Growing number of California sheriffs no longer respond to mental health calls | California

Last year, a handful of sheriff’s departments in California started refusing to respond to 911 calls involving a mental health crisis but no crime reported.

In February, Sacramento sheriff Jim Cooper announced that his deputies would only respond to mental health crises if a crime has been committed or is in progress or if someone other than the person in crisis is in imminent danger. Jeremiah Larson, police chief for the city of El Cajon in San Diego County, made a similar policy decision in May.

Some other law enforcement agencies in the state, including the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office and the Long Beach Police Department, said their officers would respond to every call but could not stay unless a crime had occurred and the person in crisis was not a threat to other people.

This trend is revealed by data showing the disastrous consequences of police responding to mental health calls. But the removal of police from these situations, long sought by civil rights advocates, has also raised questions about their real-world impact in communities where alternatives are lacking.

The motivation for Sacramento sheriff Cooper’s announcement was 2024. federal court decision holding Nevada police officers responsible for killing a mentally ill man.

The decision involved the killing of Ray Anthony Scott, who was known by the Las Vegas police department to suffer from schizophrenia. Scott called police just after 3 a.m. on March 4, 2019, to report suspicious persons outside his apartment. When officers Kyle Smith and Theodore Huntsman arrived, Scott complied with their requests; He handed over the pipe and knife he had on him. But when officers asked Scott to face the wall, Scott panicked and told them he couldn’t turn around because he thought people were after him.

Officers grabbed the mentally ill man by force, putting their body weight on Scott’s back, neck and legs, begging them to stop as he struggled. Scott lost consciousness. Medical teams determined that the person died after being removed from the scene. A three-judge ninth circuit court of appeals panel ruled that Smith and Huntsman should be tried for excessive force.

“Our case law makes clear that any reasonable officer should have known that force applied to the body weight of a prone, unarmed and unsuspected person in a crime was constitutionally excessive,” said U.S. circuit judge Roopali Desai. don’t write on behalf of the panel.

Indeed, a significant portion of police killings in the United States over the past decade have occurred while police were responding to people experiencing mental health crises. US police opened fire across the country and Killed 2,057 people He was in a mental health crisis between 2015 and 2024, according to a comprehensive database of police killings compiled by the Washington Post in those years, accounting for 20% of all police killings. Police in California shot and killed at least one person 274 more people suffering from mental health crises than any other state during that period.

People struggling with untreated mental illnesses come into disproportionate amounts of police contact, according to nonprofit mental health advocacy group Treatment Advocacy Center (Crown). During these encounters, people experiencing mental health crises often respond to police commands with strange behavior that can be irrational or misinterpreted. The outcome could be catastrophic, Taj says: The risk of being killed when approached or stopped by law enforcement is 16 times higher for people with untreated serious mental illness than for other civilians.

According to 2015 Taj The report: “Reducing the likelihood of police interactions with individuals in psychiatric crisis may represent the most immediate and practical strategy for reducing fatal encounters with police in the United States.”

Larson, the El Cajon police chief, said it was that reality that motivated his decision. “It’s happened too many times [mental health] “Situations have gone wrong for a family or a police officer, and it affects everyone for the rest of their lives,” he says. “Sometimes just the presence of a police officer can escalate a situation.”

Larson said that in cases where police officers refuse to intervene, someone at the communications center will contact the caller and explain why police did not arrive and provide them with other resources. This may include 988, the nationwide suicide prevention and mental health crisis hotline, or the San Diego Access and Crisis Line, a local hotline that taps into 988 specifically for its community.

In more than 90% of cases, the 988 hotline can successfully diffuse a crisis, connect the caller to needed services and never require police action, says Le Ondra Clark Harvey, executive director of the California Behavioral Health Association, a statewide nonprofit that supports and promotes community-based behavioral health agencies.

Clark Harvey says we should see mental illness for what it is: a health problem, not a crime. “If you’re having a heart attack, we don’t send the police, we send an ambulance, we send a doctor or emergency room to get you the treatment you need without delay,” he says.

