Police mental health unit now permanent
Program gives behavioral health professionals rapid access to officers when responding to emergencies
With police dealing more and more frequently with calls involving mental health crises, San Jose Police Department is taking a significant step toward changing how officers respond to those situations in a move lauded by health professionals.
A pilot program launched in October to connect dedicated San Jose police officers with behavioral health clinicians to respond to escalating mental health emergencies across Santa Clara County now will become a permanent full-time unit in the San Jose Police Department, a department spokesperson confirmed Feb. 5.
The decision, first reported by NBC Bay Area, comes less than a week after officers in the Police Department’s Mobile Crisis Response Team responded to the bludgeoning and stabbing of a decades-old 65-pound tortoise named Michelangelo with a garden post in a San Jose preschool garden.
The mobile crisis response team arrested the suspect, George Robles, booked him on charges of felony vandalism and animal abuse at the Santa Clara County jail and placed him on a 72-hour mental health evaluation hold, though he was released sooner and arrested again when he returned to the preschool just two days after the attack.
Although the team’s response to the tortoise attack was just one example of its work, acting Chief of Police Dave Tindall said in a statement earlier this week that the incident underscored the “need for continued collaboration with our mental health professionals.”
SJPD Sgt. Mike Porter, who will lead the new crisis response unit, is hiring eight officers for his team with the goal of getting the full-time unit up and running by the beginning of March.
“We expected that integrating mental health clinicians with specially trained officers would be successful, and it has been,” Tindall said in a statement Feb. 5. “Our partnership with the county will only grow from here.”
The concept behind the Police Department’s new mental health crisis response unit has been in the works for more than two years.
Former San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia, who left the department at the end of 2020 and accepted a position as chief of police in Dallas, long had advocated for an alternative to police responding to various situations, including mental health emergencies and misbehavior in schools.
After receiving grant funding from the state Department of Justice last year, SJPD in October launched its pilot program as a test.
Though the vast majority of mental health emergencies end peacefully, they have a serious potential for turning violent. In 2018, a civil grand jury report estimated that nearly 40% of police shootings in Santa Clara County involved someone experiencing a psychiatric emergency.
Rovina Nimbalkar, executive director of the Santa Clara County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said initiatives like the new police unit can play an important role in quelling the situation before it gets that far.
“It’s sometimes very difficult when the police show up and they’re not able to de-escalate the situation,” Nimbalkar said. “So I think it’s a great initiative that the county and city are taking to get officers more training and provide more resources.”
Over the past four months, the pilot program has provided notable support to the county’s Mobile Crisis Response Team, which for the past two years has deployed behavioral health professionals to help safely respond to psychiatric emergencies. Calls into the county’s crisis response emergency hotline more than doubled in the past year and field visits nearly tripled, according to the county’s behavioral health department.