The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has long had specially trained teams to de-escalate confrontations with people who have severe mental illness, but after two decades, the agency has struggled to deploy mental health responders at all times of day or night because of funding and staffing shortages.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors moved to fix that problem on Tuesday, voting unanimously to expand the number of employees assigned to the department’s Mental Evaluation Teams so they can respond 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and to find ways to pay for the mission.
The Sheriff’s Department, which was the first law enforcement agency in the Los Angeles area to create the teams in 1993, plans to add 25 staff members and needs about $4.7 million in funding for the first year, according to a department memo to the Board of Supervisors. The increase would more than double the number of Mental Evaluation Teams from 10 to 23 and create a “triage help desk” for residents to call during a psychological crisis.
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