Santa Clara County activates dedicated hotline for non-police crisis response

SAN JOSE – Heading into the holiday season, which experts and authorities say has long coincided with an uptick in stress, anxiety and depression, Santa Clara County has streamlined access to a program that responds to instances of serious emotional distress without police intervention.

About a year after it was initially proposed, the county has established a direct phone line to its Trusted Response Urgent Support Team, or TRUST. By contacting 408-596-7290, callers will be relayed straight to the program, which provides over-the-phone counseling support, and has four community-staffed field teams to help South Bay residents in person.

People experiencing urgent mental health emergencies that don’t entail imminent violence or safety threats can still call 988, the Crisis and Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which triages calls and determines what kind of response is needed, including a referral to TRUST.

Community advocates who helped create the program pushed for a direct line to accommodate people and families who expressly want no police response, for fear that the presence of a uniformed police officer, and the corresponding potential for deadly force, risks escalating an already fragile situation.

County Supervisor Otto Lee championed the direct line proposal with the Board of Supervisors last year.

“The direct line is a guarantee to the public who might worry, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t call, because if I call, worse things can happen,'” Lee said in an interview. “We make it very clear it’s a number for a behavioral health crisis, and it absolutely will not involve law enforcement.”

He added, “This is just in time, during the holidays, when the stress level and financial stress is higher.”

Supporters of direct access say it also lessens the potential for the triage system to refer people to a different agency when they already know they want the TRUST program. They also cited anecdotes in which a police officer was dispatched to people who explicitly said they did not want a law enforcement response.

“You can’t afford to waste crucial time being routed to the wrong agency. Who knows what could happen in that critical time?” said Regina Cardenas, an organizer with the civil rights group Silicon Valley De-Bug, which was an architect of the program. “Someone calls TRUST because they don’t want a cop — and if a cop shows up, it will prevent them from calling for help again.”

In the coming weeks, the county is releasing outreach literature to further publicize the new hotline. 

“This needs to be known far and wide across the county. Many people don’t know about the service,” said Sandra Asher, a community organizer with Showing Up for Racial Justice Santa Clara County. “When you’re in a mental health crisis, minutes matter … Now you can go directly to the only non-police crisis response we have available in the county.”

When they were making a big public push for the new phone line, advocates cited a 2023 news investigation by the Bay Area News Group, KQED and the California Reporting Project that examined a decade of use-of-force records from San Jose police, and concluded that people who are mentally impaired — either by psychiatric illness or intoxication — accounted for nearly three-quarters of serious use of force incidents and 80 percent of police killings. The investigation also highlighted broad trends of police encountering people exhibiting erratic behavior, without threats of violence, ending up experiencing serious force and injury.

The program has limits on the severity of calls it can address; psychiatric emergencies involving serious threats or violence still require a police response for safety reasons. Calls eligible for an in-person response can be met by one of four teams covering quadrants of the county: San Jose, Gilroy, the West Valley and North County. 

Those teams consist of a behavioral health professional, a medic and a community member experienced with mental health crises to provide peer peer support. The county contracts with Momentum for Health, Pacific Clinics and HomeFirst Services to fill out the teams.

A fifth team is in the works after leaders in San Jose, which accounts for half of the county’s population of 1.9 million residents, approved funding toward another city-dedicated team earlier this year.

The county Behavioral Health Services department reported that between March 1 and Aug. 31 of this year, TRUST received 2,157 calls and referrals, making it the most utilized crisis response in the county by more than 1,000 calls over the next most-used program. 

That marks a notable rise: A year ago, TRUST got the second-most calls in the county. Over half of the calls that are directed to TRUST result in field visits.

Going forward, De-Bug and other community advocates want TRUST to expand its reach to emergencies that don’t have the safety concerns that necessitate police but are more involved than what the teams currently handle. Occupying that middle ground, they say, will allow community- and peer-based intervention to cool off troubling situations before they escalate.

“Having this direct line could get people to seek help sooner, rather than wait for things to reach a crisis level,” Cardenas said. “The focus right now is getting TRUST out in the community. Getting them to rely on it more is only going to help us grow the program and see more cases on a wider level.”