The Toledo City Council Public Safety and Criminal Justice Reform Committee met on June 4, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. to receive updates on a new co-responder behavioral health program, the long-planned multi-district community police substation, and recent incidents involving Toledo Police Department (TPD) officers. The meeting included presentations from the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC) and TPD leadership, followed by extensive public testimony.
Five present also present councilwoman Dr. Jones. Thank you. We'll first call our criminal justice coordinating council crisis response team update. Thank you for being here. Can you hear me? Okay. My name is Andy Minton. Hi everybody. And I'm Lieutenant Kelly Russell with the crisis intervention team coordinator for the police department. And I am the Behavioral Health Criminal Justice Coordinator at the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. And we are here today to present on our Toledo co-responder program. I apologize to everyone in attendance. I didn't have slides done in time that we could put them on the big screen, but all of you should be able to follow along with the packet in front of you. But we're gonna go pretty surface level. So you should all be able to follow along even though you can't see the slides. So the co-responder has really been developed as a result of community need. So in 2022, Toledo Police Department reported 611 incidents evolving 632 individuals that require the use of force from officers. Also beginning in 2022, Toledo Police Department began collecting data to track of an officer perceived an individual was experiencing suspected mental health issues. So of these 611 incidents evolving 632 individuals that required the use of force from officers, 130 or 21% were suspected to have mental health issues. So this means that more than one of five cases that require the use of force from officers involved an individual with suspected mental health issues. The National Alliance of Mental Illness, what we know as NAMI, has found that people with mental illnesses are over 10 times as likely to experience use of forced interactions with law enforcement than those without mental illness across the country. So this is a mean not just in our community but across the country. So there was a kind of a new opportunity for Lucas County in 2024. In 2024, the Mental Health and Recovery Services Board opened the door for a co-responder unit uh in Lucas County through its levy promises. In their levy endorsement requests to the Toledo Chamber of Commerce, the MHRSB stated that the MHRSB proposed to use a portion of its new levy funds to address behavioral health treatment and support service needs of inmates at the Lucas County Correction Center. That's the jail that's just around the street, and to support the development of a law enforcement behavioral health co-responder program. So with this promise, we finally had the momentum we needed to move forward with a co-responder program. So that's kind of where the CJCC where I work got involved through the Connect and Protect grant, which is on the next slide. So after reviewing the MHRSB's request, I reached out to the executive director of the MHRSB and asked, you know, where is this project now? Who have you worked with? Where is it at? How can the CJCC get involved in order to actually establish a co-responder program? This was one of my long-term goals as the BHCJ coordinator because we know that law enforcement is uh the resource in our community that is used to respond to crisis situations, but we also know that law enforcement is responding to situations that they are not trained to respond to. It's better to have a mental health clinician respond to an incident that revolt that involves mental health issues. Um I had identified the Connect and Protect grant opportunity through the Bureau of Justice Assistance as a funding source that we could utilize to actually establish a co-responder unit. So after receiving permission from the mental health board, I reached out to TPD through Kelly and the Zeph Center through Courtney Borough, and we really got to work saying that this was something we actually wanted to establish. So then I put together the grant application and we were eventually awarded funding in October of 2024. So that's kind of how we got here. But I've been saying co-responder unit a lot, and I'm not sure if everyone actually knows what that means. So the actual definition that the mental health board got from the Colorado Behavioral Health Association defines a co-responder program as a program that pairs law enforcement officers with behavioral health professionals to respond to behavioral health-related calls for police service. The teams utilize their combined experience to de-escalate situations and help link individuals with behavioral health services. So the good thing about a co-responder program is when you have an officer responding to a scene, you also have a corresponder with them that are arriving at the same time. So they're dispatched simultaneously, they arrive at the scene together, and they're able to uh they have different options available to them by having a corresponder there because clinicians are more aware of community resources and are better able to de-escalate crisis situations. So on our next slide, why a corresponder unit. I have de-escalation, diversion from the criminal legal system, and connection to appropriate behavioral health services. So the first one, de-escalation. When officers are arriving to these situations involving individuals with behavioral health needs, individuals with behavioral health needs might not always be able to comply with officers' orders because they might not always understand them. They might be in the midst of a behavioral health crisis where they're kind of have symptoms that officers might misinterpret as not following their directions or as acting out or posing a threat. Whereas clinicians understand different symptoms and different actions and behaviors and are trained to actually de-escalate situations by building trust with the individual they're working with and responding to the crisis that is at hand, which is often not a threat to public safety.