County mental‑health officials outline expansion of 24/7 non‑armed crisis teams and coordination with city programs

Representatives from the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (DMH) gave a detailed verbal briefing to a Los Angeles City Council ad hoc committee on the county’s alternative crisis response system, describing expanded 24/7 mobile teams, 9‑8‑8 operations and remaining staffing and funding challenges.

Ruben Wilson, who identified himself as chief of the county’s Alternative Crisis Unit, said the county has expanded mobile response teams and now has more than 70 intervention teams that respond to crises on site. Wilson said DMH has worked over the last two years to double teams countywide, increase urgent‑care visits at crisis centers and reduce response times from multi‑hour delays to generally between 34 and 45 minutes for many incidents, though he said wait times still exceed those numbers in some cases when capacity is limited.

DMH presenters described several metrics during the briefing: a 25% increase in calls to 9‑8‑8 (county figure), deployment on roughly 25,000 calls…