It’s 10 p.m. and a Lompoc police officer is dispatched to a “disturbance.” Upon arrival at the scene, the officer encounters an obviously disturbed person who is suffering from a mental health emergency. The person wasn’t injured and hasn’t hurt anyone else, but desperately needs help. What can the officer do?
Lompoc, the third largest city in the county, is and always has been an afterthought when it comes to county services. And, as the number of folks, housed and unhoused, suffering from mental illness increases, the County Health Department hasn’t been able to keep up with the demand for services.
In December 2021 Noozhawk reported the county Grand Jury had published its annual report, and to everyone’s astonishment found the city of Lompoc lacked the resources necessary to address a growing mental health problem in the city.
Why was it astonishing, you ask? Because Lompoc does not have a public health department; the county has that responsibility and has failed to deliver.
Noozhawk continues: “The Jury was repeatedly informed that teams have frequently been slow to respond because of the large distances to cover,” the report stated. “Without the ability to write 5150 (mental health) Welfare and Institutions holds, LPD has its hands tied when dealing with those who are experiencing a mental health crisis. It is widely accepted that LPD is deficient in resources to manage mental health situations.”
The Grand Jury’s recommendation was “That the Lompoc City Council negotiate with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office and the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors on behalf of the Department of Behavioral Wellness to add a Co-Response team dedicated to the Lompoc Valley.”
Then in December 2022, Noozhawk reported that Congressman Salud Carbajal wanted answers: “The stories (from Noozhawk) highlighted the shortage of inpatient psychiatric health beds; the underutilization of the crisis stabilization unit; and the collaboration between behavioral health and criminal justice agencies to create the co-response teams, sobering center and other programs to reduce the number of people experiencing a mental health crisis who end up in jail and emergency rooms.”
The county’s response was to open a crisis hub near the south county jail – 55 miles from Lompoc, which “includes the sobering center, crisis stabilization unit and inpatient psychiatric health facility” but reported that it “has been underutilized since it opened, averaging 1.3 people per day from 2016 to 2021.”
They also established three “co-response teams, which pair a deputy and behavioral health clinician to respond to mental health crisis calls with the goal of preventing unnecessary hospitalizations or arrests.”
None of those teams are in the Lompoc Valley, however they might start one in 2023.
Once again, Lompoc is an afterthought.
I asked someone who is very familiar with how situations like the one I described at the start of the commentary are handled by the Lompoc Police Department; the response was very informative.
The person told me about meetings on this subject last year, and said the impression was, “that it was a wonder that we had any homeless or mentally ill people in Lompoc given all the posturing that was done by those in attendance.”
And “our greatest challenge was getting a response from mental health professionals during off hours especially. This also created a strain between LPD and the Lompoc Valley Medical Center, where often times we took those needing help. If there was no articulable basis to meet the criteria that the person was a danger to himself or others, they were eligible for release without an appropriate resolution.”
For LPD, the motto is, “Where service is tradition.” LPD officers are professional and compassionate, and yet in a moment of a mental health crisis they do not have the tools or appropriate backup to assist them.
What does repeated responses to individuals in need do to an officer? How can we expect them to not be adversely impacted when they cannot provide service?
When will the Public Health Department begin to provide the services they acknowledged were needed in 2017 when they published the Community Health Improvement Plan. In it they said their strategy was “To improve overall health, we seek an expansion of behavioral health care across all age groups.”
The mentally ill in Lompoc need help, meanwhile county government twiddles its thumbs and has meetings.
