It’s a major milestone for New Orleans.
For the first time, teams of professionally trained mental health intervention specialists took to the streets to respond to calls for people in crisis on Thursday.
The deployment of these mental health crisis professionals marks the first-time police will not be used to respond when such calls come in.
The deployment of the responders is more than just sending paramedics or armed officer to a scene where a person needs mental health care.
The idea of creating a mental health unit began almost three years ago with the creation of the Crisis Intervention Strategy Task Force.
A creation of City Council Member Helena Moreno, Sade Dumas was one of the early members of this task force.
She talked with WWL about the early days of the task force:
“I was one of the co-chairs of that program and I was really excited to see the realization of the program and also, and looking forward to seeing the community’s response.”
Dumas describes those plenary stages of the program as a call to meet the needs of the kind of mental health response the public was calling for.
“We just strongly believed that people should not be jailed for having mental illnesses. That they should instead be met with support, with care and with resources to get well in our community,” Dumas explains. “We looked to reduce the footprint of the policing in the city and to focus on having police do what police should do and having other people like social workers and clinicians operate in their field of expertise.”
The teams respond within 20 minutes and use clinical discretion to help the person to resolve the crisis. They also work to connect the individual with resources, like medication, psychiatrists, including transporting them to a hospital and getting them on their way to a recovery.
Dumas looks forward as she talks about the evolving of the program now that teams are on street.
“When starting all new projects, we need to make sure there are mechanisms in place for transparency, accountability and oversight. So, I encourage the City Council to work with the community in creating an oversight body for the mobile response team.”