When a 2-year-old boy was accidentally shot in central Stockton earlier this month, Stockton Police Department officers weren’t the only people on the scene. Workers with the Mobile Community Response Team (MCRT), an alternative to law enforcement for mental and behavioral health calls, arrived to help the boy’s family connect to resources and begin to process what had happened.
Adriana Valadez, a supervisor with MCRT, said they helped the family stay up in Sacramento for a week while the boy had surgery at the University of California, Davis.
“We’ve been able to work with this family as they transition,” said Torrie Piasecki, a licensed clinical social worker and a behavioral health supervisor for the team. “It was an extended family who not only was going through a tragedy of what just happened and was processing it, but they had historical trauma.”
MCRT was launched in November 2022 as a three-year pilot program between the city of Stockton and Community Medical Centers (CMC) to respond to mental and behavioral health crises instead of police. The team grew out of CMC’s CareLink Community Response program, which has been providing behavioral health and medical services to homeless people since 2001.
Mental health episodes may have contributed to several fatal encounters with police in the past few years. A grandmother fatally shot by Stockton police during a car chase was apparently having a mental health crisis, and a veteran shot and killed by officers in January 2023 had post-traumatic stress disorder.
MCRT, funded with $5.8 million of federal pandemic money, responds to calls from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week. The service is free, although its workers collect insurance information to determine which clinics, treatment centers and other medical resources are most easily accessible.
“I think there’s still some stigma around police and having to call police,” said Vanessa Castle, a social worker with MCRT. “It’s nice to be able to bridge that gap and give them another resource that maybe is a little bit more comfortable.”
Jamie Guerrero, a social work intern with the team, described an incident where an elderly woman had barricaded herself in a room after chasing her friend with a knife. The police arrived first and called MCRT.
“We came in with more of an empathetic style. I was actually able to talk to her, get her out of the room,” Guerrero said. “It probably took some of the stress off the officer, and he probably learned some techniques from watching what we were doing.”
The police department sometimes directs people to the program’s hotline, accounting for around 22% of calls last summer, according to data presented at a Stockton City Council meeting.
But referrals from police are also recently down. From February to April, Stockton Police Department officers used MCRT only 52 times, out of more than 1,800 total calls served.
Other times — as was in the case of the 2-year-old boy — MCRT gets referrals from Stockton’s Office of Violence Prevention, which focuses on gun and gang violence. Community or family members generally make up at least a third of their calls, according to data presented at City Council meetings.
In May and June, nearly 80% of MCRT’s calls were welfare checks, according to data CMC staff recently presented at a national conference. Another 8.3% were classified as emotional disturbances.
And while the program has four vans that can respond to calls out of a small office near the railroad tracks on West Lane, much of its work is actually done over the phone. Of nearly 200 initial cases in July, MCRT fielded 154 of them through phone calls.
MCRT also follows up after two days, one week, and one month, although those efforts aren’t always successful.
On a recent wellness check for an elderly woman living in a mobile home park, MCRT workers knocked on the back door to no response. When they went around to the front, they found one of their business cards still lodged in the door, left there during their last visit.
When they can connect to people, however, team members have reached for a variety of solutions, from connecting them to medical services in CMC’s network to even obtaining bus passes, as Lopez described with one young teen.
“[Sometimes] their immediate need is not necessarily a behavioral health need,” Castle said. “Maybe their immediate need is getting food, or they are trying to find a place to stay for tonight.”
MCRT is still a pilot program and will hit its two-year anniversary in November, but its members hope that they’ve established a growing presence.
“I think we’re definitely putting ourselves out there,” Piasecki said. “Even if we can’t help someone, people will call us and we’ll direct them to where they need to go.”