South Bay proposal would create direct line for non-police mental health response

The referral by Supervisor Otto Lee aims to streamline access to the TRUST program and expand the reach of the civilian-run program to people wary of a police response to psychiatric emergencies.

SAN JOSE — Community advocates and a Santa Clara County supervisor are looking to streamline public access to a community-led response program that aims to deescalate psychiatric emergencies without law enforcement, in an effort that draws on this news organization’s two-year investigation into the San Jose Police Department’s use of force on mentally impaired people,

A referral authored by Supervisor Otto Lee, and scheduled for consideration by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, would create a direct phone line to reach the Trusted Response Urgent Support Team, or TRUST. The program dispatches four teams — for each quadrant of the county — consisting of a behavioral health professional, a medic and a community member with “lived” experience to provide peer support for someone who calls for help.

Currently, someone who wants a response from TRUST has to call the 988 Suicide and Crisis lifeline and be triaged by a call taker, or in some cases, navigate a phone tree to access the program. Lee and supporters of establishing a direct line, led by the civil-rights group Silicon Valley De-Bug and families of people who have been killed by police while experiencing mental health crises, want to offer a more immediate connection and also get a clearer picture of how much the service is needed in the region.

“This does not make 988 any less important. We’re happy with that service,” Lee said in an interview Monday. “This is for the caller who wants to know that there is no risk of having a uniformed response to a mental health crisis … The goal is that we hope more people will use TRUST more directly. We want people to seek help.”

Debra Townley, a 54-year-old San Jose resident who says she has utilized public mental health services for more than three decades, says the prospect of directly contacting the service — and knowing there is no possibility of a triage assessment sending over a police officer — would be reassuring for those seeking psychiatric help before a situation becomes dangerous.

“I’m a person with a mental disability, and when I’m emotionally hijacked, I need a direct line to help. I can’t navigate a phone tree. When that’s happening, you need direct access,” Townley said. “It seems really logical if we want to help people.”

Jennifer Myhre, a senior organizer Showing Up for Racial Justice at Sacred Heart Community Service, said more and more, people are averse to calling 911 for a psychiatric emergency.

“It doesn’t matter who we talk to, whether it’s a homeowner in Willow Glen or a working-class family in Gilroy, everyone sees the need and is longing for a non-police alternative to a mental health crisis,” Myhre said.

She also cited a news investigation by the Bay Area News Group, KQED and the California Reporting Project published in October that examined a decade of use-of-force records from San Jose police and concluded that people who are mentally impaired — either by psychiatric illness or intoxication — accounted for nearly three-quarters of serious use of force incidents and 80 percent of police killings. The investigation also highlighted broad trends of police encountering people exhibiting erratic behavior, without threats of violence, ending up experiencing serious force and injury.

“The investigative report that The Mercury News broke on the higher risk of injury and death of mentally ill and intoxicated people with police really underscored the stakes,” Myhre said.

The report, Myhre added, gave the direct-line proposal a boost of political traction after it lost momentum over the past year.

Lee said his referral, which if approved by the board would compel a report due Feb. 6 outlining how a direct TRUST line could be implemented, is not as experimental as it might appear. He pointed to similar arrangements in Oakland, Los Angeles County, Atlanta, Denver and Oregon.

Advocates also pointed out that police intervention in psychiatric emergencies that involve threats of violence or safety concerns would remain an important response option, but that pushing programs like TRUST to the forefront would help ensure that it’s not utilized before it’s absolutely necessary.

That aspiration is borne out in data cited by Lee’s office, recorded between November 2022 and this past August, showing that the program received 1,531 referrals from the Santa Clara County 988 line, second only to the Mobile Crisis Response Team, which pairs a clinician and police officer to respond to psychiatric emergencies.

According to first-quarter 2023 data provided by TRUST, field teams were able to stabilize people in 72% of their dispatched calls without needing outside help. The program resolved more than 30% of their calls over the phone, and dispatched the field teams in 47% of calls.

Lee said creating a direct line is important to getting a better gauge of how much demand there is for the program, and if it’s as robust as supporters expect, to resource it accordingly.

“We won’t know until it’s implemented and we collect three to six months of data to find out how much more that need is, and then we can see what we need to allocate.”