POULSBO – The Behavioral Health Outreach Program helps Kitsap County’s first responders divert people with mental illness away from the criminal justice system and toward local behavioral health services.

In 2015, Poulsbo became the birthplace of a pilot program which sought to replicate the success of programs like Seattle’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD).

Now entering its third year, Kitsap County’s Behavioral Health Outreach Program is showing residents and officers that there is a more compassionate way to help those living with mental illness and co-occurring substance abuse.

The program, which has served some 450 individuals in the area, is the brainchild of Poulsbo Mayor Becky Erickson and Kim Hendrickson, founder of the Bainbridge Island group Islanders for Collaborative Policing.

According to Erickson, the idea came up after the pair attended a law and justice meeting.

“She said, ‘What we need to do is we need to keep these people out of the criminal justice system and we need to get them help,’ ” Erickson recalled. “We got together and she and I wrote a grant. She’s the wordsmith, I’m the numbers person.”

Hendrickson said, “The moment we had a revenue source in this county to try new programs to help people that have mental health issues and chemical dependency issues, that became an invitation to political officials and nonprofits to think about what else can we do to fill gaps in the system.”

Hendrickson made it clear that the role of the outreach program was not to provide mental health treatment, but rather to direct low-level, non-violent offenders to available resources for treating mental illness and co-occurring chemical dependency.

“We’re not treatment providers,” she said. “We can’t control the quality of somebody’s therapy or whether they’re being prescribed the correct medicines, all we can do is try to figure out what services somebody needs and encourage them to go use them. We’re not a treatment program.”

Over the last 30 years, Poulsbo Chief of Police Dan Schoonmaker has witnessed firsthand the changes in the frequency and the manner with which officers are responding to service calls involving individuals with mental illness.

“If there’s one thing that’s changed in my career, [it’s] our response to calls involving people suffering from mental illness. To me, has probably been the most dramatic change,” Schoonmaker said. “Of course, police officers traditionally have not been trained in how to deal with that. We’re guys who go to try and fix problems in 15 minutes.”

With the passing of a law in 2015 requiring mandatory Crisis Intervention Training for all peace officers in Washington state, Schoonmaker said officers are becoming better equipped to answer service calls involving individuals with mental illness.

“Now adding this component of getting a behavioral health specialist out there who is an expert in connecting people with resources and getting them into programs will help them,” Schoonmaker added. “The jails aren’t the right place for [these] people.”

Read the full story on the Behavioral Health Outreach Program in the Nov. 17 edition of the North Kitsap Herald.

Nick Twietmeyer is a reporter with The North Kitsap Herald and Kitsap News Group. He can be reached at ntwietmeyer@soundpublishing.com.