Note: This story has been corrected to clarify the process for requesting Project Respond to accompany police on calls.

As Portlanders await a medical examiner’s report and grand jury review of the death of Damon Lamarr Johnson, the fatal incident has reignited a conversation about the region’s mobile crisis response systems—including one that the police rarely utilize.

Johnson, 52, died while in police custody on June 27, following a prolonged physical struggle with officers. His death is still under investigation. 

What happened that night?

Police were called to Johnson’s apartment complex by a security guard who reported erratic behavior from Johnson, and said water was seeping out from his apartment into the hallway. 

Police decided to take Johnson into custody for a mental health hold. Johnson, who was reported to be experiencing a psychiatric issue before police arrived, became agitated during the encounter.

 

The situation became tense when officers tried to handcuff Johnson. He was restrained on the floor of his apartment for several minutes, face down, as they tried to get him to calm down. Johnson was rendered unconscious and required CPR from medics. He was pronounced dead after being transported to a hospital.

Portland Police Bureau released body camera footage of the incident earlier this month that renewed broad questions about behavioral health crisis response protocols in Portland. It also reignited calls for expanding Portland Street Response, the city-operated, unarmed crisis response team that sends social workers to calls involving people experiencing a behavioral health issue in public. 

Amid a slew of questions from reporters at a July 11 press conference, Portland Police Chief Bob Day said he'd prefer PPB not be the default response agency for calls like the one involving Johnson. 

“My desire is that law enforcement should not even have to be at these calls for service,” Day told reporters. “I’ve said it many times before, if there's anybody that wants to step into this gap and take on that responsibility, I’m very open to that. …I think we as a community need to continue to try to look for ways to create other models and other response alternatives, so this doesn’t fall on law enforcement as the only ones.”

Johnson’s death, and Day’s comments put a greater focus on the need to expand Portland Street Response, which currently operates under limited hours and is constrained from responding to certain types of calls. However, police already have a 24-hour mobile crisis intervention service at their disposal, called Project Respond—though call volume data suggests PPB rarely utilizes the service.

What is Project Respond?

Project Respond is a behavioral health response system in Multnomah County that offers 24/7 assistance to people experiencing a psychiatric emergency. It’s been in place for more than 30 years, and currently has a team of 25 crisis intervention responders. 

Project Respond sends trained mental health professionals who can and often do accompany police on calls. It's up to police to determine when to request Project Respond to join them on a scene. They usually do so by coordinating with the Bureau of Emergency Communications (911).

Note: a previous version of this story incorrectly stated that 911 operators can dispatch Project Respond. The Mercury regrets the error.

The program is operated by Cascadia Health, a certified community behavioral health center that coordinates with Multnomah County via the Behavioral Health Call Center and the national 988 crisis line. 

Between 2019 and 2023, the organization answered 73,000 calls for help from more than 16,000 people. Of those calls, the organization says 96 percent involved deescalation to avoid arrest or hospitalization.

While city leaders are working to expand capacity and operating hours at Portland Street Response, the program currently only operates until 10 pm, and doesn’t respond to calls involving weapons. Project Respond doesn’t have those same limitations. And unlike PSR, which currently cannot respond to calls inside buildings, Project Respond will meet people wherever they are.

But police didn’t summon Project Respond the night of Johnson’s death. After asking Johnson a few questions and offering to help him move his bed—which was flipped over amid debris around the apartment—Johnson declined the help. Three officers, at least one of which had some level of crisis intervention training, convened for less than 30 seconds before deciding to arrest Johnson and take him in for psychiatric monitoring. 

It’s unclear why police didn’t call for the service that night. PPB says at least one of the officers who responded had crisis intervention training. Aside from the press conference two weeks after the in-custody death, PPB declined to answer questions about its protocols and why it didn’t call for help from trained mental health providers that night, citing an active investigation.

Data provided by Project Respond shows the crisis team co-responded with police on 118 calls during the first quarter of 2025—a small fraction of the mental health calls PPB responded to this year. Police dispatch data for the same timeframe indicates well over 1,000 calls were categorized as behavioral health-related. That doesn’t include other incidents where crisis intervention was needed. Some, like the one involving Johnson, are often logged as “disturbance” or “welfare check” calls.

The rough data suggests the city’s emergency responders are under-utilizing Project Respond services, while others, namely civilians, may not even realize it exists. From January to March, Project Respond logged 542 calls for service—a decrease from the average three-month call volume logged from 2019 to 2023.

What’s also unclear is why security at Johnson’s apartment complex summoned police. The apartment complex, Argyle Gardens, is a transitional housing site for people exiting homelessness. It’s overseen by Transition Projects, Inc (TPI).

Johnson isn’t the first tenant to require psychiatric services. In fact, most tenants at Argyle Gardens receive wraparound services of some kind, be it mental health, job referral services, housing and disability assistance, or other resources. 

TPI declined to answer questions from the Mercury about their protocol for responding to tenants in need of acute psychiatric help, or whether their security guards are trained in how to intervene or summon crisis response services. 

“Transition Projects is aware of the recent critical incident at Argyle Gardens,” Clifton Roberts, a communications manager for TPI, said via email. “We never want a tragic event like this to happen to anyone in our community. At this time, we won’t be commenting further until all aspects of this situation are fully investigated.”

