Police grant may keep mentally ill out of jail

A grant awarded to the Colorado Springs Police Department recently will help start a pilot program intended to get the mentally ill treatment instead of time in jail.

Last week, the department received $86,204 from the Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant through the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice. The money will be used to fund the Case Management Pilot Project, a multi-agency effort composed of law enforcement and health care and mental health groups.

Sharon Raggio, head of Pikes Peak Mental Health, said the project will offer people treatment “with the goal of getting that person some services and ideally not coming into the presence of law enforcement again.”

“We want to give law enforcement the tools to work with people who come to their attention and who have a behavioral issue,” she said.

The pilot project will target adults with moderate to severe mental illness, said Molly Miles, the Police Department’s supervisor of grants and research. Officers can contact case managers 24 hours a day to coordinate services and treatment. The treatment is voluntary, Miles said, and officers will make an arrest if necessary.

“But often times, when we’re dispatched to a scene, it may not escalate to a point where we’d have to make an arrest,” she said.

According to the grant application, approximately 10 percent of the 24,526 inmates housed in the El Paso County jail from October 2005 to September 2006 were placed on mental health alerts, meaning they had the most serious and/or threatening symptoms of mental illness. Also, more than 50 percent of mentally ill inmates in 2005 had been incarcerated five times or more.