When Megan Younger was on her third day on the job, she accompanied police officers to the home of a woman whose family hadn’t heard from her in days. The woman was found in the bathtub – where she had been for three days – and had chemically burned off all of her hair.

Younger is one of a handful of co-responders across the metropolitan area – Kansas City, Kansas, and Olathe, Kansas, are two of the other cities – working to change the way police interact with people in a mental health crisis and to get them treatment instead of cycling in and out of emergency rooms and jails.

KCUR interviewed Alex Holsinger, a professor of criminal justice and criminology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City for this story. Read more…