Crisis response under the microscope

Johnson’s death sparked a slew of questions from the community about how police handled the call and why Johnson was taken into custody. It’s also reignited frustration over a policing system that too often leads to the death of people battling behavioral health issues.

The city of Portland has been subject to the terms of a settlement agreement with the US Department of Justice for over a decade, after the federal government determined the Portland Police Bureau had a pattern of using excessive force against people with mental illness.

The settlement agreement requires the city to undergo independent monitoring by a third party, to gauge compliance with the court-mandated terms of the settlement.

But even when the city’s police force was determined to be out of compliance with the settlement, PPB faced few, if any consequences aside from administrative changes and training updates.

Compliance with the settlement agreement used to be overseen by the DOJ. Now, that duty has been passed on to a third-party independent monitoring team hired by the city. 

Lisa Rogers, an attorney for the city of Portland, said the independent monitoring team now determines whether the city is “in substantial compliance, partial compliance, or no compliance.”

"In order to assess whether we have a durable remedy here, the [monitor] is going to be looking to whether we have an accountability system that is going to address issues when issues arise," Rogers said during a recent community listening session hosted by the Portland Committee For Community Engaged Policing (PCCEP) focused on Johnson’s death. 

The city’s primary tool for police oversight is a new, voter-approved Police Accountability Board with the authority to impose discipline on officers if the board determines they broke policy or committed misconduct. That board is not operational yet.

Jason Renaud is with the Mental Health Alliance, one of a few groups that joined the settlement agreement as an amicus (friend of the court).

Following a status hearing held in federal court last week regarding the settlement agreement, Renaud said he doesn’t see any meaningful oversight of the Portland Police Bureau currently happening.

“The purpose of the settlement agreement is to reduce the use of lethal force on people with mental illness,” Renaud told the Mercury. “For the last 12 years, that has not occurred.”

Renaud says the Mental Health Alliance has long advocated for a robust, non-police alternative system for addressing behavioral health crises. That improved system includes Portland Street Response, but Renaud is quick to note Project Respond has been in operation long before Portland Street Response was launched. 

“The real problem is 911 sent the wrong people for Damon Johnson,” he says, blaming a “lack of training and good quality call takers” who know when to tap into available crisis intervention services. (The Bureau of Emergency Communications clarified that it doesn't have the capability to dispatch Project Respond.)

But police are the ones who determine when to have Project Respond on the scene with them, not 911 operators. The 911 agency says call takers undergo extensive training on how to appropriately triage calls.

"The basic training for a Bureau of Emergency Communications (BOEC) call taker is 18 – 22 months," Jaymee Cuti, a public information officer for BOEC, told the Mercury. "In addition, our call takers receive training specific on crisis intervention and the policies for transferring calls to the Behavioral Health Crisis Center (BHCC), and for dispatching police and Portland Street Response."   

The Mental Health Alliance has called for a full, independent investigation of Johnson's death, including the social services agencies that serve Johnson, the training of 911 call takers, and the level of contact police had with Johnson prior to his death.

Portland City Councilor Sameer Kanal, who co-chairs the Council’s Community and Public Safety Committee, has called for the city to bulk up its alternative crisis response system. He’s led the charge to make Portland Street Response a co-equal branch of Portland’s emergency services system.

In April, he and two other councilors introduced a resolution that would do just that. 

“What it does is start the process of putting Portland Street Response into city code,” Kanal told the Mercury, noting the goal is to codify the program as “its own thing with its own particular types of calls it responds to” and one that is adequately funded to be able to respond in the same way as police or fire crews do. That resolution was adopted by the Council in June. 

“There’s still plenty of work to do,” Kanal cautions.

But as Portlanders wait for the program to expand, little attention or focus has been given to other alternative response programs like Project Respond. In fact, neither Kanal nor his Public Safety Committee co-chair, Councilor Steve Novick, responded to questions about how closely the city works with Project Respond, and how the service fits into the larger alternative response model. Councilor Angelita Morillo, who also sits on the committee, also declined to respond to questions. 

Those who are familiar with the service say it could have saved Johnson’s life.

“I am extremely concerned that [Portland Police] Chief Bob Day continues to say there ‘was no available mental health crisis team who could have responded,’" a local social worker told the Mercury, noting police have direct access to Project Respond and can request a co-response any time of day. The social worker’s name is being withheld because they are not authorized to speak to media. 

Project Respond workers also have the ability to initiate what’s known as a director’s custody hold, which is the type of involuntary hold that police initiated on Johnson, for the purposes of transport to a health provider. 

The Mental Health Alliance, in public statements following Johnson’s death, amplified the need for a more robust behavioral health crisis response system, sans police. 

“The effective way to reduce misuse of force by police against people experiencing a mental illness crisis is to eliminate contact between police and those people in crisis,” the Alliance said in a July 14 statement, shortly after the release of body camera footage. Last week, ahead of the DOJ settlement status conference, the organization lamented the years of work put in by organizations seeking to rectify PPB’s treatment of people battling mental illness, only to see the same problem repeated.

“All our work together was only to avert his pointless and brutal death,” the Alliance stated.