The Specialized Care Unit, Berkeley’s mobile crisis team, finally has a projected start date and a phone number.
The SCU should be able to start taking calls on Sept. 5, the day after Labor Day, according to Samantha Russell, director of crisis services at Bonita House, the nonprofit mental health care organization running the $4.5 million two-year pilot program.
Bonita House has hired five SCU team members and is still recruiting, Russell said during a town-hall-style Zoom meeting Wednesday. When fully staffed, the SCU will have rotating teams of three workers each — a behavioral health technician, a peer support specialist and an EMT — working around the clock to take crisis calls that previously would have gone to city police.
At first, the SCU will only be responding to calls on a limited basis during daytime hours, Russell said, but as more staff and vehicles become available, they aim to be available all day, every day.
The city has purchased the vans that the SCU teams will use, but they are not yet ready for deployment, Russell said. For the first weeks or months that the SCU operates, they will use rented vans. The rented vans do not have wheelchair ramps, but the permanent ones will.
A sticking point for many proponents of the SCU was taking calls for mental health services or substance crises out of the police department’s dispatch center. The SCU has a dedicated 10-digit phone number, 510-948-0075, Russell said Wednesday, although nobody can take those calls until Sept. 5.
“We will be checking voicemails every day in the mornings, but we will not be responding,” Russell said. “So currently, if you have a psychiatric emergency, it’s still 911.”
When the SCU is up and running, Russell said, people should call if they or people they know are “experiencing symptoms of a mental health, behavioral crisis” such as feeling anxious, helpless, socially withdrawn or unable to calm down, or struggling with substance use or abuse. The SCU can also handle wellness checks and reports of people thinking about harming themselves or others.
Of the more than 60,000 calls for service that the Berkeley Police Department responds to each year, between 2,500 and 3,000 are for welfare checks alone, according to data in the department’s transparency hub.
But as for conventional medical emergencies, the SCU can provide only “very basic medical care,” Russell said. “Certain calls may still require a 911 response if you have a major medical emergency if there is other things going on.”
The idea for the unit first arose in June 2020, immediately after the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer. The intention was to shift “non-criminal” calls for service from city police to a “network of crisis responders,” according to a City Council item.
