Full article by Steve Martarano available at CapRadio
WellSpace Health CEO Jonathan Porteus was walking toward his organization’s 24-hour crisis receiving center at 7th and H streets in Sacramento when he encountered a Regional Transit officer heading out the door.
“I asked him what was going on,” Porteus, the CEO for 11 years, said about the recent encounter. “He goes, ‘Well, I just spent two minutes dropping a guy off.’”
A man was in the roadway under the 16th Street Bridge blocking traffic while possibly attempting suicide, Porteus said, and the RT officer and an ambulance had been called out. Once mobilized, the subject was asked if he wanted to go to the hospital or a crisis receiving site.
“He says, ‘Oh, I’ll take the crisis receiving site,'” Porteus said. “The ambulance was called off. If the ambulance had come, there’s only one place they can take someone and that’s the hospital. The RT officer spent three minutes driving him here, two minutes dropping him off, and left. He was very happy.”
This option wouldn’t have been available for local residents before 2020 when WellSpace’s Crisis Receiving for Behavioral Health (CRBH) program, aka “Crib,” debuted during the chaotic summer of COVID-19 lockdowns and civil unrest in Sacramento and across the nation in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minnesota.