Lost Hills introduces new mental evaluation team

But too late for Mitrice



ON CALL—Dep. Lisa Jansen and clinician Daniel Moody comprise the Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station Mental Evaluation Team. The pair will assist deputies when a suspect shows signs of mental impairment. Courtesy of LASD

ON CALL—Dep. Lisa Jansen and clinician Daniel Moody comprise the Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station Mental Evaluation Team. The pair will assist deputies when a suspect shows signs of mental impairment. Courtesy of LASD

Not only does the Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station have a new captain in the house, but it recently added a mental health evaluation team to the station roster.

The two-person team is comprised of a deputy sheriff and a clinician from the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.

Capt. Matthew Vander Horck said the Mental Evaluation Team, or MET, responds to calls about people in the community who might be mentally ill—regardless of whether or not they’ve committed a crime. Upon arrival, team members assess the situation and determine if the person is a threat to themselves or others.

“If (they are a danger) they’ll take him to a hospital. If not, and he just needs help, they’ll attend to that need as well,” said Vander Horck, recently appointed as Lost Hills captain.

The team clinician is either a registered nurse, a psychologist or a counselor.

The local MET squad is unique in that it’s assigned only to the Lost Hills station, Vander Horck said. Other sheriff’s stations must rely on roaming teams that respond to calls from throughout the department’s service area.

In the past, when Lost Hills deputies needed help from MET team members, the response time could take as much as 30 minutes. Now that the station has its own crew, the deployment will be faster.

“We’re remote (and) we don’t have an abundance of mentally ill people here,” Vander Horck said. “I think because of (our) location and because the nearest station they’d be coming from is so far away, it makes sense to have a team here.”

The almost 30 L.A. County MET teams are on call 24/7. At Lost Hills, the men and women will work 10-hour shifts Wednesday through Saturday. The shifts will start in the afternoon and extend into the evening.

Vander Horck said the schedule was determined by studying the station’s call logs, noting when calls for service were at their peak, and making sure the team was on duty during those times.

The MET program was established in the early 2000s and expanded in 2015 to help deputies handle interactions with people undergoing a mental health crisis.

It’s believed such a team could have better handled the unstable Mitrice Richardson when she acted erratically at a Malibu restaurant in 2009, got arrested, and was released by the sheriff later in the night. On her own and on foot, she disappeared into the mountains and perished.

A deputy who responded to the incident acknowledged Richardson’s mental instability.