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Lenny Marcus came home from work one night six years ago to find his grown son incoherent, surrounded by his own vomit on the basement floor.
Marcus recalled how his son, who was 24 at the time, could not talk; He knew they had to go to the hospital to pull the child’s stomach.
At some point, before he drove to the hospital, law enforcement arrived and asked the deputies to take him to the hospital instead of taking him to his family.
“My son was drunk, he was saying inappropriate things, and the police got mad at him,” Marcus said of that night.
Law enforcement eventually agreed to follow the family to the hospital, he said.
“They followed us to the hospital, and the police were very inappropriate,” Marcus said. “Finally, the hospital staff told the manager that he should wait outside because it would cause trouble between my son and the staff.”
Marcus said deputies responded to the home in Winchester Canyon several times, seeing problems in his mentally ill son’s behavior when the boy himself didn’t realize there was a problem.
“My wife called the police because she was afraid they were going to shoot my son,” he said. “You read all the time in the paper about people being shot by the police because they didn’t know they were mentally ill.
“What a mentally ill person thinks is not a problem, the police think.”
This example is Marcus A National Coalition on Mental Illness (NAMI) class, and learn about the Santa Barbara County Joint Response Teams, which include a Behavioral safety department A physician with a law enforcement deputy specially trained to respond to mental health crises with 9-1-1 calls.
“The collective response is, in my mind, the single best thing the county has done,” Marcus said. “I’m a big believer. In my mind, that’s one thing the county got right when it comes to mental illness.”
The joint response team started with a pilot program in 2018 and was very successful. In October, the funding for the pilot program, the county decided not only to continue the funding permanently, but also to increase the number of employees to three teams. .
In the joint response model, the deputy and the clinic work together for 10-hour shifts and respond to emergency calls, preventing unnecessary hospitalizations or psychiatric arrests.
“If a call comes in that looks like it’s mental health and not a crime, the team starts engaging with the person to find out what’s going on,” said Tony Navarro, director of the Behavioral Health Division.
“They’re going to take the person to a shelter, get them home and keep the individual out of jail.”
The teams have responded to 1,707 calls since the beginning of 2020. Data shows that only 3% were arrested. Nosehawk.
28% of the calls the teams responded to were in cases where the individual had committed an arrestable offence. Of the total calls the teams responded to, 96% resulted in arrests.
“Our goal here is to help them,” Navarro said. “Without this collaboration, people with a co-occurring disorder or mental illness are too often incarcerated for 40 years.”
The joint response teams responded to the Marcus family several times after the family learned about the program. At one point, Marcus’ son was “really melting down” in his room, taking a bat to the wall and screaming at the top of his lungs.
“So I called 9-1-1 and asked for a joint response team,” he said. “They came in three police cars, talked to (my husband and I) in the dining room and talked to my son outside.
“They mainly talked about him. They knew how to explain it to him and how to get him help.
The program is about not only keeping people out of jail as much as possible, but getting them out of the general criminal justice system and into appropriate resources.
More than 35% of the Collaborative Response Group had active engagement and follow-up with people with a history of mental illness.
“We might have a 15-year-old kid, and all we can do is have a team go out and play basketball two days a week,” said school manager Dr. Cherilyn Lee. Sheriff’s Department Behavioral Sciences Division.
“We developed this incredible, evidence-based, rational program and took it to our community to make it work. Our mission is not to punish people with mental illness, our mission is to support them to live their lives outside of the mental health system.”
While the collaborative response teams have been a proven success in Santa Barbara County, the Behavioral Safety and Sheriff’s Departments have had to learn to blend the two different cultures to build that working relationship.
“Law enforcement and behavioral health departments have different cultures, so we had to learn how to work with someone from another culture,” said John Winkler, chief of crisis services for the Behavioral Safety Division.
“As the relationships are built, we on the mental health side are really learning how to better communicate with law enforcement so that it doesn’t feel like we’re riding in a car — we’re in the car together.”
The mission of law enforcement is public safety, and the mission of behavioral security is personal safety, Lin explained, adding that sometimes those things conflict.
“Behavioral health focuses on the person, law enforcement focuses on the situation and the world around them,” she said. There are some heads up, but we can agree to disagree now, but before we do.
“There’s constant back-and-forth and learning and growing between teams, but we need each other to be effective. It’s very encouraging that you have psychologists talking and talking to the police and we’re starting to use the same language. We’re light years ahead of where most agencies and counties and communities are.” We are
Because there aren’t enough joint response teams for 24/7 coverage, the Department of Behavioral Safety is looking for ways to expand the program, and hopes to add a fourth team in the near future, said department spokeswoman Susan Grimese.
In some jurisdictions in California, the joint response team includes firefighters and paramedics, something the Division of Conduct Safety is investigating for Santa Barbara County, said John Doyle, the department’s assistant director.
Some communities have moved law enforcement away from the collective response model entirely, but that’s not what the Department of Behavioral Safety sees happening here.
“I’m not taking law enforcement out of the collective response model,” Navarro said. “That doesn’t happen in Santa Barbara, because I see the safety benefits of having law enforcement.
“Law enforcement is receiving a lot of training in signs and symptoms and how to turn people around.”
Lee agrees.
“I don’t believe the partnership will be perfect, and I don’t think it should be,” she said. But the reality of what we’re doing together is embodied in the community, in the stories and letters and thank-you notes.
– Jade Martinez-Pogue of Nosehawk Contributing writer. It can be found on (Javascript must be enabled to view this email address).
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