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When Redwood City’s sole crisis response clinician is off duty or unavailable, patrol officers handle mental health crisis calls.
The Redwood City Police Department does not track how often that happens, but it does track clinician Patricia Baker’s responses, including nearly 1,500 calls for service since 2022.
Council member Chris Sturken has asked the city to collect more data and consider hiring a second mental health crisis response clinician, a request that comes as the department prepares to evaluate the program’s scope, capacity and effectiveness, and to identify opportunities for expansion. The evaluation is expected to be completed by January 2027, with findings and recommendations presented the following month as part of the city’s midyear budget update.
Calls for more coverage
At the Redwood City Council’s June 8 meeting, Sturken asked the city to hire another crisis response clinician as the council considered its proposed fiscal year 2026-27 budget.
“I think the residents would want someone who has that kind of a license… to respond if they were experiencing a mental health crisis,” Sturken told the Pulse last month. “Not someone with a gun.”
In calling for another clinician, Sturken said mental health calls are “like almost one a day,” but that the clinician “doesn’t work 365 days a year.”
Baker’s hours are “flexible based on the needs of the department,” but she generally works Tuesday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., Redwood City Police Lt. Jeffrey Clements said. When Baker is off duty or unavailable, calls for service are handled by patrol officers.
The department does not track how often officers respond to mental health crises without Baker, such as through simultaneous calls, after-hours calls and delayed responses, Clements said. The city’s public-facing dashboard that tracks calls does not show how much demand falls outside Baker’s coverage.
What the data show — and don’t
The dashboard includes data from January 2022 to May 2026, and the most common type of calls are welfare checks, or requests for law enforcement to visit a residence to ensure someone is safe and well.
The second most frequent call type involves a 5150 hold, which allows a person to be detained for up to 72 hours for psychiatric evaluation if the person is determined to be a danger to themselves or to others, or is “gravely” disabled, according to the dashboard.
Clements said calls for service and mental health evaluations generally refer to the same event, although Baker sometimes receives referrals or messages outside the normal process of someone calling the police department and an incident being created.
The dashboard also contains demographic information about people associated with Baker’s calls, including age, race, housing status and residence. More than 80% were Redwood City residents. But because the dashboard reflects only cases involving Baker, the data do not provide a comprehensive picture of who is experiencing mental health crises in Redwood City.
What comes next
Redwood City Police Chief Kristina Bell said at the June meeting that the department is “still kind of in the early stages” of having Baker on the team full time, which has expanded her responsibilities beyond the pilot program.
“If we had another clinician, it wouldn’t free up more officers to do other things,” Bell said at the June meeting. “Sometimes her response doesn’t necessitate us, but that is very much a case-by-case basis for future expansion.”
Bell added that there have been “very low-level talks” about the department partnering with the county to have another clinician available, but said any such partnership remained a future conversation.
Clements told the Pulse that “a second clinician would allow for more coverage.”
According to the city’s fiscal year 2026-27 budget, the police department will complete an evaluation of the City’s crisis response clinician program early next year to identify opportunities to expand the program’s “scope, capacity and effectiveness.”
The evaluation will include input from partners and assess the feasibility of integrating a domestic violence co-response model, such as the CORA Co-Responder Program, according to the budget. Findings and recommendations will be presented as part of the city’s midyear budget update in February 2027.
Sturken told the Pulse that he remains interested in adding another mental health clinician, but said the city’s limited budget could stand in the way of that goal.
How the program began
Redwood City launched the Community Wellness and Crisis Response Team Pilot in late 2021, joining Daly City, San Mateo and South San Francisco in pairing mental health clinicians with law enforcement crisis calls. The program began amid a broader discussion about how police respond to people in possible mental health crises, including criticism of officers’ use of force during a Redwood City arrest shortly before the pilot launched.
The pilot’s clinicians worked through StarVista, a nonprofit that partnered with San Mateo County to provide behavioral health counseling.
While Baker worked through StarVista until the pilot program ended in June 2025, Redwood City hired her as a city employee, making the clinician a full-time city position.
What a clinician brings to a crisis response
According to the city’s classification of the position, Baker provides field-based crisis intervention, behavioral health assessments, de-escalation, and referrals; connects people with services; and co-responds with law enforcement on mental health crisis calls.
From 2020 to 2024, at least 90% of sworn personnel and 77% of dispatch personnel in the police department received crisis intervention training, according to the city’s strategic goals for fiscal year 2025-26.
At the June meeting, Sturken said “it’s great” that so many Redwood City police personnel have completed mental health crisis response training, but said that responding to mental health crises is not their primary job.
Police officers and licensed mental health professionals can play different but complementary roles during a crisis, said Laura Parmer-Lohan, CEO of the National Alliance on Mental Health of San Mateo County. NAMI trains San Mateo County deputies responding to mental health crises.
Parmer-Lohan said officers may focus more on “bring[ing] the temperature down,” while a licensed professional can have a more nuanced conversation with a person and help connect them with longer-term care.
The presence of a badge can be “very triggering” for people who may be experiencing a mental health crisis, she said.
Law enforcement still has a responsibility to keep the community safe, Parmer-Lohan said, and “if somebody is threatening somebody else, they have a duty to act in a way that hopefully will prevent that.”
The goal is for officers to “calm the situation down to the point where there’s enough time to bring in somebody like this clinician,” she added.
Parmer-Lohan pointed to a 2025 study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour that examined the Community Wellness and Crisis Response Team pilot in Redwood City, Daly City, San Mateo and South San Francisco. Researchers found the co-responder program reduced involuntary psychiatric detentions by 16.5% or an estimated 370 fewer detentions over two years.
A person experiencing a mental health crisis may not recognize that they are ill or in a crisis, a condition known as anosognosia, Parmer-Lohan said.
“That’s where, if you have somebody that understands the landscape of mental health conditions, and you know how to engage with somebody who is having a crisis, they can help navigate it,” Parmer-Lohan said.
When asked what would indicate whether Redwood City should hire another clinician, Parmer-Lohan said the city should look at its call volume and conduct a “risk analysis” to identify when demand is highest. She said she did not have enough data on Redwood City’s demand to take a position on whether another clinician is needed.
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