Law enforcement enlists mental health experts to help save lives -- 'a paradigm shift in policing

[tulipsandroses]

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Spivy, a behavioral health clinician, rides with the team for 40 hours a week. They respond to anything from disorderly conduct calls to suicide attempts to overdoses. Spivy fills a role that traditional policing hasn’t always included: an expert on scene who can diagnose individuals who may need mental health support.
It’s a change from previous tactics when people suffering from mental crises were often arrested, a strategy that only exacerbated their issues and resulted in jails filling up.

Spivy provides a calm, professional presence, able to talk people down from a breaking point. It means providing help and saving lives and bringing a peaceful end to a potentially dangerous situation. She referred to one recent call where a man was waving a gun in public. She and her team managed to calm him and he was taken to the local mental health services center. It was a situation, she said, that could have gone a lot differently.

“I was able to evaluate him and determined that it was a mental health issue,” she said. “Whereas any time before, that individual probably would have been arrested and taken to jail.”
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Out of the approximate 270 individuals they’ve encountered since the Savannah team began working in the community, only three were arrested who didn’t have outstanding warrants, according to the department. All others were directly connected to help
https://www.gpb.org/news/2022/06/08/law-enforcement-enlists-mental-health-experts-help-save-lives-paradigm-shift-in

[Deuxcents]

1. This was my understanding when the call went out to

Defund the police. I understood it to redirect resources for this very reason. Professional people in place of a beat cop w/o the training for things such as this issue.