RICHLAND COUNTY, S.C. — The Richland County Sheriff's Department and the South Carolina Department of Mental Health have created a new partnership to help people in the community during mental health crisis.
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott says the community needs to come together to talk about mental health to help create solutions.
"People just don't want to talk about mental illness and I'm going to tell you right now being mentally ill does not mean that you're a criminal," said Sheriff Lott. "It's not a crime to have a mental illness and unfortunately for too long, it's been treated that way."
The sheriff says law enforcement tends to get called in when someone is having a mental crisis.
"If you can just imagine you're having a mental crisis and a law enforcement officer pulls up in a full uniform and a marked police car, what does that do to the stress level that you already have? That already escalates it," explained Sheriff Lott.
In 2020, the department received over 2,700 calls for someone in a mental health crisis.
The department set some goals to address this situation. They have sent more than 70 deputies to a 40-hour crisis intervention training. In 2019, every deputy went through a four hour training.
RELATED: Three 'weeks of terror' after robbery suspects targeted Hispanic community in Columbia, sheriff says
"For over the last year, we've been working with the Department of Mental Health to create a crisis intervention team where we have someone from the sheriff's department that's law enforcement, that's trained in crisis intervention, to be partnered up with a mental health professional," said Sheriff Lott.
The department began the program in early February. A captain RCSD and an employee with the Department of Mental Health assigned to RCSD full-time run the program.
Since the program started, they've responded to 64 calls.
"I see progress being made. I see us moving forward and addressing the situation," said Sheriff Lott. "We haven't had it in Richland County where we've responded to someone in a mental crisis and then we ended up having to shoot someone... We don't want that to happen in Richland County and Columbia."
The sheriff's department said in a press release, "The goal of the Crisis Intervention Team is to reduce custodial arrests; reduce the strain on the judicial system; decrease unnecessary and expensive emergency room visits for individuals in behavioral health crisis; improve access and referral to community services; provide an immediate responses to crisis situations; and to provide post-incident follow up by working with individuals, family members and caregivers to reduce the likelihood of a new crisis situation arising."
Allison Farrell, the Director of the Office of Emergency Services at the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, says this is an exciting program.
"It's an opportunity for two different agencies to come together, DMH and the Richland County Sheriff's Department, and really be very forward-thinking about how we provide support to our communities," said Farrell.
The director went on to say, "It also allows us to do some collaborative follow-up on the back end where that deputy and that clinician can go back out and really support these people with mental health illness and their families and their neighbors and make sure that we're providing them the best care possible."