ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. – Two Orange County deputies will be partnered up with mental health clinicians to respond to mental health crisis calls as part of a new sheriff’s office pilot program called the Behavioral Response Unit.
Sheriff John Mina eluded to the idea of a new response team last week but on Thursday, the sheriff’s office revealed new details about the pilot program and what it could mean for the Orange County community.
Recommended Videos
The clinicians are mental health professionals with Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health and the deputies have received crisis intervention training. The deputy-clinician pairs also participated in 40 hours of behavioral response unit training earlier this month.
[TRENDING: 250,000 chickens killed in fire | SpaceX launch to bring sonic booms | New stimulus could mean $600 direct payment]
According to the sheriff’s office, the pilot program will include two deputies and two clinicians. They started responding to calls this week. The teams will respond to calls for service related to mental illness, including PTSD and some substance abuse calls.
“They will be proactively on patrol, they’ll be listening to calls, they’ll be looking at our calls for service,” OCSO Major Carlos Torres said. “There’ll be working with our veterans, they’ll be working with our homeless community. If a call goes out, they’ll start listening to the call and heading that way.”
The sheriff’s office responds to about 8,000 calls a year regarding some sort of mental crisis. Family and others have minimal options and often turn to law enforcement for help.
After responding to a call, the BRU teams will follow up to create a treatment plan and offer resources, according to the sheriff’s office.
“The clinician and the deputy hopefully being able to combine their skills to engage this individual, find out what it is that they need from us, then be able to find out how can we further assist them, get them linked to ongoing services that can hopefully prevent any future crises,” Christin Edwards-Salinas, of Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health, said.
OCSO has been working on this new response unit for more than a year.
“A mental health clinician is in a better position to help people who are in crisis,” Mina said. “Many times our deputies, even though they’re trained in crisis intervention, they don’t always have all the tools they need to help people who are in crisis.”
The idea for the program came about in 2019 after the sheriff saw national incidents involving people in crisis and thought about a way to prevent more tragedies.
Even with more than 400 crisis intervention-trained deputies at the department, they don’t have everything they need to help people in crisis, according to the sheriff’s office.
Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood has also recently implemented a program partnering deputies with behavioral specialists to respond to certain calls.
Chitwood said too many calls involving a person with a mental health crisis end in tragedy and could be avoided. He spoke to News 6 last month about his agency adding counselors to respond to some calls, too.
“And with these actions, we believe will stop, in most cases, a deadly confrontation with law enforcement,” Chitwood said.