South Bend residents push for mental health crisis units after fatal police shooting

SOUTH BEND — Calls for a mobile crisis response team designed to respond to mental health crises have grown among residents in the two weeks since the fatal shooting of Dante Kittrell by South Bend police late last month.

However, while activists and some city officials are pushing for a more effective response to incidents similar to Kittrell’s, conversations among community groups have yielded little consensus on the best way to implement crisis units.

Last week, a resolution calling for the fire department to house a mental health team was rejected by the rest of the council. At a Wednesday night community meeting hosted by Faith in Indiana and Black Lives Matter South Bend, among others, the resolution’s sponsors — Lori Hamann and Henry Davis Jr. — said they aren’t giving up on the proposal and plan to revise the document for another vote.

At the same meeting, representatives from Oaklawn Psychiatric Center gave a presentation on the health clinic’s Mobile Crisis Team that’s been responding to calls in the community since March. Residents had questions about Oaklawn’s team, including how it interacts with law enforcement and whether it would respond to calls involving weapons.

Talks also appear to be growing more contentious with Faith in Indiana gathering in downtown South Bend on Friday to criticize Mayor James Mueller for not meeting with community leaders. Black Lives Matter also organized a demonstration outside Mueller's house on Monday morning, where seven people gathered to demand the city fund a mental health response team.

The mayor's office announced the city will hold a community meeting on Aug. 23 on the topic of crisis response teams.

Amid the response from community organizations, it is still unclear how Oaklawn's team fits into the framework of Hamann and Davis’ resolution, leading some at Wednesday's meeting to question the best way forward.

'They took him from me':South Bend mourns the death of Dante Kittrell

"I don’t know that we’ve done a good job of collaborating with each other," said Rebekah Go, a member of Faith in Indiana.

Others pointed to Indianapolis as a potential model for South Bend due to recently announced funding for a 24-hour, clinician-led response team.

Resolute on resolutions

Debate about crisis response has heated up locally since the police killing on July 29 of 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.

Among the speakers at Wednesday’s community meeting at the Near Northwest Neighborhood Center, which drew around 50 people, were Hamann and Davis, who both said they will keep pushing to pass their resolution.

The latest version of the non-binding resolution calls for the city to “convene all relevant parties to examine the current mental health crisis response system; recommend changes in the system; and develop and propose a plan for incorporating mental health professionals and the fire department in the response to all mental health crises.”

A council committee on Monday voted to table the resolution with council members calling it “irresponsible.” Mueller said it was “reckless” and “ignorant about how our fire department operates” earlier that day.

Speaking Wednesday, Hamann called the response from city leaders “outrageous” and “over the top.” She said she plans to meet with officials and residents in the coming weeks and hopes to resubmit the resolution within a month.

When asked how Oaklawn’s Mobile Crisis Team fits into her proposal, Hamann pointed to language calling on city leaders to engage all relevant community partners as conversations on the issue continue.

'My worst nightmare': Bystander recalls recording the death of Dante Kittrell at hands of South Bend police

City officials have said the police department is in talks with Oaklawn about how to include the Mobile Crisis Team on calls related to mental health and substance abuse. However, where the specific timing and nature of discussions stand is not clear.

John Horsley, Oaklawn's vice president of adult and addiction services, previously told The Tribune that Oaklawn began reaching out to police departments in late 2020 when it first received grant funding to start building the Mobile Crisis Team. South Bend police chief Scott Ruszkowski also has said talks between various police departments and county agencies have dated back at least two years. He added that he recently received a draft from the county's 911 center on "how they would receive calls."

Julie Tobey, director of the 911 center, declined to be interviewed for this story.

When asked at Wednesday's meeting how long it would take for the Mobile Crisis Team to be integrated into the 911 center's protocols, an Oaklawn representative did not give a timeline but said progress is being made and the unit is increasingly working with police on mental health calls.

"Those calls are coming. They are happening and it takes time for law enforcement to know what services we provide and how we respond and for us all to learn when it’s appropriate to call us or not," said Kelli Liechty, director of Oaklawn’s certified community behavioral center.

Oaklawn questions

Community members also heard from Oaklawn representatives Wednesday, though many had questions about how the center's crisis team operates.

