Police officers responding to calls often find themselves in contact with people with behavioral health conditions or intellectual disabilities — a challenge that has led law enforcement agencies to make more and more use of programs and training that can improve the safety of police interactions for individuals in a crisis.
The 2024 Annual Meeting of the Municipal Association of SC featured a panel session with two police chiefs who have worked to expand mental health resources in their departments: Chief Marion Boyce of the West Columbia Police Department, and Chief Jorge Campos of the Clemson Police Department.
In West Columbia’s case, Boyce said, the efforts came out of working “to figure out how we could better provide a service to that population suffering from mental health crises and substance abuse.”
A significant issue involved, he said, was that a person with mental health problems can generate frequent calls for law enforcement, straining available resources. One of the department’s responses was to partner with the nearby University of South Carolina College of Social Work so that its students could serve as interns handling social work cases with the department.
The West Columbia Police Department, along with the Cayce Police Department, also partnered with the Lexington County Community Mental Health Center through its Mobile Crisis program to embed a mental health professional with their officers.
“The biggest thing that we're trying to do in West Columbia is make that investment into our community, [so they] know that we care about them,” Boyce said.
In the City of Clemson, Campos said, many of the mental health challenges the police department has seen are similar — mental health problems can lead to substance abuse problems, and people with ongoing conditions leading to numerous calls for service over time.
Campos shared a story to illustrate the value of crisis intervention team training for his officers, when they responded to a call of a person who appeared frantic and was trying to break into cars in a parking lot. The officers helped calm down everyone involved in the situation, called EMS, and got the person suffering from a mental health crisis to the hospital.
“Instead of handling it like someone's breaking in or trying to steal a car, a criminal trying to steal a car, they immediately recognized there was something else going on here,” he said.
The panel also featured Stacee Rowell of the SC Department of Mental Health, who manages the Mobile Crisis program. The program aims to redirect individuals from unnecessary hospitalization and incarcerations, and helps those in crisis access ongoing mental health care, which has been available statewide since 2019.
“In addition to that, we have over 20 embedded clinicians throughout the state that are either embedded in law enforcement agencies or the jails,” she said. “Those clinicians are able to engage with those individuals, either through getting reports, to do follow-ups with them, to try to get them engaged in services … It's also important to know that a lot of these positions are cost share, so that means that city and county councils may need to provide some budgetary space for that.”
Boyce compared the partnership of law enforcement and social work to a strong marriage.
“It takes intentionality. It takes communication. We don't always speak the same language. I know we're there for the same purpose, and that's to serve people, but how a social worker serves, and how a law enforcement officer serves are sometimes a little bit different. You can imagine that that could cause some conflict, but you have to keep those doors of communication open,” he said.