Santa Barbara County Gets $6 Million Diversion Grant
Co-Response Team, New Sober Center and 20 New Chill-Out Beds Funded
The dog days of summer haven’t arrived yet. Mercury doesn’t launch into retrograde until next month, yet tempers are snapping louder than a fat man’s suspenders. In fact, nothing less than police intervention was required to restore order at this week’s Santa Barbara City Council meeting as Anna Marie Gott — the loudly buzzing council gadfly who has achieved acronym status of “AMG” — erupted into peals of bitter laughter, shouting that the mayor was “a tyrant.” The Mayor, known alternately as Cathy Murillo, was trying to silence the loquaciously pugnacious councilmember, Jason Dominguez. (Technically, she cut off further debate and called the question.) Jason, by way of background, has been known to provoke. Cathy, likewise, is known to overreact. Either way, it’s not a good look. (For the facts, see the news article by Delaney Smith.)
All this high-profile gassing off underscored my great sense of relief upon hearing the County of Santa Barbara just won a $6 million Proposition 47 grant. Prop. 47 is the law Californians passed in 2014 intended to get people who don’t really belong behind bars somewhere else. Such as into treatment for substance-abuse or mental-health issues. The money will pay for a lot of things — a new sober center, for example, and 20 beds of step-down housing — but chief among them is the county’s obliquely named “co-response team.” That’s where a mental-health crisis outreach worker is teamed up with a sheriff’s deputy and sent out into the wild blue yonder in hopes of defusing situations that could otherwise lead to flying lead.
The county hatched this program — old hat in other parts of the country — as an experimental effort and on a trial basis last September. Almost from the get-go, its days appeared numbered. Given chronic staffing problems with the Sheriff’s Office, it was unclear just how available departmental brass could cut Deputy James McKarrell loose to star in what could be a real-life buddy movie with mental-health crisis worker Bradley Crable.
