Sacramento Mental Health Board urges county to improve handling of crisis calls
Sacramento County’s Mental Health Board, which is composed of local health professionals, are calling on the Board of Supervisors to improve the handling of mental health calls in the region.
The letter and recommendations were submitted to the supervisors’ record Tuesday afternoon. Originally addressed to the board on March 11, the group of mental health professionals urged the Board of Supervisors to “take immediate action” on resource education and increased staffing, according to the recommendation letter.
In February, Sacramento County Sheriff announced its no longer responding to 911 non-criminal mental health calls. Instead, these calls will be redirected to the county’s 988 mental health crisis line, Sheriff Jim Cooper said in a news conference that month.
This change was made after a July 29 federal court ruling that set the precedent that law enforcement is not immune from excessive force claims when responding to mental health calls, according to past Sacramento Bee reporting. During February’s news conference, Cooper said he didn’t want to put deputies at risk.
The Sacramento County Mental Health Board, wrote in a public letter addressed the supervisors that there is an “urgent need” to improve crisis response after Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office changed its policy on non-criminal mental health calls.
“By February to March, when we were writing that letter, everyone was scrambling to try and figure out what to do,” said Patricia Wentzel, the mental health board secretary.
She wrote that there needs to be increased awareness of the 988 crisis line and how to access county resources. More funding is also needed for clinicians and peer support specialists. Additionally, Corrinne McIntosh Sako, the chair of the board, urged the county supervisors to support the region’s behavioral health mobile crisis response team.
“... It is imperative that we build out a behavioral health mobile crisis response program that is accessible and sustainable in order to better protect those experiencing behavioral health crises and those responding to their calls for help,” Sako wrote.
With the systemwide change to non-criminal health calls, Wentzel said the new policy has “catalyzed” the county to work together and become more active with 988.
“Sacramento County’s Department of Health Services appreciates the CWRT Advisory Committee’s recommendation,” Sacramento County’s Director of Health Services Tim Lutz wrote. ”The Department has already implemented a number of the identified recommendations and on others, will continue to evaluate whether they are necessary and warranted. We appreciate the advisory committee for their ongoing engagement and thoughtfulness.”
However, Wentzel said the change of plans have left people “without services.” For example, within the first six days of the policy’s change in January, the Sheriff’s Office got 320 mental health calls and left 18 unanswered, past Bee reporting states.
Despite the Wellness Response Team, being a full-time service, she said there is yet to be a “a concerted effort” to make residents aware of its existence and what it offers.
“The people in charge of overseeing something like that had just too many balls to juggle, and it wasn’t happening,” Wentzel said. “Now we have this crisis and we need to act on it.”
What is the board recommending?
The letter lists six specific recommendations for the Board of Supervisors, which include:
▪ Directing the Deputy County Executive for Public Safety and Justice to make sure all public safety agencies have information about 988 and CWRT’s services.
▪ Tasking the Behavioral Health Services to create an outreach plan about 988 and the CWRT program. Monthly updates from this plan will also have a community engagement campaign, a multilingual outreach plan, and more funds toward diverse engagement strategies.
▪ Adding an officer and Behavioral Health Services clinicians to the Co-Responder Crisis Intervention Teams. This recommendation also includes that these teams are available to respond to calls with Emergency Medical Services and Metro Fire.
▪ Advising Behavioral Health Services on establishing a Memorandum of Understanding with law enforcement agencies in Sacramento County to establish a bilateral referral process with 911 and 988.
▪ Increasing compensation to CWRT staff.
▪ Advising Behavioral Health Services to allocate funding to a health program manager position, which directly oversees CWRT on improving coordination and the program itself.
This year, the Community Wellness Response Team has received quadruple the calls compared to 2024, getting around 154 referrals, Wentzel said. Last year, the team only received 60. She added that Sacramento’s local 988 line receives 1,000 to 1,200 calls a month.
While referrals have seen an uptick and staffing has been overwhelmed, there is still a disconnect between Sacramento County residents in accessing services.
“We would like to see the staffing for the community wellness response team at (Behavioral Health Services) beefed up and increased,” Wentzel said. “... We’ve been full-time for quite some time, and yet there hasn’t been a concerted effort to make the community aware of the existence of the program and how to access it.”
This story was originally published May 15, 2025 at 3:08 PM.