Clark Harvey acknowledged that in an ideal world, mental health professionals would respond to mental health crises, but the real world is not ideal. “Some communities don’t have a mental health response team, they don’t have the funding, they don’t have the infrastructure.” That’s why all first responders (police, fire, emergency services) need solid mental health response training, he says.

“There shouldn’t be a lack of answers. Someone needs to answer, and ideally that person needs to have all the training,” says Clark Harvey.

in El Cajon, Firefighters voice their concerns He said they had to deal with people exhibiting mental health issues and Larson’s deputies refused to help.

Larson says the police and fire departments in his community have since agreed on how to handle situations that are unclear; So the situation does not appear to require police intervention, but the fire department still requires officers to be present.

“If the fire department wants us there, 1767375487 be there,” says Larson.

But even in cases where violence or weapons are involved and police are necessary, Larson says she prefers to have mental health professionals help. The San Diego area provides Psychiatric Emergency Response Team (Pert) clinicians who can respond to mental health calls along with police. The program has been around for nearly three decades.

“When we started we had funding for 23 clinicians working in partnership with officers, and now we have 70,” says Mark Marvin, vice president of the San Diego Community Research Foundation, which heads the Pert program.

Marvin says the growth is because the program works: Internal data shows that more than 90% of trained Pert clinicians are successful in reducing crisis calls and connecting people to appropriate mental health resources. However, the Pert team may not be available everywhere at all times. In fact, Pert and San Diego law enforcement agencies use heat maps to make decisions about where to deploy teams of clinicians each shift.

“We have a Pert clinician assigned to El Cajon and will continue to work closely with Pert,” says Larson. That is, when Pert is available. “We are trained to enforce the law… We do not have sufficient training to be considered experts in the field of mental health.”

Shannon Scully, director of justice policy initiatives at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (Nami), a grassroots organization for individuals and families affected by mental illness, says police efforts to step back in general should be seen as a positive step.

“I think what we’re seeing now is a shift; the government is trying to respond to what people want,” explains Scully, who says a robust mental health crisis response system includes a 24/7 call center, non-law enforcement first responders, and adequate crisis reception centers for people who need a safe way to get emergency mental health care. Many communities in the U.S. are just beginning to develop this trio of much-needed services and facilities, Scully said. And often there are not enough mental health workers available 24 hours a day.

An Ipsos poll commissioned by Nami last year found that 86% of 2,045 U.S. adults surveyed thought people experiencing a mental health or suicide crisis should receive a mental health response rather than a law enforcement response.

“We have overwhelming agreement from Americans that this is what needs to happen,” Scully says. But as we grow accustomed to relying on responders other than police, as communities manage resources, and as different organizations begin to figure out how they can best serve, we may experience some challenges.

The National Emergency Number Association for 911 call centers finalized the standard for how 911 centers should interact with 988 centers just last year. In many communities, there is still no proper way to even transfer callers between the two systems for an appropriate response. And other factors – especially famine trained staff for many emergency call centers – increase the challenge.

“Systems are changing much more slowly than I think society expects,” Scully says.

According to Larson, the future is clear: “I dream of a day when there will be a team that can handle mental health calls and the police will be out of it.”

He says the police should first specialize in crime. “We shouldn’t have officers handling calls that they probably shouldn’t have been involved in to begin with.”

Taun Hall agrees. The outcome might have been better if police had not been sent in June 2019 when her 23-year-old son was having a mental health crisis. Miles Hall, diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, was shot and killed by police in his family’s upscale suburb of Walnut Creek after he broke the family’s sliding glass door and fled into the neighborhood brandishing a metal garden tool.

Neighbors and family called 911, hoping for immediate medical help. Miles was shot after police cornered him in a dead-end spot, used rubber bullets and unsuccessfully ordered him to stop.

California AB 988 is named for Miles, and the Hall family has been at the forefront of changing the way mental health crisis calls are handled in the state.

“Probably most of the time it’s not necessarily the police who intervene,” Hall says. “By the way, police departments have huge budgets. Now it’s time to consider whether some of that money should go to other people, people who are trained and can intervene appropriately.”