Police mental health unit now permanent

“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.