A grocery store manager calls to report a shoplifter. Officers arrive and confront the person, only to find that the theft was small -- perhaps a carton of milk or piece of fruit -- and the suspect is busy blabbing away at people who don't exist.
Does the officer take the person to jail? To an emergency room? Both are costly interventions that police know won't do much to help anyone: The often-homeless suspect will end up right back out on the street with no ongoing help for his or her mental illness.
But what if the officers could take the person to a facility where he or she could check in and rest up for a day, then get connected to real services and perhaps housing?
It's a choice that King County officials are currently working to provide for police and the mentally ill, with a 16-bed facility where officers could take non-violent misdemeanor offenders who are exhibiting signs of mental disturbance.
The King County Council has already set aside $6 million for the facility in a Mental Illness and Drug Dependency Plan funded by a mental health sales tax increase that the council passed in 2007 of one-tenth of 1 percent. A committee overseeing the $45 million MIDD plan has been meeting since last summer to work out the details and, while there's been a recent setback on the costs, says Amnon Shoenfeld, head of the county's Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division, he expects the new crisis diversion center to open sometime next year.
The $6 million is supposed to cover two facilities, Shoenfeld says: the 16-bed crisis center itself and a transitional respite center that was originally supposed to be 24 beds, but may have to be cut back, he says, because estimates for the facility outstripped the budget.
Police would bring offenders to the crisis center for an initial stay of 24 hours in which they could rest -- or be restrained, if necessary, in a locked room. During that time, the center's staff would work on a mental health or drug treatment plan "that does not involve being booked into jail and treated like a criminal," says King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg, who sits on the MIDD Oversight Committee.
Those who say yes to a program would then be moved to the transitional facility, Shoenfeld says, where they might stay two to three weeks while waiting to get into a program or housing. "It's not a huge capacity. People can't stay long," he says, "but certainly long enough to do initial case management work and link them with the resources they need."
For the homeless mentally ill, the greatest need is low-cost housing, something Shoenfeld acknowledges is in short supply. But "we'll do our best," he says. "We'll engage in prioritization so that the people who are most vulnerable and at risk would be put further up on the list in terms of getting into available housing."
The program is an attempt to break the cycle of repeat offenders whose jail stays and emergency rooms visits ring up giant bills for the county, with a single mental episode costing the county $47,000, according to Satterberg.
"If you've spent time on the seventh floor of the [King County] jail, it's a sad, depressing place," he says. "We have people who don't belong there and aren't being served long term. We have a moral imperative to do better by them."
And by police and taxpayers. Satterberg says it will be complicated to site the crisis facility, which a contractor is expected to lease somewhere between downtown and Tukwila. But in San Antonio, Texas, one city that has tried crisis diversion, he says, "it looks like it's saving them a tremendous amount of law enforcement and justice resources on the back end."
"The trick," he says, "is to have the transition into the community networks to get people out of those beds once they've stabilized." n