Supervisors Vote to Expand LA County Mental Health Crisis Response Teams
LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors June 8, passed a proposal by Supervisor Janice Hahn and co-authored by Supervisor Kathryn Barger to expand the county’s Psychiatric Mobile Response Team (PMRT) program.
LA County’s Psychiatric Mobile Response Teams are teams of unarmed mental health professionals who respond directly to a person experiencing a mental health crisis. Currently, 25 Psychiatric Mobile Response Teams operate across the county during normal business hours between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. and 12 teams operate between the hours of 5 p.m. and 2 a.m. and on weekends. The average response time is often 2 hours and the teams are not available to respond between the hours of 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. – limiting their ability to be a viable alternative to law enforcement.
“Mental health crises aren’t a nine-to-five problem and our solution can’t be either,” said Supervisor Hahn, who authored the motion. “Too often, armed law enforcement or ambulances become the de facto response to people experiencing mental health crises. If we want our Psychiatric Mobile Response Teams to be a viable and effective alternative to calling the police, they need to be available 24/7 and there need to be enough teams to respond to every crisis quickly.”
The motion today authored by Supervisor Hahn and co-authored by Supervisor Barger does two important things to expand the county’s Psychiatric Mobile Response Team network.
First, it asks the county to develop a plan to expand Psychiatric Mobile Response Teams to be available 24/7 before 2022.
Second, it asks the county for a plan to use new federal funding available through the American Rescue Plan to expand and improve the Psychiatric Mobile Response Team network to respond to crises across the county more quickly.
The effort to expand these teams comes just one year before the first nationwide mental health crisis hotline, 9-8-8, launches in Summer 2022. Dialing 9-8-8 will be an alternative to 9-1-1 and will connect people with the Psychiatric Mobile Response Teams when necessary.
A plan to expand the Psychiatric Mobile Response Teams to 24/7 is due back to the board in 60 days.
LA County Publishes First-Ever Online Jail Decarceration Dashboard
LOS ANGELES — On May 18, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to establish the Jail Population Review Council, chaired by the Office of Diversion and Reentry, with the goal of maintaining the reduced jail population beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
For years, the Los Angeles County jail facilities have been severely overcrowded. When the pandemic hit, LA County justice partners collaborated to quickly and safely decrease the jail population within weeks. Recognizing that overcrowded jail facilities contribute to unhealthy and unsafe conditions for everyone involved, Supervisor Janice Hahn and then-Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas authored a motion in September 2020.
The County of Los Angeles, in partnership with the Vera Institute of Justice, has published an online decarceration dashboard which provides a visual breakdown and analysis of the county’s jail population on a daily basis. The goal of this dashboard is to help policymakers, advocates and academics better understand the makeup and changes in the population of people in LA County jails in order to craft public policy to safely reduce the jail population.
Hahn, who authored the motion to publish the online dashboard said that we can’t create effective policy to address our overcrowded jails if we don’t understand our jail population.The “Care First L.A.: Tracking Jail Decarceration” dashboard, can be accessed at www.vera.org/care-first-la-tracking-jail-decarceration. It will be updated daily using data collected by the Sheriff’s Department and breaks down everything from racial disparities, to case status, to the prevalence of mental illness among the jail population.