San Antonio Police Have Radical Approach To Mental Illness: Treat It

It’s almost 4 p.m., and Officers Ernest Stevens and Ned Bandoske have been driving around town in their black unmarked SUV since early this morning. The officers are part of San Antonio’s mental health squad – a six-person unit that answers the frequent emergency calls where mental illness may be an issue. The officers spot a call for help on their laptop from a group home across town.

...[T]he jail in Bexar County, Texas, where San Antonio is located, was so overcrowded – largely with people with serious mental illnesses – that the state was getting ready to levy fines.  To deal with the problem, San Antonio and Bexar County have completely overhauled their mental health system into a program considered a model for the rest of the nation. Today, the jails are under capacity, and the city has saved $50 million over the past five  years.

The effort has focused on an idea called “smart justice” – basically, diverting people with serious mental illness out of jail and into treatment instead.  It is possible because all the players in the system that deal with mental illness -- the police, the county jail, mental health department, criminal courts, hospitals and homeless programs – pooled their resources to take better care of people with mental illness...