR to any call where the suspect is either armed or exhibiting violent behavior."

So in other words Denver is proving that a social worker and a paramedic are not enough to take any real load off of the police, even when they are just handling calls dealing with the mentally ill. So in other words, BLM and Liberal were dead wrong and their alternatives to police are not effective.