Mental Health Response: The Devil Is In the Details

Finding the best way to respond to mental health crises is a continuing search. One thing we can be sure of is that proposals under the “defund the police” banner are bad ideas. See Michael Rushford’s post yesterday. We need more police, not fewer, regardless of what we do about mental health calls. Beyond that, alternatives need to be well thought out and adequately funded and supported. Too often, they are not. Scott Calvert and Julie Wernau have this report in the WSJ, titled “‘No Hose, No Gun’: Police Alternatives for Mental-Health Crises Fall Short: New units designed to avoid violent and often deadly encounters lack both funding and institutional support.”

Dispatchers at the 911 center in Mesa, Ariz., have three levers to pull: fire/medical, police or mental health. The last one is a relatively new addition, adopted by dozens of police departments around the country and aimed at avoiding violent and often deadly confrontations between police officers and the mentally ill.

“No hose, no gun,” said Mayor John Giles. “Just somebody with a clipboard and an argyle sweater who wants to ask how your day is going.”

Now there’s a disaster waiting to happen, if the person is so far gone as to be a danger to himself or others.

A more promising alternative, in my view, is a team including both mental health clinicians and police with special training in dealing with the mentally ill. Restraining people who have become violent is definitely not a job for clinicians. The article notes that San Antonio has a three-member team comprised of a police officer, a paramedic, and a mental health clinician. The problem is that the city only has one team, so it is frequently not available. Orange County, Florida, apparently has better results with multiple teams.

Orange County, Fla., Sheriff John W. Mina pairs mental-health workers with a deputy because he doesn’t feel comfortable sending them out alone. Since the joint teams started in January 2021, they have responded to 8,100 calls and have made no arrests. No mental-health workers have been harmed.

“That tells me this is a better way,” Mina said.

There are other issues described in the article. One of them is how the 911 dispatcher knows which team to send. A quick response is needed, and the information is often sketchy.

So the quest for the optimum solution continues. One thing is certain, though. Public safety is the number one function of state and local government. It needs to be adequately funded, if need be by cutting spending on less important things. Like the California bullet train that will only go from Merced to Bakersfield, not SF to LA as promised. Like university ethnic studies departments that exist to indoctrinate students in theories that were widely and correctly understood to be crackpot until a few years ago. Like “prevailing wage” laws that inflate the cost of everything built for the government by requiring wages well above what is actually “prevailing.” And on and on.