Tell the Mayor and your Supervisor: Keep Clinicians on Street Crisis Response Teams

The City launched Street Crisis Response Teams (SCRT) three years ago as part of its Mental Health SF ordinance. The program responds to calls for assistance when people are having a mental health crisis on the City streets by dispatching a mental health clinician and a peer counselor along with a paramedic. Clinicians on these teams are trained in de-escalation techniques and are the only team members qualified to issue a psychiatric emergency hold (5150) so that people who pose a danger to themselves or others can be moved from the streets into health care.

From November 2020 to November 2022, the team responded to 14,230 calls, 64% of which involved people experiencing homelessness. Responding to 911 calls for mental health crises by sending these teams instead of armed police officers has saved lives and reduce the risk of people being arrested or killed rather than treated.

Yet the Department of Public Health decided this year to transfer the seven Street Crisis Response Team vans from DPH to the Department of Emergency Management and to remove trained mental health clinicians from SCRT vans. Even though the SCRT vans are a program created by the Mental Health SF ordinance, this decision was made with no notice or request for input from the MHSF Implementation Working Group (IWG), a panel of experts responsible for overseeing the city’s enactment of the ordinance.

People with serious mental health conditions, especially those experiencing homelessness, can’t be expected to trust institutions and uniformed officers when those institutions and officers have so often inflicted trauma and violence, often influenced by racism or other prejudices. Having a trained, non-uniformed clinician on these teams helps build trust and has helped get people into appropriate care and shelter.

We urge you to contact the mayor’s office and your Supervisor to advocate for the importance of keeping a trained clinician on the teams and to ask that any changes to the SCRT be made in consultation with the Mental Health SF IWG.