Orange County, North Carolina recently received a grant of $1.2 million to create a community care and response team, focusing on diverting those with mental health illnesses away from incarceration through assessments, treatment and compliance in the Orange County Community Resource Court, Emerson Gonzales-Roblero reports for The Daily Tar Heel, a student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This grant will provide four social workers for police departments throughout the county and run until September 2025. According to Director Caitlin Fenhagen of the Orange County Criminal Justice Resource Department, law enforcement personnel are not trained to handle mental health crises when responding to 911 calls.
“Very frequently, law enforcement are the first to arrive on the scene of what may just be a behavioral health crisis,” Fenhagen said, “And not only are they not trained with any real background in behavioral health – they do have some CIT training or mental health first aid – but it’s very different.”