Out of nearly three dozen police shootings in the county from 2018 through June 2022, 40 percent involved someone with mental health issues, a review by The San Diego Union-Tribune found.
Every year, police officers and sheriff’s deputies respond to tens of thousands of calls about people in behavioral health crises, and the county has been working for decades to disentangle law enforcement from those kinds of emergencies. Shootings by law enforcement inspired county and mental health leaders to create the Psychiatric Emergency Response Teams in 1996. The program, often referred to as PERT, pairs licensed mental health clinicians with law enforcement officers.About 14 percent of the 451 people shot by police or sheriff’s deputies in the county from 1993 through 2017 had documented mental health issues, according to a report from the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office.