OKLAHOMA CITY—A long-in-development crisis response unit focused on mental health and drug abuse calls has officially launched within the Oklahoma City Fire Department, finally realizing a longstanding goal of the City’s Public Safety Partnership.
The Mobile Integrated Healthcare unit inside OCFD is staffed entirely by trained mental health and substance abuse professionals and can be dispatched to mental health crisis calls through the same 911 operations that dispatch police and fire response.
It’s another culmination for projects stemming from the “39 recommendations” submitted to City Council in early 2022 to address de-escalation, community engagement, and accountability in public health response, in particular aiming to reduce the proliferation of violence that can come with armed police response.
“Our team is about eliminating barriers,” said Mobile Integrated Health Program Manager Lori Brown-Loftis, LCSW. “It’s about trying to ensure that the residents of Oklahoma City are getting connected to the services that they need and not just going to the hospital or jail as the alternatives.”
Focused dispatch
The goal of the Mobile Integrated Health unit is to provide a more focused and properly trained response team to handle emergency calls with a clear mental health component, reducing the chance for escalation that can happen with traditional armed police response.
The new mental health response teams are different from the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) officers within OKCPD who undergo some training for mental health response, but maintain their role and duty as police.
With the Mobile Integrated Health teams, respondents will be unarmed and not authorized to directly arrest or apprehend subjects, instead focusing on clinical de-escalation methods and providing immediate access to mental health care and even on-site drug and overdose treatment.
“This is an entirely new team,” Brown-Loftis said. “We have paramedics, which the Fire Department is very comfortable with, because they have paramedics on their engines, and then we also have licensed social workers, licensed clinical staff, and behavioral health navigators whose degrees and training are specific to mental health, and even more specifically to crisis work.”
Crucially, much of the planning and development of the new unit was seen in the City’s emergency dispatch infrastructure where staff has been trained to better identify mental health crisis calls for diversion to this new unit.
“The dispatchers have already been trained to recognize when calls have a mental health component,” Brown-Loftis said. “So it’s mainly about getting our team housed within the 911 communications center and training the call-takers and dispatchers on how to get us integrated into those calls.”
Roll-out and funding
Though the City is making a concerted public push to officially launch the new Mobile Integrated Healthcare teams right now, Brown-Loftis makes it clear that they’ve already been quietly operating for months.
“We’ve actually been responding to calls since December,” she said. “That was kind of our soft launch, just to get staff hired and get everyone trained on radio communication, especially for mental health professionals that have never worked on something like police radio. But now the City wanted to do a real launch for us to raise awareness, especially for Mental Health Month in May.”
The team is currently comprised of 27 members and three dedicated vans across their Crisis Call Diversion Team, handling dispatch, the Crisis Response Team, responding to potentially dangerous mental health emergencies, and the Alternative Response Team, handling overdose calls and less dangerous situations.
Additionally, the unit now oversees the Community Advocacy Program that works to connect frequent non-emergency 911 callers to more in-depth and continuous resources or care.
Contrary to the models floated by some other cities that have seen pushback or controversy from plans to divert police funding to develop a dedicated mental health response, none of those teams in the new permanent unit have required the use of police funds.
“70% of our budget comes from Fire’s general fund, where we fall under their operations service and we’re really just extending a lot of services that Fire already had in place,” Brown-Loftis said. “And the other 30% comes from the City’s opioid settlement funds.”
Logistical realities
Though the development of the Mobile Integrated Healthcare team and the public push to raise awareness of it have been designed to reassure city residents that there is a dedicated, non-police response unit for mental health emergencies, Brown-Loftis admits that they still can’t currently operate around the clock.
“We’re currently operational from 7 am to 11 pm,” she explained. “And that decision was made based on data and information we have from the 911 center that informed the peak operation hours, and also because we’re a new program, so we’re getting it up and running in more of a limited capacity to see what other data we can collect during that time.”
That means that currently, between the hours of 11 pm and 7 am overnight, the Mobile Integrated Health unit will not be available to respond to calls.
During those hours, Brown-Loftis recommends still calling 911 for any emergency, noting that CIT-trained police officers should still be available, and reminds city residents that the 988 Mental Health Line is also still available with their own crisis response teams as well.
“We just don’t have as many units as we have police units in Oklahoma City,” she said. “So no, not every single call that comes in related to mental health will be something we can respond to.”
But over time, as the new unit can demonstrate the importance and need of having a dedicated, fully-trained team of mental health professionals ready to respond to crises, Brown-Loftis said that she believes their staff and operational hours could expand.
“I’m hopeful that eventually we will be able to grow this team to fill in and provide that need for the entire city,” she said. “Our goal, really, is to provide extra support and to learn as much as we can so that we can come back to City Council and talk about what makes sense for Oklahoma City and what response is needed so that we can meet the entire need for the city.”
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
