Editorial PD: Santa Rosa’s mobile crisis team works 24/7

The year ends with wonderful news. Santa Rosa’s mobile crisis response program not only survived the financial headwinds against the city; expand to 24/7 operations.

The three-year-old crisis program, called InResponse, helps people, many of them homeless, who are experiencing behavioral health crises or other challenges. These are incidents that don’t really need to be handled by law enforcement or sometimes the fire department, but before InResponse, there was no one to call.

InResponse is part of a nationwide awareness that communities need intervention alternatives beyond the police, who, despite extensive training, are not social workers. Programs like InResponse take a patient-centered approach, deploying trained crisis workers instead of armed officers and connecting individuals to needed services with follow-up. This method frees up law enforcement officers to deal with crime and other threats to public safety. It also directs fewer people through the court system and decreases the number of incidents that could escalate into police use of force.

Mobile response teams were also formed in Rohnert Park, Cotati, Petaluma and unincorporated Sonoma County.

InResponse succeeds because its three-person teams include a mental health professional, a paramedic and a specialist. They respond to calls involving behavioral health issues, welfare checks, possible suicides, homelessness and other issues.

Forty percent of last year’s 4,759 calls primarily involved mental health. Each one was one less call that police, fire and EMS didn’t have to make.

InResponse handled all of these calls while running just two shifts. One van operates from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM and the other from noon to 10:00 PM. The new night shift will operate from 9.30pm to 7.30am.

With Santa Rosa’s continuing budget woesthis expansion comes as surprising and welcome news. Credit local leaders for understanding the value of InResponse. It has support from agencies such as Buckelew Programs, Catholic Charities, the Santa Rosa Fire Department and the Sonoma County Division of Behavioral Health.

The model for such programs is CAHOOTS — Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets — which was launched in 1989 in Eugene, Oregon, as a partnership between the White Bird Clinic and the city’s public safety system. A White Bird crisis worker and a doctor were dispatched to 911 calls involving a range of non-emergency behavioral health issues.

That CAHOOTS ever broke out is in itself a social and political miracle. Founded years earlier as a counterculture collective serving people at risk of falling through society’s cracks, White Bird was viewed with suspicion by law enforcement and the Eugene establishment.

Santa Rosa engaged CAHOOTS as a consultant to help InResponse. There was no guarantee that success would translate to Santa Rosa. It did so, in large part, because local leaders were able to create a mobile response program tailored to local needs.

Now, three years later, it remains a success. There’s nothing wrong with borrowing a good idea from somewhere else to make progress on a seemingly intractable problem. Health remains an issue, but crisis incidents are handled much better today.

You can send letters to the editor to [email protected].