Police get expert help when contacting people who are in mental crisis

Police often are the first on the scene when people have a mental health problem.

In the past, when officers arrived to find someone in crisis they would need to call a mental health professional for help, sometimes waiting up to an hour for assistance.

Lourdes Health teamed up with the three Tri-City police agencies to cut that wait to minutes now that mental health counselors will be riding with some police officers.

While police and mental health professionals deal with many of the same people, they’ve always operated in separate worlds, said Deanna Petrilli, a mobile outreach professional working in Kennewick.

“Mental health and law enforcement speak different languages, but through this program we are learning to translate those languages to address the growing mental health and substance abuse crisis in this region,” she said.

Pasco, Richland and Kennewick police and Lourdes Health got a $1.1 million grant through a program aimed at moving the mentally ill out of jails and into treatment facilities.

The money pays for mental health professionals to be available at the three police agencies during weekday and swing shifts and all day on weekends.

Pasco led the way

While the mobile outreach team is new, the idea started slightly more than two years ago with Pasco police Chief Bob Metzger. He joined with a team of mental health professionals, firefighters and members of law enforcement to help people whose mental health issues are behind their legal problems.

The group, called Hotspotters, works to find them treatment to try to keep them out of jail, Metzger said Wednesday, adding that jail shouldn’t be where people with mental health issues are dumped.

“One of the things I found out ... is that we did not have a good dialogue,” he said. “We had a dialogue but it wasn’t necessarily a good one between police and mental health professionals. We needed to bridge that gap.”

It also cut the number of times officers needed to use force to arrest people. That has dropped by 60 percent in Pasco, Metzger said.

While Hotspotters tried and failed to get a grant, Lourdes officials approached them with a plan to go after the settlement grant. After getting the money, they worked with Kennewick and Richland to bring the program to the rest of the Tri-Cities.

The idea is to make it available across Benton and Franklin counties, since the people affected aren’t limited to a single jurisdiction, Metzger said. If the entire team is needed in Pasco, Kennewick, Richland or in the county, they can respond to a single spot.

While Kennewick police Chief Ken Hohenberg and Richland’s Interim Chief Jeff Taylor benefit from having a mental court to divert people found competent but still mentally ill, this adds another way to help people and to increase communication between mental health professionals and police.

Riding with officers

The team consists of three full-time mental health professionals, four full-time clinicians, two part-time clinicians, along with two full-time and one part-time peer specialist. Along with the initial meeting, the team will follow up with the people they interact with by providing referrals and seeing how their treatment is going.

The professionals, who have master’s degrees, and clinicians will ride along with officers and respond when they’re needed.

They won’t get out of the car until the officer tells them it’s safe, said Cameron Fordmeir, Lourdes Health manager. Along with being able to provide immediate screenings, evaluations and information, they can decide whether the person needs to be hospitalized.

Their targets will be people with severe chronic mental illness or significant substance use disorders who would normally end up in jail to wait until it is determined whether they were competent.

The team will provide officers with training about dealing with people who are in crisis.

“This is a complete change in how we would operate in the past,” Taylor said. “When we would have a mental health call, our officers would go out, they would assess the scene and if they felt that resources were needed, they’d have to make a phone call.”

That call was often inadequate for getting across the severity of the situation, Taylor said.

Funding the program

The money for the mobile outreach team runs out in December, Fordmeir said. The group will provide quarterly reports to the state about the success of the program. Depending on the effectiveness, they could get more money.

No matter what happens, though, the chiefs said they are already discussing how to keep it if the funding goes away.

This story was originally published February 27, 2019 at 5:57 PM.