Harris County Sheriff’s Office to expand CIRT program pairing cops with clinicians

Sergeant Aaron Brown didn’t have to think hard when asked for an example of how the Crisis Intervention Response Teams at the Harris County Sheriff’s Office help keep citizens and officers safe.

He quickly recalled how, just hours before his conversation with the Landing, a team was dispatched to a scene where a woman was standing outside a motel room holding two butcher knives. It’s the kind of call that could have led to someone getting hurt.

Instead, armed with information about the women’s mental health history, and the perspective of a mental health provider, the team told deputies to stand back. Two hours of calm conversation later, she peacefully surrendered.

“A typical old police response, what would we do? We would force it. We would force entry, somebody could get hurt for no reason, right?” said Brown, who leads the county’s CIRT teams. “We have a different ideology. We’re going to give them space, and we’re going to listen to understand. We’re going to communicate.”

As part of the budget package approved last week, Harris County Commissioner’s Court gave the thumbs up to an additional $560,000 for the hiring of six more mental health clinicians for the Sheriff’s Office CIRT teams.

The program currently includes nine units meant to respond to the 1,700 square mile area that is Harris County. The expansion will allow the teams to reach more scenes where they can be of use, said Brown.

According to Brown, sheriff’s office CIRT teams typically work 10-hour, overlapping shifts while an extra sergeant and deputy are on call. The new clinicians will enable the team to expand the number of working teams and help relieve those who are on call.

He said the more teams there are, the more their influence on deputies outside their units grows.

“The licensed professional counselor is teaching, and they’re not just teaching the CIRT deputy, they’re teaching our patrol deputies on patrol when we have contact with them,” said Brown.

In 2023, Brown’s teams were dispatched to roughly 4,700 calls for service, which resulted in nearly 1,500 cases where the CIRT team was able to resolve the issue without taking anyone into custody, 278 jail diversions, and 685 emergency mental health detentions where a person was forcibly taken to a medical facility.

CIRT teams pair a sheriff’s deputy with a master’s-level clinician from the Harris Center for Mental Health and IDD , who helps provide background information on the subjects of their calls and inform the approach when an individual is in crisis.

The teams can be deployed by dispatch to any calls which have a mental health component, and are deployed to SWAT calls as a resource, according to the program’s website .

The nature of the calls varies widely, according to Brown. From a welfare check on a veteran to suicidal individuals to barricaded suspects and SWAT scenes. When a CIRT team is called to a scene, the senior CIRT deputy takes control of all police activities at that scene, according to sheriff’s office policy .

Sheriff’s office officials say that the success of their program is seen when such calls are diverted away from the justice system, a potentially violent situation is de-escalated, or a citizen is connected with mental health resources and lessens future justice system contact as well.

“Arresting him for criminal trespass for the 93rd time, is that going to change [the person]’s perspective? No, we get no value. In fact, the citizens lose. Everyone loses,” said Brown.

And, ideally, the team and their access to both medical information and a clinician’s training create more safety for both officers and the person in crisis.

“If the goal is public safety, and the goal is the sanctity of human life, the more information we have, the better decisions we make….No one’s ever been hurt by knowing more.”

A different response

The concept of a co-responder team is not new. In fact, Houston has had such teams for over 15 years. The Houston Police Department began its program in 2008 and now runs 18 teams, according to sheriff’s department officials. Since beginning its own program in 2011, the Sheriff’s Office has shared training and resources with HPD.

The approach has gained popularity across the country, expanding after the murder of George Floyd forced a reckoning on how policing agencies approach scenes that have the potential to end in the use of force.

In 2020, a University of Cincinnati study , which compiled research on the effectiveness of the model, said the practice was a “promising practice in police-based behavioral health crisis response,” but that more research was needed.

Angelina Brown Hudson, chief executive officer of the Greater Houston chapter of the  National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI),  said that additional teams are a good thing, and that Houston’s unincorporated areas, which the Sheriff’s Office patrols, are in particular need of this form of help.

“I don’t think people understand how big a job they [CIRT teams] have,” said Hudson. “You know, this is happening all the time, and they don’t near have enough CIRT teams to go out.”

As of Thursday, 80% of those incarcerated at Harris County Jail have a mental health indicator, according to the sheriff’s office’s public dashboard .

Hudson and NAMI advocate for officer training and CIRT teams, and the national organization was instrumental in the development of law enforcement crisis intervention training best practices.

To some mental health advocates, police would ideally never respond to calls for those in crisis. Harris County’s Holistic Assistance Response Teams are one example of a program which responds to mental health 911 calls with only medical providers.

Krish Gundu, the executive director of the Texas Jail Project, told the Houston Landing that while the co-responder model is better than previous practices, it’s still not as good as taking police enforcement out of the picture completely.

Gundu advocates for incarcerated Texans, many of whom suffer from mental illness. A Houston Landing investigation last year showed that one-third ​​of the more than 540 people who died of unnatural causes in Texas jails since the 1980s were flagged as potentially mentally ill.

“As long as you have law enforcement, you run the risk of a situation escalating,” said Gundu, who noted that their mere presence can be a trigger for some individuals, and often the symptoms of their illness end up being criminalized.

Brown said that while he started his policing career in more traditional fields like narcotics and canine units, he ended up in negotiation and then crisis response after experiencing the death of a family member who experienced severe mental illness.

Since, he said, he has had some of his best conversations talking other Harris County residents off literal ledges. These are people from across all walks of life, he tells his deputies, who call 911 because they had never been listened to before.

“​​Living it changes the perspective…But you know, you can take that trauma, you can aim it. You get to stop other people.”