![]() The debate was supercharged in the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd and mass protests over policing practices, with many activists urging that law enforcement be removed from non-emergency response altogether. The Nevada County Sheriff’s Office is among the wave of law enforcement agencies across California and the country rethinking how they handle mental health-related calls.Īs the national reckoning over use of excessive force and the death of unarmed civilians gained steam during the past decade, demands also grew for communities to reconsider their approach to the personal crises - severe mental illness, homelessness, substance abuse - underlying so many 911 calls, arrests and, sometimes, fatal encounters with police. “But I also work there, so I’ll make sure, when they ask me, ‘What do you think?,’ I’m definitely going to tell them.” “We don’t really have the final say,” Alvarado said. I’m at my wit’s end.”Īlvarado assured her they would place her son on another 72-hour hold at the local emergency room for evaluation, and that he would recommend the man be transferred to a facility for longer-term treatment. “I just want him to get help,” the woman said. He offered to take her to the county crisis stabilization unit if she was feeling overwhelmed by the confrontation with her son. “It changes how your body reacts to things,” Alvarado told the woman. It’s been hell every day here,” she wailed. When she tried to call the local behavioral health agency for an appointment, she said he threatened to kill her and threw a baseball bat at her. The man was not taking his medication for bipolar disorder since he got home from his latest hospital stint a few weeks ago, she said. Now the man stood calmly, barely responsive, as Spittler checked him for weapons. Minutes before, siren blaring, sheriff’s Deputy Galen Spittler raced his patrol truck through the winding Penn Valley roads to respond to a report of a 33-year-male - one they had placed on a psychiatric hold last fall - assaulting his mother. Pepper and a colorful glass marijuana pipe splayed out beside him as he looked out on the wooded valley below. "Just because it works on one network, it doesn't mean that all the pieces – technical, policy, governance – have been put in place behind the scenes everywhere.The man sat silently on a cluster of boulders when the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office mobile crisis team pulled up. "While this is a good day, it also points out the need for national-level co-ordination," said Lance Valcour, the outgoing executive director of the Canadian Interoperability Technology Interest Group. The piecemeal rollout has been questioned by some critics. 24, no other definitive plans have been made elsewhere in Canada to introduce the service. While federal regulators mandate that the required technology be installed by Jan. Proud of being first to introduce the service, E-Comm's Doug Watson said that many more operators across the country "were hot on their heels."Ĭalgary's 911 service will follow on Monday. The quick rollout in the Lower Mainland was aided by the local 911 provider, considered one of the most advanced in the country. The new system required a number of technical tweaks to the local mobile phone network. "Once you start adding complex English structure and vocabulary it becomes confusing, especially when people are in a panic," she said. She advised local 911 provider E-Comm to simplify the language in its texts, asking that words like "concise" be replaced by "short." Many in the hearing impaired community have a grasp of English only as a second language. Lyons was invited to test the new system before it was launched. "We are going to roll out sequentially as operators are ready across the country." "It's an incremental improvement to what we already have," said Chris Langdon, a vice-president at Telus Corp. The operators will still be able to hear sounds from the user's phone and track its location. Under the system, registered phones dialling 911 can be connected with operators and a text-message session will be initiated. The service, launched on Tuesday, is available in Metro Vancouver and some communities along the Sunshine Coast and Squamish Lillooet region. This gives me my independence to contact emergency services now I'm just as free as anyone else," Janice Lyons, a service leader at the Western Institute for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing said through a sign-language interpreter. "This is something we've waited many years for. ![]()
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