Pandemic sees the Democratic NationalConvention Going virtual and the republicans being forced to rethink grand plans for a big celebration followed the u. S. Conventions on aljazeera. Hi im femi oke a welcome to the home edition stream now typically in the United States and canada if theres a Mental Health emergency the police are caught but let me show you the worst Case Scenario that may well happen im going to take you to san diego saw years ago when the sister of alfred alang go call the police because her brother who had Mental Health issues was acting strangely this is what happens. But for the way so the police did you know they shot another arno armed black person as usual and the lady is saying she called them for help not to kill her brother and they shot her brother. Back. It is happy she called trail she did not call for them to kill him with his medical history so they got it for not examining her one for. Her to pay them. Whats important to my getting. The you know the other right. On the same percent of this chain we all should the Police Respond to Mental Health crises and if not then you can join the conversation on the cheap look forward to hearing your responses your questions for the panel and you can be part of the street. I will say hello to the guest the guests will introduce themselves to you as santi it is good to see you tell everybody you are. Everybody you want to. Reach over spots that were going through also which is an initiative were trying to bring to the city to do rapid response. Mental crisis intervention beyond that i were a lot of parents. Were myself i trained pure were. Also there i host a show called slavery which. So. Looking forward to digging into a lot that you have going on. Welcome to the straying south to an International Audience good morning my names tom black i am the director of consulting at weber clinic im also a former coots crisis worker an administrator i spent 10 years responding to calls out in the community and working to support the day to day operations of the program and in my current focus is conversations and work with other cities as they explore implementation of programming based on the cahoots model of mobile crisis intervention. People who lucky Mental Health from people who have the peace. Absolutely who does an acronym standing for crisis assistance helping out on the streets the coots model is a mobile crisis intervention response thats integrated in Public Safety where all the calls for service are routed through that Public Safety dispatch so those those Mental Health response seems that you see with boots are responding to calls the same way that the police or Fire Department deal thank you so much. But not least tell everybody you. Im amy king and im a sergeant with the olympia placed department in the state of washington ive been with o. P v a little bit over 20 years ive had a variety of different roles during those years currently i am in charge of our downtown walking patrol d and have been involved in the last couple of years of creating a mobile Crisis Response unit here in the limpia and another program we have really are faces. In our crew Response Team is based off of because its model. I mean im just thinking in the end really seen through the ice is why the police who why they come to a Mental Health emergency if i broke my leg i wouldnt call the police right now as it stands right now we have 911 and we dont have 912. And so although there are places like in eugene where tim is from and where im up in toronto i think is where he is from and Program Starting and there are other places across the country that are moving toward some kind of mobile d Mental Health response so that there is a Mental Health response as opposed to just Police Response or maybe instead of Police Response but currently most places dont have d a 912 so to speak there is no other system in. A sense he will still take on that what we call the policeman some days oversee having some kind of breakdown who episodes why police why not and when youve been you not situation with a Family Member. You know i think one of the big reasons is that you know folks dont have any other option even with the option to do exist sometimes people dont know those options do exist but i think really a big piece is you know we treat police as a jack of all trades Intervention Service that realistically you know we havent talked enough about Mental Health historically you know probably around the world but even in recent history you know the Mental Health conversation is just beginning and because of that we dont really have the infrastructure in place to. Understand whats happening with the what is being an episode where you know i dont know i dont think theyre acting strange and dont know how to react but also dont know what to call it either in that situation. Team i see. Yes nancy brings up a really great point that you know aside from the lack of other resources you know that might exist in a community there is a lot of what were seeing is a lack of understanding you know that theres this assumption that because somebody is presenting a certain way in public that they have done something bad and that theres a morality that gets assigned to that presentation of you know of a crisis and so you know as as were discussing this this type of response we need to really look at where things like morality you know where our personal values and you know implicit and explicit bias are playing into what we as bystanders or as Community Members expect to see what kind of outcomes we become attached to when we see that crisis unfolding in the community we call because we want to see a certain type of response we want to see a certain type of outcome and by and large because that understanding isnt there because theres maybe not so much compassion generally what we want to see is just a removal of that crisis you know we want that to happen somewhere else not in my backyard and so you know i think that as we really look at whats another type of 1st responder we can bring into these situations we also need to look at what we as Community Members what we are neighbors are doing and what what is really happening when we do Something Like call the police when we see you our neighbor in crisis gets commissioned this to kevin kelly and you choose right now heidi i think Mental Health professionals used to respond insisting he was behind one of the Police Respond and not spat people cant make up their minds pretty simplistic assented you want to work on nothings divil. Yeah you know when i hear that statement what it says to me is you know what data are reflecting you know what is research or evaluating oh whats happening in these calls a thing that we really try to you know collect a lot of information in the ritual response never work that were in what were finding at least here in toronto is that you know the large majority of call of big mate and then what are Mental Health calls and you know were receiving 30000 Mental Health calls a year in the city you know 10000 of those are related to suicide risk. So when we really you know look at the numbers we sort of think you know the numbers kind of tell us whats needed and whats not for certain situations and i think thats really important for us to you know to draw from while were making these be used decisions about what models we put in place and how we operate our cities. The police. Yeah absolutely. You know going back to what jim said a few moments ago in terms of we need to figure out as a community at large what our expectations are currently the expectations that we have whether we recognize those are expectations or not because weve done that work to examine them are not are not being met and so we need to have i think a larger conversation about what do we want the response to look like and we also need to talk about what is the i hate to use the word problem but what is it were trying to address or solve oftentimes. You know the police have a certain amount of tools some of those are great tools. There are some great officers across the country but sometimes we as a scientist said were being tasked with. Dealing with anything and everything and we dont have every tool were not always the right response and so. When