For decades, Santa Barbara was said to be the only county in which law enforcement officers were not empowered to write 5150 holds for people experiencing such acute mental health woes that they posed a risk to themselves or to others, or qualified as “gravely disabled.” As the plight of the mentally ill has increasingly occupied public discourse, this “factoid” has been repeated until it achieved the stature of historical fact. It served to underscore the acute and chronic shortage of bed space in the county’s only lockdown psychiatric hospital.
The county’s Psychiatric Health Facility — better known as the PHF — has only 16 beds, forcing three people per day to be shipped to psychiatric hospitals in other counties. Law enforcement executives, such as Santa Barbara’s newest police chief Kelly Gordon, questioned the wisdom of this policy, and she vowed that her officers would be empowered to write such holds. Sheriff Bill Brown’s deputies vowed to do the same, though only in exceptionally limited circumstances.
Despite such pronouncements, only one 5150 hold has been written by any Santa Barbara County law enforcement officer in the past year. When the Grand Jury researched the origins of this policy — going back to the mid-1970s — they discovered no vote of the board of supervisors and no official edict. It was, however, an understanding, and understandings — as illustrated here — can be as powerful as any law.
The Grand Jury also urged the supervisors to expand staffing for mental health professionals to go out in teams with law enforcement officers in what are known as “co-response units.” These teams are better schooled in de-escalating sometimes lethal situations with individuals experiencing acute mental health problems. This has reportedly help keep people out of jail whose offenses stem more from mental health disorders than criminal intent.
Countywide, there are six such teams: four operated out of the Sheriff’s Office, one out of the Santa Barbara Police Department, and one from the Santa Maria Police Department. The County Executive Office respectfully pointed out that a recent audit of the co-response teams found each team fielded only one call for service a day. None of this, however, alters the significant shortage of acute-care mental health beds in the county.
Under questioning from supervisor Joan Hartmann, it came out that the eight beds in the county’s newly reopened Crisis Stabilization Unit (CSU) have just been deemed 5150-worthy. Translated, this means that clients committed to the CSU can be held there involuntarily until they can stabilize or be transferred to a longer-term facility. Just last week, county Behavioral Wellness Director Toni Navarro acknowledged the county was seeking state funding to build a new 24-bed PHF unit. While this funding is hardly in the bag, it qualifies as the first time in decades that any movement has been made toward expanding the number of PHF beds.
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