By Lori Raab
The Bend Police Department has a special strategy in place to deal with the growing number of people who have mental health issues.
Bend Police Chief Jim Porter tells KBNW news they are seeing a larger number of people dealing with severe mental health issues compared to just a few years ago.
“In 2009 we dealt with about 800 people in crisis and now its more like 1400 – one thing we’re finding is that these people are in deeper crisis because there is nothing available for them to go to due to budget cuts and other issues. People who were just living n the edge because of the downturn in the economy have slipped off the edge.”
So, the department is taking a new strategy in how to address the growing problem.
“We took a strong look at a year ago at how we were delivering our services to the community and what the community needed. Also what some of the pressure points were for us. The mental health issue, providing services to people in mental health crisis was a huge one for us. We are growing and we are an events town so there are a lot of pressure points for us. ”
With the help of the City Manager and the backing of the Bend City council, the department developed a team. Half the team takes care of critical incidences, crime incidences and the other half deals with mental health crisis calls. Deschutes County also have mental health professionals who can go along on police calls.
“We modeled ourselves after several cities across the United States…which developed in the department a community response team. The team will respond to hot spots of crime, things like car break-ins, burglaries, things we identify through intelligence lead policing, the second one of course was the people with mental illness, people that we interact with at possibly the worst times of their lives.”
Chief Porter says they’ve also set a goal to have our entire patrol division to be trained in advanced interaction in dealing with people in mental health crisis. He says “It’s not easy or cheap but we’re going to get it done.”
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