Activists in San Jose want more money for crisis teams outside the police

San Jose authorities plan to allocate additional funding for mental health services in the upcoming budget after advocates called for more non-police emergency response.

The Trusted Response Urgent Support Team (TRUST) program, run by Santa Clara County, is receiving about $450,000 from San Jose to fund another mobile crisis response team for a year. But advocates of non-police emergency response said the program needs more money to enable 24/7 services that are not available.

Without continued funding and a 24/7 mobile response team to respond to mental health crises, the program cannot reach its full potential, advocates say.

“One of the reasons we moved this forward is because San Jose zip codes disproportionately generate more calls to TRUST and more deployments than other regions of the county,” Jen Myrrh, senior coordinator of Showing Up For Racial Justice at Sacred Heart, told San Jose Spotlight. “Funding an additional TRUST field team for San Jose was one of the community-driven recommendations from Reimagining Community Safety in 2022.”

TRUST is the only response team that works with trained psychologists, a doctor and a peer support member – someone with first-hand experience. The county’s other mobile response teams include police officers. TRUST teams are dispatched via the 988 crisis hotline.

At a San Jose City Council meeting earlier this month, Council Member Peter Ortiz said the San Jose Police Department is at its lowest staffing level and the city relies on teams like San Jose Beautify to handle situations that could put them at risk.

“A San Jose TRUST team will fill gaps in service and provide relief to our hard-working San Jose Police Department and city officers and employees who are often sent into situations they have no business being in,” Ortiz said.

TRUST operates four outreach teams in Santa Clara County: three from Campbell-based Pacific Clinics, which cover San Jose, West Valley and South counties, and one from Momentum for Health, which operates a field team in North County.

David Mineta, CEO and president of Momentum for Health, said advocates have been pushing for an alternative police crisis response since President Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s.

“It’s a team of three people who go out and respond the way I would want as a family member. With empathy,” he told San José Spotlight. “On the teams there is someone with experience as a colleague who knows what it’s like to have been there themselves, someone who can provide first aid and respond to medical problems.”

Santa Clara County launched TRUST in November 2022. It received $7 million in funding through the Mental Health Services Act and a $2 million grant from the California Department of Health Care Services.

County officials plan to allocate $10.2 million to the program in the coming fiscal year, a spokesman for Supervisor Joe Simitian’s office told San José Spotlight.

“What is reflected in our budget, and I think is reflected in San José’s actions, is a growing realization that we need to be more thoughtful about what kind of response is appropriate in a moment of crisis,” Simitian told San José Spotlight. “And that can and often should be a mental health response rather than a law enforcement response.”

Laurie Valdez, organizer of Silicon Valley De-Bug, said her partner Antonio Guzman-Lopez was killed by San Jose State University police during a mental health crisis before developing the TRUST program. The new round of funding from San Jose is welcome news, Valdez said, but it needs to be consistent.

“A lot of people in the community say, ‘I’m never going to call the police for help.’ Everyone is scared because they’re either going to die or go to jail – and that shouldn’t happen,” she told San José Spotlight. “You should be able to call for help and get the help and resources you need.”

Their commitment, along with that of other families who have lost loved ones to the police, has contributed to the nationwide development of TRUST, said De-Bug co-founder Raj Jayadev.

“After the attention on police brutality grew in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and there was a reckoning here in San José about the racist background of police brutality, the authorities were receptive to the idea of ​​alternatives to the police and so we developed a kind of vision of what that might look like,” he told San José Spotlight.