unarmed

When Angelenos face a situation that requires calling 911 — such as encountering a person in the throes of a mental health crisis — the first responders are usually firefighters or armed police officers.

But a new report suggests a third option holds promise for the future.

For the past year, Los Angeles has been testing a program that dispatches specially trained civilians who don’t carry guns in response to certain calls for help. The report released earlier this month by the city said the early results are encouraging.

“When deployed to non-violent, non-urgent calls for service, unarmed crisis responders have been shown to minimize the potential for escalation and address critical mental health emergencies in a manner that prioritizes compassion and safety,” the report said.

The use of so-called “unarmed crisis responders,” the report found, not only offers specialized care to people who need help — it also allows “LAPD more time to focus on traditional law enforcement efforts.”

The ongoing pilot program has teams of licensed clinicians, social workers, community workers and therapists who work in pairs, responding to calls around the clock, seven days a week. Over its first year, the program handled more than 6,700 calls, largely to conduct welfare checks and respond to reports of public intoxication and indecent exposure.

While the program’s workload of roughly 40 calls a day is still a fraction of what the LAPD handles, the report says it has already saved police nearly 7,000 hours of patrol time by freeing them up for other tasks. With the city’s police force struggling to fill its ranks, officials say such programs could have a larger role in the future.

The report does not touch on what impact, if any, the teams have had on low-level crimes in the areas they cover, but the hope is that it will ultimately make the city safer.

The outreach workers conduct follow-up visits after certain calls and offer specialized services to people who are willing to accept them, including mental health treatment and drug rehabilitation programs.

The Unarmed Model of Crisis Response, as the program is known, is one of two that city officials are operating. The other, called the CIRCLE program, operates out of the mayor’s office with its own call center and dedicated service areas.

Although some skeptics questioned whether unarmed civilians would too often be overmatched by the subjects they encounter, the recent report found that fewer than 4.1% of calls end up requiring police backup. Those cases typically involved individuals who insisted on having an officer present or who turned out to have weapons, the report said.

The findings come as advocates brace for billions in federal spending expected to be slashed from social safety net programs by the Trump administration. The looming cuts have renewed questions about how L.A.’s program and similar ones across the country will scale up and have more impact.

More than half of the calls that the unarmed responders handle involve some type of disturbance, with reports of a prowler or trespasser as the next most common category. On average, the teams take about 28 minutes to respond to a call, and once there they spend about 25 minutes on scene, according to the city’s recent report.

In one case, an unarmed responder team was dispatched to an apartment where a woman identified in the report as “Liz” had been behaving erratically. The team arrived to find her unit’s door open. The woman invited them inside and they saw evidence suggesting she may have overdosed while her gas stove was left on. After turning off the burners and opening windows to ventilate the apartment, the team contacted firefighters and stayed with the woman until they arrived. They eventually convinced her to go to a hospital to get checked out.

The civilian teams won’t go to calls that involve weapons or violence or a need for urgent medical attention. They also do not handle situations where minors are present or when there are three or more people involved in an incident.

Police department officials have said repeatedly that, despite increased crisis intervention training and new “less-lethal” weapons designed to incapacitate rather than kill, officers are not always equipped to handle mental health calls.

LAPD leaders have said in the past that they support the program, while cautioning that any call has the potential to quickly spiral into violence.

The program, run by the office of the city administrator, was initially rolled out to three police divisions spread across the city — Devonshire, Wilshire and Southeast — but has since expanded to three others: West L.A., Olympic and West Valley.

The unarmed responder program launched in March 2024 amid continued public frustration with the city’s handling of the intertwined issues of homelessness, substance abuse and mental health. Much of the criticism was leveled at the LAPD following a string of shootings and other use-of-force incidents that involved individuals experiencing crises.

So far in 2025, LAPD officers have shot 27 people. At least a third of those incidents involved someone who was experiencing a behavioral crisis, according to a Times analysis of incident reports and interviews with families of the people shot.

Efforts to ease the reliance on armed police for emergency responses have been around for years, with several new programs springing up since 2020, spurred by a nationwide movement to redirect law enforcement funding following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. Researchers have tracked more than 100 such programs across the U.S.

Despite showing promise, some city-run initiatives in Los Angeles have struggled to grow. Many similar programs across the country continue to face challenges around how to scale up.

