The one thing the original MPR link didn't provide......
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/loc ... 4b443b79df
24/7 mobile mental health crisis teams to launch in Minneapolis next month
MINNEAPOLIS — At Fair State Brewing Cooperative in Northeast Minneapolis, staff members don't often call 911 in the taproom.
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"There's someone having some kind of mental health emergency, or needs some kind of support that our taproom staff just aren't in a position to provide," Schmitz said. "They don't need a police response. They just need to be connected to services."
With that in mind, Fair State Brewing and nearly 100 other businesses sent a letter to the city in the months after George Floyd's murder last year, calling "for the formation of mobile mental health emergency response teams dispatched through 911 and available 24/7/365 for immediate in-person unarmed response."
"We felt there was a real gap," Schmitz said, "in what the city was providing."
This month, the city council answered that call by approving at least $6 million over two years for 24/7 Mobile Behavioral Health Crisis Response Teams, to be operated by Richfield-based Canopy Mental Health and Consulting. The city selected Canopy over three other candidates who had responded to the proposal for mobile crisis teams.
That link is from July.
This one is more recent......
https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis ... 600104644/
Police-free response created conflict
Mpls. and EMS officials disagreed on new mental health service.
Months later, in July, the city awarded Canopy Mental Health & Consulting a two-year, $6 million contract to provide the professionals who would respond to mental or behavioral health-related emergencies 24 hours a day. The Hennepin County Association of Paramedics and EMTs — the union that represents Hennepin County's paramedics, emergency medical technicians and emergency medical dispatchers — then accused city officials of pursuing the new program with little or no input from the union's health care first responders.
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By February, Smith and Simpson moved from e-mails to a conference call with other members from their respective teams, including Hennepin EMS Chief Martin Scheerer and Assistant Chief Thomas Mayfield. From that call, an important question emerged, according to an e-mail sent afterward: "What does Hennepin EMS need to become a partner in this pilot program?"
Though the city's co-responder initiative with Hennepin County's Community Outreach for Psychiatric Emergencies program, or COPE, has been inactive since fall 2020, e-mails make clear that city officials were interested in maintaining a partnership with the county by having EMS respond to calls along with the new mental health provider. EMS was already responding to such calls, referred to by dispatchers as "emotionally disturbed persons" (EDP) calls, alongside Minneapolis Police Department officers, but OPI wanted to know whether the removal of police would prove a problem for EMS.
It did.
If officers weren't going to be present, Simpson asked OPI to clarify which types of calls EMS staff would be requested on once the new program launched.
"I think we could consider starting to establish some of these criteria to break up the large EDP category into those situations in which police need to respond, and those in which they don't," the director of city strategic management, Andrea Larson, wrote to EMS leaders in February. "For the latter, we would need to hear from you when you would be comfortable responding without police."
The EMS union have some questions.
I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat. [Will Rogers]