peoples expectations in any kind of relationship the relationship between the community and the place being no different are on meds or misunderstood i think we as police need to definitely do a better job of telling the story of who we are why we do sometimes the things we do why we dont do other things. I think those are some of the things that are missing from the conversation and helping us forge a path forward as to what we want as a community at large let me share with you sponsor vanzant Police Department they had a Community Briefing and they said this is a 911 coup that didnt go well and it was for a Mental HealthEmergency Response have a listen to who. Well i want to share with. Iraq what about a blind man other than in the sunshine to leave things like cause of. Whats whats your address. Right. The next day but if i can i share your so whats your address. Who doesnt he was having difficulty even not teaching id that he knew that if the police were cool maybe he would get to die by cool which speaks to. How wrong Police Involvement can be. A new chief says i called the ambulance for my stepfather one time taking to the hospital for a mental breakdown and the Police Showed up in costs and took him to jail teemu to not how with theyve dealt with that situation a bit differently. So you know i think one of the 1st things i didnt really need to establish is that you know a crisis occurs when a need goes on and what that need is you know various person a person with that response looks like in that actual crisis you know varies person to person day to day but you know on a on a very fun foundational level with the coots response that we have here in eugene in springfield oregon when that call is made to the Public Safety dispatch center and the coots goes our objective is to support and stabilize somebody providing the least intervention necessary to really get them through that that initial period of crisis you know were not going to be able to solve every problem you know were not going to be able to implement Long Term Solutions but what we can do is work with that individual recognizing that theyre the expert in their experience and that we as as responders really need to listen to that experience listen to their expertise and then engage in a collaborative process that keeps that person empowered and that keeps them in the position of autonomy you know really being able to figure out what is it that that is the most emergent unmet need you know and what can be done to address that maybe its 3 in the morning and theres not you know that business isnt open but we can we can still Work Together we can still come up with a plan to support that person so that they can make it through until that more traditional resources opened up you know there are a lot of situations where yes somebody does need to go to the hospital that is the most appropriate outcome for them in that situation and as such you know the model of mobile Crisis Response really recognizes that theyre going to be times where getting somebody out of that immediate situation where those triggers are you know where there are other circumstances the. Allowed that need to go unmet you know and so we you know we will transport folks when needed and thats i think the other thing thats really important is that when were looking at these responses when were looking at who goes out oftentimes folks might wait to call until its too late because theyre worried about that ambulance bill or because theyre worried about getting that huge bill when they go to the e. R. And because folks can you know because of the economic pressure can can put those things off if theres an alternative response that can come in before those crises have gotten to the point where the hospital is the only outcome thats really going to to get that person through the night keep them safe you know then were doing a lot better job so you know i wonder about you know both with that that caller in sparks and then that more recent example if there had been a resource you know for somebody to reach out to before things got so emergency would there have been a different outcome. There you go. Through you know that youre speaking. Oh oh. You know i do know what happens when a Police Officer showing up versus when youre worker a pure. Crisis sure i love it you know we have these associations with Police Officers that Police Officers show up when something is wrong and there is danger present which sometimes just you know of the. You know the space sort of the environment that then occurs after that is you know we believe the groundwork for escalation of if of purely responses. You know the 1st responder of you know the person or the people who are experiencing the crisis whether its a person alone or with you know their loved ones or the people who wrote them of the sense a much different message of both the situation and says this is something that is manageable and something that can be deescalated bad you know perhaps you know or further crisis computer verted you know by the simple fact that you have to also look straight so let me point out the experience of so someone who understands you know whats happening to you know certain symptom presentations me of and can properly respond to that in a way that maybe someone who doesnt have the wealth of experience in training do you know if you know our own Police Officers. You know may not have the training so things can go right really quick. Yeah yeah go ahead and get. I know in a limb here. You know ive been doing this a long time and a couple of years ago we started our downtown walking patrol and granted olympia is you know 5060000 people so are not huge. When you have a large house population in our downtown area some of those folks have struggles with Mental Health issues some of them down but man you know relationships have which i think is one of sonti is referring to a little. Our ability and our walking charlie unit has given us such a different kind of access and the relationships have become so important and and hes absolutely right that when those relationships are established there are people a call may come to dispatch and ill hear the description of the person or even just the location of the person and i will know likely who someone is calling about and also because i know that person. Can usually make a pretty good guess as to whether that what the solution is what might be helpful to that person if its perhaps a more appropriate response for crew than it is for us to respond and i think moving toward some more pure based models is a direction that we should continue to look at and explore and expand and olympia we have our crew team and then we also have our familiar faces which is very pure based as well and we have seen successes that if someone had told me 2 years ago this is what we were going to see from those programs im not sure that i would have believed it has been miraculous if i can use that word. Recent only its adult to leave the new york Police Department and she helps them with their trading for Mental Health clinics yes this is what she told us that. I work with the new york city who is departments of Negotiation Team i teach them about Mental Health. And the escalation the aspirations the news in Good Communications to defuse a crisis situation with specific skills i teach active listening you have to listen to the press and we had to use my mouth to mine is to listen more than we speak in a way to gather the information so that you can express in rich School Number 2 when she has friends in b b youre likely to have her or that person is going to start to trust. Her maybe hate me and then you can work with to find a positive outcome so liz rainey comments sound you cheap hi there he is in the us who dont have ono who else to call for Mental Illness in the way Police Officer trained in general needs and of the home which got clients matzoh movement has tate do you feel that the times of change no changed a sunday in the last few months bill is the question on the realized. I would city yes there is no i do know the big thing obviously is what have you not may 25th which was sure sure its murder in that you know start of the conversation obviously its a very important conversation to have sta