The Los Angeles Fire Department ended its use of psychiatric mobile response teams in vans to calls around the city after officials said it didn’t actually free up first responders or hospital emergency rooms. Another plan to have unarmed Transportation Department workers conduct traffic stops — instead of police — has been dragging on for months.

Even so, proponents of the other ongoing programs are expressing cautious optimism.

“This data proves that care-first approaches work — they keep people safe, cost less, and prevent the expensive liabilities that drain our budget year after year,” City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said in a statement.

Hernandez, who represents neighborhoods on the city’s Eastside and co-chairs a council committee on unarmed responses, added, “I’m proud we’re showing that Los Angeles can expand our public safety ecosystem and save lives, save money, and invest in care instead of harm.”

Godfrey Plata, deputy director of the nonprofit group LA Forward, which has advocated for unarmed alternatives to police, said his organization was pleased with the growth of the program and the City Council’s willingness to increase its funding “even in a budget deficit year.”

With the World Cup and the Olympics on the horizon, the city must continue to explore ways to protect both locals and the large number of tourists expected to arrive for those events, Plata said.

“This is a cost-saving measure in addition to a life-saving measure,” Plata said. “It would be really great to have a system built out by then to be able to absorb the shock of our emergency management systems.”

Israeli soldiers have deliberately shot at unarmed Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza after being “ordered” to do so by their commanders, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports.

Israel ordered an investigation into possible war crimes over the allegations by some soldiers that it revealed on Friday, Haaretz said.

At least 549 Palestinians have been killed and 4,066 injured while waiting for food aid distributed at sites run by the Israeli-and United States-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the Gaza Government Media Office said on Thursday. The GHF has been a source of widespread criticism since its establishment in May.

According to the Haaretz report, which quoted unnamed Israeli soldiers, troops were told to fire at the crowds of Palestinians and use unnecessary lethal force against people who appeared to pose no threat.

“We fired machineguns from tanks and threw grenades,” one soldier told Haaretz. “There was one incident where a group of civilians was hit while advancing under the cover of fog.”

In another instance, a soldier said that where they were stationed in Gaza, between “one and five people were killed every day”.

“It’s a killing field,” that soldier said.

Method of ‘control’

According to Haaretz, the Military Advocate General has told the army’s General Staff’s Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism, which reviews incidents involving potential violations of the laws of war, to investigate suspected war crimes at these aid sites.

One of the authors of the report, Nir Hasson, told Al Jazeera that the Israeli directive to fire on civilians is part of a method to “control” the aid seekers.

“It’s actually a practice of … controlling the crowd by fire, like if you wanted the crowd to run off [from] a place, you shoot them at them, even though you know they are unarmed … You use fire to move people from one point to another,” he said from West Jerusalem.

While the journalist and his colleagues do not know the name of the commander who might have issued such a directive, Hasson said that he would likely hold a position high up in the army.

Despite this practice at these sites, most Israelis and the army’s troops still believe the war on Gaza is just, even while some cracks are emerging in this understanding, the journalist said.

“[There are] more and more people who are asking themselves if this war is necessary, but also what is the humanitarian price the Gazan population is [paying] for this war,” he said.

‘A death trap’

Reporting from Amman, Jordan, Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut said the Haaretz report is “shocking”.

“People in Gaza have said these distribution centres have now become a death trap for Palestinians,” Salhut said.

“Aid groups have said that Palestinians are left with no choice – to either starve to death, or die seeking the very little food that is offered in the distribution centres run by the GHF,” she added.

The GHF operates four food distribution sites in Gaza – one in the centre and three in south.

Since an Israeli blockade was lifted on the entry of humanitarian goods at the end of May, attacks on aid seekers in Gaza have increased.

On Friday, medics said six people were killed by gunfire as they tried to get food in southern Gaza.

But the GHF has come under intense condemnation by aid groups, including the United Nations, for its “weaponisation” of vital items.

On Friday, Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials, MSF, called the GHF’s aid distribution sites “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid”.

Since Israel began its war on Gaza in October 2023, at least 56,331 people have been killed, with 132,632 wounded in Israeli attacks, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported.

A Palestinian man in a red cap walks down the narrow alleyway in Nablus’s old city towards a group of Israeli soldiers, clearly unarmed.

He attempts to talk to the soldiers, who had flooded into the occupied West Bank city in the early hours of Tuesday as part of Israel’s latest military raid – believed to be the largest carried out in Nablus in two years.

