The Daily Item reports that a Pennsylvania state grant will fund a mental health position at the Buffalo Valley Regional Police Department. The goal of the $277,000 reinvestment fund is to avoid sending a person experiencing a mental health emergency to a county jail. This is especially significant given the number of encounters that occur between police officers and people suffering from a mental illness, as detailed in cited CPE report:
An estimated 7 to 10 percent of all police encounters involve a person suffering from mental illness, according to Redesigning Public Safety: Mental Health Emergency Response, a report released last year by the Center for Policing Equity. Most of the encounters do not involve violence and some don’t involve a crime, according to the report.
Read the article on Yahoo! News.