From The Crime Report
At the Houston Police Department, a licensed clinical social worker or caseworker rides along when police answer an emergency call regarding a person presumed to be mentally ill. Some 30 of those ride-along professionals now work out of that department’s relatively new Mental Health Division.
In Wisconsin, the Madison Police Department Mental Health Liaison Program has similar pairings of health clinicians and cops, otherwise known as crisis intervention response teams.
The teams in those two cities reflect an innovative approach to handling police encounters with mentally ill persons that is picking up traction around the country.
The U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), which supports the Houston and Madison initiatives, is also monitoring other BJA-supported “specialized police response” demonstration sites in Los Angeles; Portland, Maine; Salt Lake City, Utah; and the University of Florida. Together, the six pilot programs are expected to provide new law enforcement tools and techniques aimed at steering mentally ill persons suspected to be lawbreakers toward medical treatment whenever that’s deemed more appropriate than locking them up.
“It starts with … training police officers to better understand individuals who are suffering from mental disorders, (to develop) ways to approach them and to resolve calls to service … that population,” Gerard Murphy, deputy director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center National Initiatives division, told The Crime Report...
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