Amid criticism, sheriff creates team to help people in crisis

Team will follow up with those who suffer mental breakdowns

The Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office will establish a team to follow up with people who have experienced a psychiatric emergency and provide them with resources and services.

The mental health evaluation team will not accompany officers called to mental health crises. But it will circle back to the people who experienced those emergencies in the following days, the sheriff’s office said in a release.

Members of the new team will check on people who suffered a mental break, providing referrals to local mental health clinics and safety plans for their family members, the office said.

Creation of the new team arrives on the heels of widespread public criticism of how law enforcement responds to mental health crises. Multiple men who have been killed by local police departments in recent years were described by family members as having suffered mental health problems, including Miles Hall in Walnut Creek and Tyrell Wilson in Danville.

Wilson was killed by a sheriff’s deputy, Andrew Hall, after taking a step toward Hall while holding a knife.

Hall has since been charged with manslaughter in an earlier on-duty shooting, the 2018 killing of Laudemer Arboleda, a Newark resident, who also suffered from mental illness.

“MHET is a proactive program that links those with a serious mental illness with needed outpatient services, treatment and resources,” said Contra Costa County Sheriff David Livingston in a statement. “Our goal is to increase safety by reducing the number of repeated police calls regarding those who may be undergoing a psychiatric crisis and cut down on potentially violent encounters with law enforcement and the community.”

The new team’s goal is to prevent the people it evaluates from having “reoccurring episodes and police contacts,” said Jimmy Lee, a sheriff’s office spokesman, in an email.

“The program focuses on post-event follow-up to provide outreach in an attempt to prevent future incidents and help those continuing to struggle with mental health issues,” Lee said in an email.

The follow-up approach doesn’t go as far as a San Francisco initiative to remove police altogether from mental health crisis response. Under that pilot program, paramedics, behavioral health clinicians and peer specialists have begun answering mental health calls instead of armed police.

Oakland has similarly explored replacing police with outreach workers, emergency medical technicians and other civilian specialists in mental health emergency response units. The City Council voted last week to invest $6 million in that pilot program, part of an overall budget that maintains police funding.

In its release, the sheriff’s office noted that “outside agencies within the county, nonprofit organizations and other service providers involved in mental health services” aided the sheriff’s office and Contra Costa Behavioral Health Services in building the new team. Lee did not respond to a question inquiring which other organizations were involved.

However, the sheriff’s office never contacted a local nonprofit well-versed in handling mental health crises: the Contra Costa County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental

Illness. The nonprofit has provided crisis response training to local police agencies, according to its president, Gigi Crowder, but the sheriff’s office has never responded to the organization’s outreach efforts.

Having a county crisis management team in the sheriff’s office is long overdue, Crowder said.

“This should have been in place already,” she said of the office’s new evaluation team. “We keep running into this issue where, in this county, we’re reactive instead of proactive.”

The National Alliance on Mental Illness Contra Costa advocates for unarmed responses to mental health crises, unless the people involved are brandishing firearms. The sheriff’s office’s new mental health response team, on the other hand, will follow up with people only after regular, armed law enforcement officers are sent to handle people experiencing mental breaks.

California legislators are attempting to bridge perceived gaps between law enforcement services and mental health assistance. A state bill making its way through the legislative process would set up a hotline with its own number, 988, for people to call when they or their loved ones are experiencing a mental health crisis.

That legislation — the Miles Hall Lifeline Act — is named for Hall, who was killed by Walnut Creek police in 2019 after his family alerted law enforcement to a mental break he was experiencing.

Crowder said she hosted a memorial in her backyard for Wilson this past weekend, an event attended by his parents, who live out of state. In the wake of Wilson’s killing, his kidney was donated to his uncle.

“We celebrated (Wilson’s) life with his mom and dad there,” Crowder said. “It was very emotional because … a piece of Tyrell continues to live on.”