Liechty said the crisis team's goal is to provide a response to individuals going through mental health emergencies without the need for police, though she said the unit has co-responded with law enforcement agencies, including South Bend police, within the last two weeks. She added Oaklawn currently does not have a memorandum of understanding with any governmental body and is currently in discussions with law enforcement agencies and the county’s 911 center to create a standardized protocol moving forward.

Liechty did not say when asked by residents if Oaklawn’s team was called during Kittrell’s standoff with police. Liechty also was unable to answer if she thought Kittrell would still be alive if the crisis team had been able to speak with him, though Darial Sterling, Oaklawn’s head of diversity, equity and inclusion, said the outcome may have been different if police had allowed Kittrell’s family to speak to him.

“If they were allowing parents or people that knew him to talk him down, he probably would be alive,” Sterling said.

Amid discussion about the police killing of Kittrell, Lietchy emphasized that Oaklawn’s crisis team would call law enforcement in situations involving weapons, saying their clinicians are not trained to handle an armed person experiencing a mental health episode.

Oaklawn’s team is currently only taking calls from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, though officials have said they hope to expand the crisis unit to around-the-clock coverage for both Elkhart and St. Joseph counties by next year.

According to Liechty, the biggest obstacle now facing the psychiatric center is hiring enough staff to keep pace with its expanding coverage.

Given that Oaklawn would call police in any incident involving a weapon, some groups are more supportive of the fire department housing the mobile unit. However, it is unclear if any clinician-led team would be the sole responding agency to a situation like Kittrell's in which there was a weapon.

Nevertheless, Jorden Giger, an organizer for Black Lives Matt in South Bend, feels response teams in the fire department will end up being more accessible to residents.

"When you look around in the community, you see firehouses. They're woven into the fabric of the neighborhoods. A lot of people may not know where Oaklawn is, but they can identify where a firehouse is," Giger said.

Solutions in Indianapolis

While talks continue to take place in South Bend, another city in Indiana has moved forward with clinician-led response teams.

In Indianapolis, mental health workers have been responding to some mental-health calls since 2017 in a partnership between the city’s police department and mental health providers called the Mobile Crisis Assistance Team.

The team is comprised of clinicians, paramedics and officers, and statistics show the unit makes arrests in around only 2% of its calls. However, for calls involving weapons, MCAT is not the first unit on the scene, according to Kimble Richardson, a mental health counselor at Community Health Network in Indianapolis. Richardson, who works closely with MCAT units, added mobile crisis teams are sometimes called once police secure a scene.

Responders with MCAT originally were self-dispatched or specifically requested, but earlier this year the team became connected to the city’s 911 center, allowing dispatchers to identify code words that would trigger a mental health-related response.

While the MCAT program has widespread support, the death of Herman Whitfield III at the hands of Indianapolis police in April spurred some activists — namely the Indianapolis branch of Faith in Indiana — to push for a fully clinician-led response to mental health emergencies.

Last week, Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett released a draft budget that included $2 million in funding for a 24-hour clinician-led emergency response team that will provide services by teams of behavior health clinicians and peer teams to respond to a mental health crisis.

Josh Riddick, a member of the Black Church Coalition with Faith in Indiana, said the full set of policies governing the new team haven’t been decided, though the program will be run out of the city’s Office of Public Health and Safety. Riddick also acknowledged the clinician-led team would call law enforcement in situations involving a weapon, but the funding represents a significant step forward for those prone to mental health crises.

“There’s going to be some fluidity and flexibility here,” Riddick said. “But the goal, and the recognition based off the existing systems we have, is that the majority of crisis calls are folks who are not a danger to others … most times they’re a person in need of help.”

Riddick said he’s kept abreast of the recent developments out of South Bend and emphasized the importance of having the area’s response team synced with the dispatch center because people are conditioned to call 911 in a crisis.

He also added that putting a mobile crisis team inside the structure of an agency not designed to handle it is not an approach he recommends.

“What I hear in the conversation around trying to have South Bend Fire Department hold this is that ‘we need to use the existing structures.’ And I don’t know that that always has to be the case,” Riddick said.

If you go

What: Community Action Group Meeting on Crisis Response Procedures

When: 6 to 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 23

Where: Brown Intermediate Gymnasium, 737 West Beale St.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: South Bend debates what mental health crisis units will look like