Borderline shooting sparks new legislation




The call came in like so many others: Ventura County sheriff’s deputies requesting a mental health check on a subject at his home. A fight between an ex-Marine and his mother over money. Screaming. Shouting. Holes punched in walls.

Little is known about the brief April 2018 meeting between Ian David Long and members of a Ventura County mobile crisis-response team, a group of mental health specialists whose job it is to determine whether a person is a danger to themselves or others. Privacy laws allow the county to keep those details from public view.

What is known is the outcome: No action in regard to taking Long’s gun.

Long, who seven months later would walk into Borderline Bar and Grill and kill 12 people, was not arrested as a result of the call and was not held for further psychiatric care, the sheriff’s department has said. No attempt was made to remove the Glock handgun he’d later use in the attack.

“(The crisis team) met with him, talked to him and cleared him, and didn’t feel he was qualified to be taken under 51-50, and he was left at that scene,” thensheriff Geoff Dean said Nov. 8.

The 51-50 state penal code designation is for someone who needs to be involuntarily committed for psychiatric evaluation.

The encounter—and how it might have prevented the November shooting if the law was different—is at the center of a new bill introduced last month by Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin (D-Camarillo). Assembly Bill 12 is intended to make it easier for law enforcement to utilize gun-violence restraining orders. The orders, created following the mass shooting at Isla Vista in Santa Barbara in 2014, allow family members or police to petition a judge to get a court order that temporarily prohibits someone from having a gun.

County mobile crisis-response teams are a part of the adult mental health services division of the Ventura County Behavioral Health department.

More than half—54 percent— of all the division’s 25,000 calls last fiscal year were crisis calls. Many callers are simply looking for information and resources; other issues are resolved right over the phone, said John Schipper, the adult services division chief.

“Sometimes it’s just a matter of ‘You need to call the police’” he said.

About three-quarters of the crisis calls result in a field visit, Schipper said, usually to a hospital emergency room and sometimes to a person’s home; such was the case with Long.

Speaking in general terms, Schipper said crisis teams, made up of at least two people for safety purposes, will first determine if it’s safe to approach the scene and then will establish communication.

“The whole time they’re talking with the person, they’re doing an observation: Are they disheveled? What is their mood? At some point they’ll ask, ‘How would you describe your mood?’ Does the person seem to have good judgment? Do they understand why someone might call?”

Even if a person appears to have mental health issues, that alone is not enough to hold them, Schipper said. The law requires that they meet one of the criteria regarding the potential to cause harm. For fiscal year 2017-18, county mental health teams ordered 1,097 involuntary holds and helped another 290 people enter a psychiatric hospital voluntarily.

“Not only are you taking someone into custody, they may end up in a hospital for at least three days,” the division chief said.

That’s not to say the team is averse to doing so when it’s needed, he said.

“Civil liberties are something we take very seriously, but public safety is also something we take very, very seriously,” Schipper said. “The hospital is something that prevents dangerous, bad things from happening, but it’s a last resort.”