Santa Barbara Sheriff Bill Brown’s office quietly announced it was seeking a $1 million state grant that would help restore the department’s crisis intervention training program (CIT) for sworn deputies and custodial officers, a program that has lain mysteriously dormant for the last two years. In addition, the grant funding would also cover the costs of two co-response teams, which consist of two sworn deputies and two mental-health clinicians who are teamed up to respond to 9-1-1 calls involving acute mental-health crises.
Started six years ago, this program has been much beloved by mental-health advocates trying to keep violent interactions between law enforcement and those with mental-health disorders to a minimum. The program has been mysteriously at loggerheads with itself, mostly because of conflicted funding formulas that pit the Sheriff’s Office against Behavioral Wellness, representatives of both typically making up each of the four co-response teams the county has funded. The two departments have drastically different methodologies for assessing the success of the program and arrive at drastically different conclusions. In addition, a recent law-enforcement-phobic state law has decreed that mental-health clinicians can’t receive financial remuneration from Medi-Cal for going out on co-response calls if a law enforcement officer is also present.
Privately, many clinicians will say that a law enforcement presence is either helpful or necessary because of the acuity of the mental-health crises involved. But funding is funding, and without it, the number of clinicians available for co-response assignments is way down. About 40 percent of the co-response calls do not include a mental-health clinician. The whole point of the program has been to keep high stress encounters from escalating, keeping mentally ill people out of jail, getting them into programs that might possibly help, and to free up deputies who could respond to numerous other calls for service if not engaged for hours on end working to contain those experiencing mental-health meltdowns.
