Bill calling for crisis response team within fire department rejected by council

SOUTH BEND ― City leaders insist they’re all in agreement: Reform is needed in the way mental health crises are reported to and dealt with by police.

But disagreement over the proper way to do that led on Monday to public statements chastising two council members for their resolution to establish a mental health intervention team within the fire department, as well as the indefinite postponement of a Common Council vote on that proposal.

A council committee voted to postpone the non-binding resolution after more than an hour of tense debate involving several residents and activist organizations. Most of the eight council members present said the resolution, while dealing with a crucial issue, was haphazard and ill-conceived. The bill’s authors, council members Henry Davis Jr. and Lori Hamann, and more than half a dozen activists said others were protesting about procedure while overlooking the core issue addressed.

“Calling for ‘immediate implementation,’ which the title of the bill states, without determining clear guidelines and processes strikes me as unrealistic and irresponsible,” at-large council member Rachel Tomas Morgan said.

“If we are going to put something in place,” she added, “I don’t want to vote on something thrown together in a matter of days, or amend this on the fly tonight. This is not responsible governing. This is too important of an issue.”

More:Fire chief, other South Bend leaders rip proposal of SBFD leading mental health crisis team

Debate about crisis response has heated up locally since the police killing on July 29 of Dante Kittrell, a Black man who was reportedly suicidal and holding a gun in a field near Coquillard Elementary School.

Kittrell, 51, was shot to death by South Bend Police Department officers after more than 40 minutes of negotiation, police say. His mother, a pastor and residents of the neighborhood near Sheridan Street stood by and reportedly tried, to no avail, to convince police to let them speak with Kittrell.

Several activist groups, led by Faith in Indiana and Black Lives Matter South Bend, have been asking for mental health intervention units outside of SBPD for years, they say. The manner of the killing ― a SWAT truck drove up to Kittrell in the seconds before officers shot him ― inflamed their demands.

Kittrell "was not wandering in a place where he wasn't known. He was in a place where everybody knew who he was, and our police department ― not for the first time, and certainly not for the first time for police around the country ― decided it was easier just to shoot him than to figure out how to solve the problem," said Paul Mishler, a professor of social work at Indiana University South Bend who spoke during the meeting.

He said people with mental health issues are significantly more likely to be killed during a police encounter because they don't understand what's being asked of them.

More:'My worst nightmare': Woman who took video of South Bend police shooting recalls standoff

Bill fails after confusion

But a resolution to house crisis response units within the South Bend Fire Department was denounced Monday by most city council members, the mayor, the police chief and the fire chief as an unhelpful cause for confusion.

South Bend Fire Chief Carl Buchanon told The Tribune he hadn’t discussed his department’s involvement in mental health crisis intervention with any council members. He had received only an email, which he didn’t see until Monday.

“How are you going to say that the fire department’s involved and we have not had a formal conversation?” Buchanon said of council members who mentioned their emails to him.

“In this particular conversation about mental health, yes, we need to have the right people respond,” he said. “But don’t perceive that the fire department has trained professionals to be able to provide that. … We depend on the adequate resources to be able to respond.”

More:Competing mental health crisis team proposals after Dante Kittrell shooting

Change to the city’s response to crises is happening in two main ways, according to city leaders. A behavioral crisis center is being built at Epworth Hospital in downtown South Bend in collaboration with Beacon Health System, with the goal of appropriately treating people instead of holding them in jail. And the police department is in talks with Oaklawn Psychiatric Center about how to include Oaklawn’s Mobile Crisis Team in response to crisis calls.

Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski, speaking publicly for the first time since Dante Kittrell was killed by SBPD officers, said discussions about a crisis response team have been happening for more than two years and “are not moving as fast as I feel it should be, but it is moving."

Oaklawn's crisis team has been going to mental health calls for the past few months, according to John Horsley, Oaklawn's vice president of adult and addiction services. But it handles only calls made to the center's hotline and isn’t open 24 hours.

The eventual goal is for the county's 911 center to divert situations involving a mental health episode to the Mobile Crisis Team as opposed to sending police. Reaching that point, however, is proving to be a lengthy process with the 911 center and first responders, he said.

“It’s going to take all of us to be able to move this Oaklawn outline into a 24-hour-a-day service to our community,” Buchanon said. “There is no light switch that we can turn on that’s going to do it. It’s going to take effort, and it’s going to take time.”

Hamann said part of her motivation for the council resolution is her 28-year-old son, who’s been diagnosed with autism. Watching the “systemic failure” to protect people such as Kittrell, who had lifelong mental health issues, unmoored her.

But her colleagues, all but one of whom are also Democrats, said a flurry of emails and amendments to the bill over the weekend led to confusion about which version would be heard before the council. Ongoing efforts to create and better fund a Mobile Crisis Team piloted by Oaklawn Psychiatric Center seem more likely to succeed, they said.

“I support a mobile crisis team, I support funding one,” said Troy Warner, a council member for the fourth district who also works as a spokesman for St. Joseph County police. “But let’s be fully transparent about (this bill): It provides no funding. It does not create any teams. It doesn’t hire anybody, it doesn’t create any positions. There’s no details, not even a semblance of a plan.”

Investigation into response continues

Warner also said any change in response should happen after a county investigation into Kittrell’s death concludes.

“We know what was on a grainy video from a few hundred feet away,” he said in reference to a recording taken by Brianna Johnson, a resident in the Sheridan area who was at Monday’s meeting.

A police spokeswoman said Monday that the officers involved in the shooting are on administrative leave pending the investigation of their behavior by St. Joseph County officials. The department pledged to release in-car camera and body-cam video footage to the public if the county prosecutor does not.

SBPD won't comment on the officers' tactical response, during or after the investigation, Ruszkowski said.

More:'They took him from me': South Bend mourns Dante Kittrell's death

Ruszkowski said of 668 calls related to mental health made this year as of Aug. 3, only the incident involving Kittrell ended adversely. The others were resolved using de-escalation measures, he said.

Officers who are hostage and crisis negotiators were present when Kittrell was killed, he said, adding that, in general, the decision to involve a SWAT team is part of department protocol.

Under the department’s use of force policy, deadly force should be used only as a “last resort” and when there is imminent danger to others.

"When a firearm or other weapon is introduced, not just for that person but capable of harming others," Ruszkowski said, "that ups the ante and ups what we have to do in a tactical and a de-escalation type response."

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Council rejects mental health crisis team in South Bend Fire Department