More colleges are hiring crisis-response teams for mental-health emergencies

When an emergency call reaches Oregon State University’s public-safety department, dispatchers don’t automatically send the police. Instead, they can choose to send members of the university’s new crisis-response team. Oregon State is the latest of several large universities to roll out teams of crisis responders in efforts to rethink campus safety and field more appropriate responses to students in some nonviolent emergencies, like mental-health or addiction crises.