The Sophie Beaumont building in downtown Green Bay is home the Brown County Department of Health and Human Services. (WTAQ/Casey Nelson)
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – The Brown County 2021 budget proposal is calling for the addition of a second mental health clinician.
The clinician would help law enforcement officials with calls involving mental health crises.
“We get more and more mental health calls all the time,” GBPD behavior health officer Luke Van Donsel said.
The Green Bay Police feel a second mental health clinician to assist officers is necessary.
“With the addition of a second social worker, we are planning on adding two police officers if we can get that through the budget so we’ll have a total of four officers and two social workers. That’ll allow us to double the coverage in the city,” Green Bay Police Chief Andrew Smith said.
The mental health clinician has access to a database of resources that can assist people in getting faster treatment.
This access to resources can save officers time and taxpayers money.
“Our officers sometimes were spending 12, 14, 16 hours and that’s two officers because we can’t just leave a person in that condition with one officer, we decide two officers,” Chief Smith said.
“We know that if they are staying inside of our community treatment center, that’s roughly $1000 a day, if they’re staying inside of our jail it’s roughly $45 a day and so if we can bypass those expenses obviously that’s a savings,” Brown County Executive Troy Streckenbach said.
Those costs can be avoided if officers can get the person help before the crisis occurs.
“I think it saves money all the way around and it provides a better service and that’s really what we’re trying to do,” Chief Smith said.
Streckenbach says the addition would save taxpayers about $33,000 annually.
Streckenbach says their hope is to make a better community.
“That goal of course is an individual receives the resources and lands safely. Law enforcement gets back to where we want them as taxpayers, as a community. We want them on the streets. We want them in our neighborhoods. We want to make sure that our neighborhoods are safe and our streets are safe,” Streckenbach said.
Streckenbach also detailed plans for a one-stop crisis center coming to the area.
The crisis center is projected to open in March 2021.
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