The county jail has become the mental hospital, and officers are spread thin

PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY — Public safety officials spread are thin dealing with people with mental health issues.

On average, a Prince William County police officer, when called, spends about 10 and a half hours working with a person with mental issues. That’s more time than what’s available in a regular eight-hour shift.

The police department answered more than 3,700 calls for help involving people with mental illness between January 2016 and November 2017. Averaging about 142 mental illness calls per month, officers spent more than 19,000 hours working with individuals with mental issues.

A crisis assessment center near Manassas is a place where officers can take non-criminal cases, where individuals can meet with a staff therapist every day between noon and midnight. It’s here, instead of jail, where officers have the option of taking those suffering mental illness.

The center came after the mass shooting at Virginia Tech on April 20, 2017. That’s when officials decided to pay more attention to the mental illness problem in the state.

Prince William County Police Major Dawn Harman:

“From the Virginia Tech shooting, a couple of things happened. Number one, police departments and law enforcement agencies in the commonwealth began active violence training, as a routine. And the second thing that happened out of that was the initiation of crisis intervention team training. For the first time in law enforcement, we decided that, whereas we’re kind of a jack of all trades master of none, we thought it might be better, and we could do better, in serving persons with mental illness by training individual officers to look for signs of mental illness versus drug addiction.”

The crisis center at the county’s Sudley North Government Center is staffed by one therapist, and a police officer working an “off-duty detail,” or overtime, to protect the therapist. When a police officer brings in someone to the crisis center, they transfer him to the officer at the center, and the first officer is free to back on duty.

Having the center is a helpful and popular intervention means, and that is its weakness.

“They can only see one person at a time. So, if somebody from Manassas City beats us there, or if somebody from Manassas Park beats us there, or if somebody walks in off the street and needs assistance, then that officer goes back to the eight hours, sitting with the person, waiting for another therapist to be called from home, to then evaluate this person,” said Harman.

Harman joined Colonel Peter Meletis, who oversees the Prince William County Adult Detention Center, and Prince William County Sheriff Glen Hill, who all asked the Board of Supervisors to create a one-stop shop for their staff that would help people in the criminal justice system that suffer mental illness. The idea is to foster better communication between local law enforcement agencies, county social services departments, and add more staff at the jail to work with mental inmates, provide more worker training, and more resources to help inmates find housing and employment when they’re released from jail.

Melitis says more violent, mental offenders wind up in jail to stay.

“The jails across the united states continue to be the mental hospitals for people who continue to commit crimes, for the mentally ill, mainly the serious crimes, they stay, they don’t get a chance to get out,” said Meletis.

A new addition that will be added to an expanding adult detention center in Manassas, called phase two, will include 20 beds for the violently mentally ill, those who are considered to be a danger to themselves or others, all waiting to be taken to a mental hospital The completed Phase I expansion of the jail already has 50 beds that were converted to serve those with mental illness, said Meletis. Initially, those beds weren’t supposed to go to mental illness inmates. 

If a person commits a crime, for instance, if they pull out a knife and stab someone during a mental breakdown, they’re not eligible to go directly to the crisis assessment center. Officers must first deal with the crime committed before that person is eligible for counseling or treatment.

Depending upon the threat, and seriousness of the offense, they can go to jail, where staffers perform a mental evaluation. A judge can later recommend treatment.

Less violent offenders can be taken to a police station and kept in a conference room to wait for a therapist to arrive to talk to them.

Sometimes the person is in handcuffs, other times not. An officer, however, never leaves their sight.

“Even with the crisis assessment center, that’s a step in the right direction. We could serve a lot more people, in a more expeditious fashion, if we had more of those. But right now, its only if it happens between noon and midnight, and only if you’re in the Manassas area.” said Harman. “Because it’s not efficient for one of our officers in Dumfries to drive all the way to Manassas somebody’s already there in the queue.”

The Prince William County Police Department has not requested a specific dollar amount from county officials to fund these needs. The presentation before the Board of Supervisors was so simply “raise awareness” of this issue facing the community, Harman told Potomac Local.

Prince William County officials are working on the county’s 2019 budget to be approved in April and will take affect July 1.