Mental health response plan gets a try out

Council OKs $844,000 for a two-year trial to aid police officers

PLEASANTON » Following the lead of some other cities around the Bay Area and abroad, Pleasanton will begin next year sending health professionals along with police officers to many calls for help when a person is experiencing a mental health crisis.

Officials said the Mental Health Response Program will be a two-year pilot and is aimed at reducing the number of times police interact with a person facing mental health crisis, and freeing up most patrol officers — who normally have to help field hundreds of mental health-related calls annually — to focus on other policing.

The Pleasanton City Council on Tuesday approved the program, which is expected to cost nearly $850,000, and will pair two police officers with clinicians.

The program is part of the city’s response to what it described as a “national movement for police reform” in the summer of 2020, which was touched off by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Protests after Floyd’s death also put a spotlight on how police address calls for help when people are having mental health crises and how they interact with homeless people.

Pleasanton’s program will include two full-time licensed mental health clinicians — one for adults and one for youth — and two specially trained police officers from the city’s recently established homeless outreach team.

Though the program is a part of the Police Department and will be overseen by a sergeant, the teams will answer calls in an unmarked car, officials said, modeled after a San Diego program. In that program, the officer is usually not in uniform but carries standard police gear with

him, city reports said.

The Pleasanton program will run on weekdays, according to city staff reports, but after hours or on weekends, patrol officers still will handle mental health calls.

Police Chief David Swing said another goal of the program is to reduce the number of mental health detentions, where people are placed in mental health hospitals for 72 hours.

Vice Mayor Julie Testa said in an interview she hopes clinicians, who are trained in de-escalation, can help find ways to work with families and the people experiencing mental health crises to avoid forced hospitalizations.

“Hospitalizations are traumatizing on both the family and the loved one, and they’re expensive. So everyone is better off if we can find ways to support them without that outcome,” she said.

The program also will include a part-time program assistant, who will act as a caseworker, to help those contacted by the new response team connect with social safety net services or longer-term mental health support.

There also could be calls that are handled exclusively by a clinician, such as “nonurgent requests for service that do not pose an immediate safety risk to the public,” according to city reports. Swing said

the criteria for how each response is handled will be determined during the pilot period.

It will cost Pleasanton about $844,000 for the pilot, most of which is for salaries and benefits of the three additional staffers for two years, with about $43,000 to lease two vehicles for the teams.

The police officers’ salaries and benefits already are included in the city’s budget.

The City Council unanimously approved the program at its meeting Tuesday. The teams are not expected to be sent out until about July; city reports said it can be challenging to find and hire clinicians for such a program because “this type of fieldwork is unconventional in the profession.”

The clinicians will either be licensed social workers or licensed marriage family therapists, who are legally able to recommend mental health holds if needed, city reports said.

Though many California cities around the state and some internationally have started similar programs, City Manager Nelson Fialho said this program will be the first of its kind in the Tri-Valley area.

Though Alameda County has a Community Assessment & Transport Team, known as CATT, to address mental health crises, Swing said Pleasanton has only been able to get its help on scheduled visits to someone who is known to be dealing with mental health issues. The CATT program is not staffed well

enough to help Pleasanton with “spontaneous” calls and focuses most of its effort on the western part of Alameda County, he said, where the need is greater.

“Currently, there is really a lack of resources in Alameda County for immediate calls in the field here in the Tri-Valley,” Swing told the council.

Testa said she’s happy to see this program coming together but hoped that eventually the program wouldn’t include a police officer but would operate more like other long-standing successful models. As an example, she mentioned the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets program, or CAHOOTS, in Eugene, Oregon.

That three-decade-old program pairs clinicians with emergency medical technicians to respond to mental health crises.

“Crisis response should be and ideally is a medical response, not a law enforcement response,” Testa said at the meeting. Testa is a board member of the Tri-Valley chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Though she wants the program to evolve, she said just getting it started in Pleasanton is significant.

“For my city to dedicate the resources to it, it’s such a huge step forward,” she said in an interview.

She also hopes Livermore and Dublin will join in with this program or a similar one so people experiencing mental health crises will receive the attention they need throughout the Tri-Valley area.