As police are increasingly responding to calls about people in mental crisis, a San Diego organization is working with them on how to handle the potentially deadly encounters.
The numbers are staggering, said Mark Marvin, director of San Diego County's Psychiatric Emergency Response Team (PERT).
"Since 2009... these calls coming into dispatch of (a) psychiatric nature have increased 92 percent," Marvin said. "San Diego Police Department in the last year alone was roughly 110 percent."
PERT hired an additional 10 clinicians since last year and trained more than 1,000 officers and deputies in its one- to three-day academies.
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