Monroe County Executive Adam Bello and other county officials say you get a firefighter if you call 911 for a fire…and an EMT if you report a heart attack. But for anything else, you get police, and Bello says that won’t work for every situation.
Bello says the Daniel Prude case and others show the need to re-examine our Mental Health Delivery System. He says millions are being spent every year and that spending needs to be realigned so that nobody feels like their last resort is an encounter with police, when what they need is a mental health professional.
Bello says there will be three immediate action items: Thanks to the City of Rochester for expanding its contribution, which the county will match, to the FIT Team. The FIT team pairs law enforcement with trained mental health professionals, but up until now has only been on duty during the day. The expanded funding will make it available 24/7.
A new addiction response team will be established to help navigate people through dealing with their disease by community-based systems, guiding them through treatment.
The county is also setting up a task force to make sure the former two steps are integrated with law enforcement and all other services.
And Bello said Monroe County spends about $40 million a year on its Office of Mental Health. He vowed to create a new system that works better with that money, using the RASE Commission to make sure it’s done equitably. That includes updated training for police and public health professionals. He said the county needs “meaning and lasting systemic change.”
Kelly Wilmot of the Monroe County Office of Mental Health said the OMH Forensic Intervention Team has provided 24,000 mental health contacts over its three years, 11,000 of them this year alone with the numbers increasing since the COVID-19 pandemic started. There are five full-time clinicians who work with police to handle calls to help de-escalate the sort of crisis that led to the death of Daniel Prude in March.