The soldiers immediately kick and shove the man – 40-year-old Nidal Umairah – before his brother walks over, attempting to intervene. Gunfire follows, and soon the two brothers are lying dead.

Nidal and his brother 35-year-old brother Khaled were the latest victims of Israel in the West Bank, after they were killed late on Tuesday. It is unclear which brother had initially been detained, but witnesses were adamant that the behaviour of the Israeli soldiers was an unnecessary escalation that led to the deaths of yet more Palestinians.

Ghassan Hamdan, the director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society in Nablus, was at the scene of the killings.

“There were at least 12 soldiers and they all fired their automatic machine guns at once,” said Hamdan.

After the two men fell to the ground [medics] asked the soldiers if we could treat their wounds. They answered by firing at all of us.”

“We all took cover behind the walls of the old city,” he told Al Jazeera.

Hamza Abu Hajar, a paramedic at the scene, said that the Umairah brother who had initially approached the Israeli soldiers had been trying to go to his house to move his family out and away from the Israeli raid.

“They lifted his shirt up to prove he was unarmed,” Abu Hajar said. “They then started shooting at him, and at us as well.”

The Israeli army said it acted in self-defence after one of the Umairah brothers tried to seize a weapon from a soldier. It said that four soldiers had been injured in the incident.

West Bank raids

The raid in Nablus, which lasted more than 24 hours, is the latest Israel has conducted in the West Bank.

Israel has taken advantage of the world’s focus on its own war on Gaza since October 2023 to escalate its land theft and violence in the West Bank.

During that span, Israel has killed at least 930 people in the West Bank, 24 of whom were from Nablus, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Many of these deaths are the result of violent Israeli raids ostensibly aimed at clamping down on Palestinian fighters in the West Bank, but which have resulted in mass destruction and thousands of Palestinians fleeing their homes.

According to Hamdan, Israeli troops mainly targeted Nablus’s old city by storming into hundreds of homes in the middle of the night. Dozens of people were also reportedly arrested.

Young people in the city protested by burning tyres and throwing rocks at Israeli troops, yet they were met with heavy tear gas, injuring at least 80 Palestinians in the raid.

In the past, Palestinian protesters have been imprisoned on “terrorism” charges or shot and killed for simply resisting Israel’s occupation by throwing rocks or defying Israeli soldiers.

This time around, the Israelis classified the entire old city in Nablus as a closed military zone for 24 hours. No ambulances or medics were allowed inside to aid distressed residents, said Hamdan.

“Nobody was allowed in or out. Nobody was allowed to make any movement at all. We [as medics] could not enter the area during the entire raid to try and help people in need,” he told Al Jazeera.

Assault and vandalism

During the raid, Israeli troops stormed into several apartments after blowing off door hinges with explosives.

Umm Hassan, a 58-year-old resident who did not want to give her full name, recalls feeling terrified when several Israeli soldiers broke into her home.

About five months ago, her husband passed away from cancer, an illness that also claimed two of her children years ago.

Umm Hassan is also battling cancer, yet she said Israeli soldiers showed her no mercy. They flipped her television on the ground, broke windows and tossed her paintings off the walls and onto the living room floor.

They even vandalised her books by throwing them on the ground, including the Quran.

“I told them to leave me alone. I was alone and so scared. There was nobody to protect me,” Umm Hassan told Al Jazeera.

Another woman, Rola, said that Israeli soldiers stormed into her home two times in the span of six hours during the raid.

When Israeli soldiers returned the second time, Rola said that they attacked her elderly father, hitting him on the head and chest with the butts of their guns.

Rola described her three nieces and nephews – all small children – cowering with fear as Israeli soldiers vandalised and destroyed their home.

“The second time they came to our home, they put us all in a room and we weren’t able to leave the room from 8am until 3:30pm,” said Rola.

“We [Palestinians] always talk about being resilient. But the reality is when Israeli soldiers come into your private home, then you get very scared. It’s natural. We are humans and humans get scared,” she told Al Jazeera.

Psychological warfare

More than 80 Palestinians received treatment from the Palestine Red Crescent Society during the raid, 25 of them as a result of gunshot wounds.

While Israel says its raid was “precise”, inhabitants of Nablus say that the attack on the city was the latest attempt to intimidate and frighten Palestinians.

“Honestly, what were Israeli soldiers searching for in my home? What did they think they were going to find?” asked Rola. “The reason for their raids [violence] is to uphold the [illegal] occupation.”