Thomas Dee, Stanford University

About the Presentation

Police officers typically serve as first responders to emergencies involving mental-health crises and are legally authorized to place individuals in involuntary psychiatric detentions. Concerns that these involuntary detentions are overutilized and can cause unnecessary harm have made the practice highly controversial. Co-responder programs are an emerging and responsive innovation that pairs mental-health professionals with police officers on qualified emergency calls for service. This pre-registered study provides leading evidence on the impact of a co-responder program using two distinct quasi-experimental designs. The results indicate that co-responders reduce the frequency of involuntary psychiatric detentions by 16 percent. These results also suggest that nearly half of this reduction is due to an improved continuum of care that reduces future calls for service.

About the Speaker

Thomas S. Dee is the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, and the Faculty Director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. Dee is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a senior fellow (Joint) at the Hoover Institution, and a Research Associate with the programs on education, children, and health at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses largely on the use of data and quantitative methods to inform contemporary issues of education policy and practice. Recent examples include studies of the impact of innovative school curricula and pedagogy and studies of changing patterns of school enrollment and engagement in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) awarded his collaborative research the Raymond Vernon Memorial Award in 2015 and again in 2019. He also received the 2024 Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award from the American Educational Research Association. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the American Educational Research Journal, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Education Finance and Policy and as an Associate Editor of Economic Inquiry.

Seminar Format

Location IN PERSON: 2208 LeFrak Hall. We are requesting advanced registration so that we can track capacity. Please use this link to RSVP.

Location ONLINE VIA ZOOM: Zoom Registration Link. Registration link will be provided approximately 2 weeks in advance of the seminar. Upon registration, you will receive an automatically generated email with the direct link for the seminar

If accommodations are needed, please send request to meeting organizer (mprc-support@umd.edu) at least 72 hours prior to the event, if possible, to allow time to discuss and implement alternatives.

COVID-19 Information

MPRC public events for Fall 2024 will be a mix of in person and online via Zoom.  For in person events, all event attendees must follow current protocols