Santa Barbara Sheriff Bill Brown’s office quietly announced it was awarded a $993,000 state grant to field two co-response teams for one year and slightly more than $300,000 to reactivate the crisis intervention training program (CIT) after a two-year hiatus.
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.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated to clarify that the state grant has already been awarded, how much money has been awarded, and what the money is funding.
