SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) – Many police departments have specially trained officers and mental health professionals whose job is to help defuse the sometimes-volatile “5150” calls that involve people in the throes of mental illness.
But those officers are in short supply, and often they are unavailable in a crisis, as happened in Sacramento and the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, where police encountered men with mental problems and ended up shooting them to death.
Both cities would like to add additional resources but neither has the money.
“Funding for mental health services has been cut, and we are responding to more of those types of calls,” El Cajon police Lt. Rob Ransweiler said.
El Cajon, a city of 100,000, and Sacramento, the state capital with nearly half a million residents, each have a grand total of one mental health team that pairs a professional counselor and a specially trained officer.