In April, League City Police Department applied for a $218,000 U.S. Department of Justice grant for police departments to either start or improve a mental health response unit. The money would cover the overtime of the officers assigned and the equipment the unit needs. The department will find out this fall if it has been awarded the grant.
Capt. Stephen Antley said the decision to start a specialized mental health unit came from the volume of mental health calls dispatch has received and feedback from the department’s officers. Because the feedback was anecdotal, in early 2022 the department decided to track how many times officers either involuntarily or voluntarily committed someone to a hospital.
After a year of collecting data, the department discovered it was committing someone to a hospital nearly every other day, Antley said.
“That's about the time we were like, ‘OK, we’ve identified the problem; now we can start attacking the problem with good solutions,’” he said.
If the department receives the grant, Antley said department officials hope to deploy the specialized teams of two dedicated mental health officers by the fall to early 2024. However, department officials aren’t letting that hold them up from rolling out other solutions in the meantime.
As of May, 20 officers have undergone mental health training, and Antley said the goal is to have all of League City’s 78 uniformed officers eventually undergo the same training. To become a certified mental health officer, officers must undergo 24 hours of mental health training on top of a prerequisite of 40 hours of crisis intervention training and an eight-hour class in de-escalation.
In these trainings, officers will be required to “respond” to actors experiencing various crises, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or simulating an intellectual or developmental disability.
The specialized mental health team will consist of two officers whose primary job is responding to mental health calls and who will respond to calls in addition to the regular front-line police officers dispatched for emergency mental health calls.
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Based on officers' interactions with people going through a mental health crisis, the department saw a need to not only react to the crisis, but also play a proactive role in the community. Antley said one way the department achieves this goal is by partnering with local mental health organizations, such as the Gulf Coast Center and the Medical Behavioral Hospital of Clear Lake, and following up with the people they respond to.
“A big part of their job would be to conduct consistent follow-up with the people that we come into contact with,” Antley said. “We can follow up and make sure that they are prescribed medication; make sure that they're taking their medication; keep that line of communication open; and, you know, be a resource for them to try and keep them out of crisis.”
Antley said because officers usually interact with subjects on their worst days, building relationships with people outside of their emergency crisis is crucial.
“Criminalizing mental health isn't the answer,” Antley said. “We don't want to put people that are experiencing a mental health crisis in the justice system if we can help it. Acts of crime sometimes go hand in hand with mental health crises, and if we can try and head off some of those issues, then we can try and reduce the recidivism of people, and we can improve their quality of life.”
Also of note
For the past year and a half, the League City Police Department has partnered with the Gulf Coast Center, an organization offering mental health services to people in Galveston County. Cities throughout the county have relied on the center to provide mental health services, such as counseling, follow-up care and finding safe housing.
Gulf Coast Center and Galveston County plan to build a 48-hour holding center, or extended observation unit, to provide ongoing care. The facility will accommodate 10 people at a time, allowing them access to nursing; psychiatry; counseling; crisis counseling; and referrals to physicians, housing and substance use disorder treatment.
Gulf Coast Center CEO Felicia Jeffreys said the center would primarily serve Galveston County but could serve other counties for a fee.
Galveston County Precinct 3 Commissioner Stephen Holmes said the county dedicated $4 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds to build the unit. Holmes said the county secured an additional $8 million in state funding for the center’s operations.
“This is a much needed continuum of care,” Jeffreys said. “It will be financially beneficial to the community. Operationally it will be a more efficient way to take care of our individuals, and clinically it will be less traumatizing.”
