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Weekly roundup
This Week in Behavioral Health and Court Diversion
This week's roundup traces crisis intervention efforts across the country, from Chester County, PA expanding Crisis Intervention Team training with new tracks for youth and veterans, to Fargo's Public Safety Task Force working to restart its own dormant CIT program, and Flagstaff Shelter Services embedding on-site clinicians to keep unhoused residents out of the ER and off 911 calls.
On the diversion and funding side, New York's mental health courts remain a patchwork with half the state's counties still lacking one, while LA County moves to fix a clerical error that had accidentally wiped out Measure J's dedicated funding for jail alternatives.
New Stories
Behavioral Health Intervention
The county has expanded its Crisis Intervention Team training with new tracks for youth (CIT-Y, one of only six national NAMI pilot sites) and veterans (VRT), building on a nine-year, 400-graduate program that already spans 31 local police departments.
The Cass County Public Safety Task Force met to revive its dormant Crisis Intervention Team program, with Sergeant Tanya Jahner laying out what it'll take to get local officers back into CIT training.
Flagstaff Shelter Services and The Guidance Center are now embedding licensed behavioral health clinicians directly at the shelter during peak hours, a move that's already cut reliance on 911 and the ER and will need about $250,000 a year to keep going past its first funded year.
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Diversion
More than 40 mental health courts have opened across New York since the early 2000s, but roughly half the state's 62 counties still don't have one.
Judge Matthew D'Emic's Brooklyn court has graduated 1,560 people since 2002, with recent completion rates between 73 and 87 percent, while about 1,600 people with serious mental illness sat in NYC jails this past December alone.
Getting into the Brooklyn court can take nearly a year. Last year the median wait from arrest to first clinical contact was 265 days, and that's before eligibility review even starts.
A proposed Treatment Court Expansion Act would standardize these courts statewide and widen who qualifies, but it's stalled in the legislature for years despite backing from the state's top judges.
Even where courts exist, the programs they lean on, like Harbor House in the Bronx, are maxed out. It has 116 beds and a waitlist of 36 people.
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Funding
The LA County Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 to put a charter fix on the November ballot, restoring funding for jail diversion programs.
Voters approved Measure J back in 2020, requiring at least 10 percent of the county's unrestricted general funds go toward alternatives to incarceration, like job training, mental health treatment, and youth development.
A clerical error in 2024, tied to the separate Measure G, accidentally nullified Measure J starting in December 2028, without anyone intending that outcome.
This November's measure is essentially a repair job, meant to keep that funding commitment running without interruption.
It's a reminder that even a policy voters already decided on can quietly unravel through paperwork, not politics, if nobody catches it in time.
