Behavioral Health Justice Intervention Services (BHJIS)

DHHS-BH proposes to embed Behavioral Health staff into Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office patrol operations to co-respond to mental health calls. This will allow for a proactive program that emphasizes treatment in the least restrictive manner. The program will provide a wide range of appropriate services, both for immediate crises and follow up.

Operating with on-call availability for after-hours and weekends, The CERT will be a team of at least an officer and behavioral health specialist to be deployed to 911 calls to offer mental health assistance, triage, screening, crisis intervention, referrals, and follow up with aftercare within the community.

College Campus Behavioral Health Crisis Response will partner with college campuses to respond, in collaboration with the campus law enforcement and other emergency response personnel, to behavioral health crises caused by mental health challenges or substance use/misuse, to alleviate acute crisis and divert students from needing emergency psychiatric care or justice interventions.

Project “Warm Handoff” will provide immediate transportation from jails to a community based treatment facility upon release. Behavioral Health Forensics will partner with Sheriff’s Department, Probation, Superior Court, District Attorney. Funds will contract peers and clinical staff along with vehicles to provide reentry services to individuals identified as having behavioral heatlh needs upon that person’s release from jail.

BHS and the Stockton Police Department will design a role-clarity resource tool on responding to individuals experiencing a behavioral health crisis. The resource will be integrated into citywide Crisis Intervention Trainings. Officer Wellness Training will be offered and recommendations addressing gaps in the first-responder system will be generated.

The Vallejo Police Department, with its partners, will conduct a large-scale community needs assessment to track progress and identify gaps in current mental health and substance use crisis response, and develop a co-response service model to ensure Vallejo has access to trauma-informed care for mental health- or substance use-related crises.

This project will improve the City of Watsonville’s community safety and wellness with the creation of a multidisciplinary, trauma-informed, holistic, public health-centered, prevention/treatment-focused, socially and racially equitable, co-response system. Substance use/mental health crisis response will be coordinated, comprehensive, and culturally responsive (rather than producing additional trauma/entry into the criminal justice system).

Hayward seeks to demonstrate the Hayward Evaluation and Response Teams (HEART) Program to build capacity for and implement a high-quality trauma-informed, service-appropriate co-responder program that reduces violence and diverts individuals from justice-involvement.

Fort Bragg Police Department will establish a collaborative partnership between local police and the mental health community to design and implement an integrated mental health response process that avoids the justice system by engaging the most appropriate mental health services for people in need in the community.

The Downey Police Department, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health, seeks to partner together to better serve and offer diversion programs to those affected by serious mental illness, substance use disorder, and homelessness.

To strengthen collaboration between the Sheriff’s Office and community stakeholders with regard to analyzing data and making recommendations for re-entry programs that will help reduce recidivism, especially for populations with behavioral health challenges. Coalition includes:

o Law Enforcement Agencies
o Tribal Governments
o Non-Profit Agencies serving justice impacted individuals
o Health Care Sector
o Office of Higher Education
o County Behavioral Health
o Probation/Parole
o Workforce Alliance of Mendocino County

The grant will pay for Clinical Therapists to collaborate during the response to 911 calls. Two-person teams will focus on risk assessment, proper diagnosis, providing resources, services and support.

The Woodland Police Department and the Yolo County Health and Human Services Agency wish to promote effective strategies to identify and reduce the risk of harm to individuals with mental illness or co-occurring mental illness/substance abuse and to increase public safety by expanding the existing successful Co-Responder Clinician Program.

As a team of case managers and police officers, Campus Assessment and Stabilization Team (CAST) will assess and stabilize crisis situations through a humanistic, trauma-informed approach that will attempt to reduce the need for hospitalizations and use of force while connecting individuals to support services that will sustain their wellbeing.

The University of California Santa Cruz will be working to develop an improved mental health crisis response program on campus. The program will be developed in collaboration with Campus Police. It will include strategies for a non-law enforcement team that does not require enforcement efforts and can safely transport students to the local behavioral health unit when necessary.

The Alliance for Community Wellness will develop a multidisciplinary Mobile Assessment and Transportation Unit that will co-respond with officers in the community to divert people with mental illness and SUD who are arrested for misdemeanors away from the criminal justice system to a navigation center for respite and supportive services.

Remote Crisis Intervention Assistance for Police and Schools to Reduce Risk of Justice Involvement 2/15/2022 2/14/2023 The Chinatown Service Center (CSC) will provide telehealth iPads to the Monterey Park Police Department, and within two school districts. The tablets will connect directly to CSC clinicians trained in de-escalation, to assist with mental health crises. The purpose is to prevent or reduce risk of justice involvement for youth and adults.

LAGS Recovery Centers, Inc. is providing a mobile mental wellness team to work on the streets of Santa Maria and Lompoc, working alongside local agencies to do wellness checks on the homeless, homeless recently discharged from the ER or hospital, elderly homeless, and homeless youth. The objectives are to reduce the number of chronically homeless experiencing crises on the street and increasing wellness check-ups for the unhoused.

In this partnership with the San Francisco District Attorney’s, Public Defender’s, and San Francisco Jail Health Services, MHASF will provide the “Peer Supported Release & Community Reentry” project. The purpose is to provide peer support to individuals formerly incarcerated in the San Francisco jail, to mitigate and reduce recidivism among individuals with mental health and co-occurring substance use challenges, to integrate participants into the community, and improve their long-term health outcomes.

ONTRACK Program Resources’ Community Health and Justice Project will transform the way Sacramento’s criminal justice, behavioral health and Black community stakeholders work together; reduce Black disproportionality in the Sacramento criminal justice system through strategic Collective Impact process; provide capacity building technical assistance and training; and utilize a data driven approach.

Orange County Youth Mental Health First Aid project will train 30-50 school-based law enforcement School Resource Offers (SRO) to become mental health advocates. SRO’s will be trained to provide a warm handoff of students to professional mental health coaches, counselors, and therapist. Two-hundred students will receive professional social emotional support sessions from Licensed Clinical Social Workers.

The purpose of the Safe Outside the System program is to establish a
coordinated continuum of care between restorative justice organizations, mental health non-profits, law enforcement, and City of Oakland Department of Violence Prevention to catch individuals in early mental health crisis before they enter the criminal justice system

Healthy Sonoma will strengthen connection and referral processes between grade 7-12 school personnel, law enforcement, County agencies and community organizations providing behavioral health/substance use services. Cross-agency professional development will be provided. Law enforcement partnerships will reduce incarceration and support school re-entry. Training will increase culturally appropriate responses to student behaviors

Uplift Family Services, Santa Clara proposes to 1) enhance current county-wide crisis services by building capacity among system partners, particularly law enforcement, first responders, and other community partners; and 2) increase community awareness of mental health and substance use issues to avoid over-utilization of law enforcement and 911 calls.

Uplift Family Services, Solano proposes to 1) enhance current county-wide crisis services by building capacity among system partners, particularly law enforcement, first responders, and other community partners; and 2) increase community awareness of mental health and substance use issues to avoid over-utilization of law enforcement and 911 calls.