Sheriff will stop responding to non-violent 5150s later this year

MENDOCINO CO., 1/26/17 — At some point in the coming year the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office plans to stop responding to “crisis calls” unless there is a threat of violence, Sheriff Tom Allman said Monday, although he would not specify a date. Allman presented this “challenge,” as he called it, to Mendocino County supervisors in a measured presentation at a special joint meeting of the supervisors and the Behavioral Health Advisory Board held January 23, also attended by Health and Human Services Agency directors and mental health staff.

For the past several years a debate has raged in Mendocino County over how to better respond to people suffering a mental health crisis, who can be deemed “a danger to themselves or others” and can be placed on a “5150.”[footnote]So called for the California penal code that allows people to be detained if they are deemed a danger to themselves or others.[/footnote]Central to the debate is the fact that the county has had no emergency facility for mental health patients since the closing of the Psychiatric Health Facility in 1999. An increase in the number of crisis cases — who wound up being taken to the jail or hospital — caused alarm during the tenure of the previous mental health provider Ortner Management Group; and both law enforcement and local medical staff expressed frustration with the strain on their resources.