The Brief

For some who lived on the streets of Los Angeles, Inside Safe was a lifesaver — giving them a roof over their head for the first time in years, then helping them find a permanent home.

For others, it was a major disappointment.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is banking on her Inside Safe initiative to help her solve the largest homelessness crisis in California. The program, which brings people from encampments into hotels until housing becomes available, has moved hundreds of Angelenos into permanent homes.

But hundreds more have gone from those hotels back to life on the street.

Nearly two years in, the program is successful enough that it spawned a copycat county-wide effort. Yet it has not affected the vast majority of the nearly 30,000 Angelenos who sleep outside. A lack of long-term housing and a shortage of health care, mental health and addiction services remain huge obstacles, as does the program’s high price tag.

“Lots of people that have been brought inside under Inside Safe, and that’s great,” said John Maceri, chief executive officer of The People Concern, a nonprofit that runs two Inside Safe hotels. “We still struggle with the exit strategy: Where are people going to move to?”

Proponents say data proves the model works: Overall homelessness dropped slightly in the city of Los Angeles in 2024, and the number of people sleeping on the city’s streets is down 10%.

“Homelessness in LA is down for the first time in years,” Gabby Maarse, spokesperson for Mayor Karen Bass, said in an email. “ The progress made by a new comprehensive strategy, which includes Inside Safe, is a marked improvement since before the mayor took office and she will not be satisfied until street homelessness is ended.”

But the newer county-run copycat program, called Pathway Home, appears to be connecting people with services and permanent housing more quickly — suggesting there are ways the city program could continue to improve.

How LA’s program has improved, and where it still lags

Inside Safe is supposed to be an alternative to the aggressive, law enforcement-heavy sweeps ramping up since the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled cities are free to ban camping even if they have no shelters. More than a dozen California cities already have passed new anti-camping ordinances or updated existing ordinances to make them more punitive.

Mayor Bass publicly eschewed that strategy, and as of July, police had made no arrests during Inside Safe operations, according to the city. Even so, a report by Human Rights Watch earlier this year accused LA of not doing enough to protect the rights of its unhoused residents.

Bass launched Inside Safe in December 2022. Seven months later, CalMatters reported that fewer than 6% of the people who moved into Inside Safe hotels later went into permanent housing. People living in the hotels weren’t getting the help they needed accessing everything from medical care to mental health and addiction services — something Bass acknowledged at the time was a problem.

“It was a little chaotic when it first started,” said Maceri.

Tents line the streets of the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles on Oct. 8, 2024.

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Carlin Stiehl

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There has been improvement since then, but challenges remain. To date, Inside Safe has cleared 67 encampments and moved 3,254 people into hotels — nearly 23% of whom have gone on to permanent housing.

That improvement from 6% to 23% is “great,” said Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, who has hosted more than two dozen Inside Safe operations in his district. “But it’s obviously not where anybody wants to see it. At the end of the day, interim is interim and permanent is permanent. We want to see folks permanently housed.”

As of July, more people had returned to homelessness from Inside Safe than were permanently housed at the time — 819 compared to 650.

Getting medical and mental health care, addiction treatment and other resources inside the hotels is still an issue, as service providers continue to struggle with staffing shortages, Maceri said. But it’s gotten “a little bit easier.” The county now sets up resource fairs at the hotels. The mayor appointed Dr. Etsemaye Agonafer as the city’s first deputy mayor of homelessness and community health, tasked with coordinating those services. The mayor also brought in USC and UCLA’s street medicine teams to provide services at the hotels.

It’s still not enough, said Tescia Uribe, chief program officer for the nonprofit PATH, which operates three Inside Safe and three Pathway Home hotels. They have clients with severe mental health and addiction issues who need intensive care.

“We are absolutely not set up for that,” Uribe said.

In some cases, living in a hotel room behind a closed door actually allows people’s problems — such as domestic violence between a couple living together, or substance use — to escalate into a crisis, because staff don’t see what’s happening in time to intervene, she said.

Cost is another huge obstacle for the program: The hotel rooms cost the city an average of $121 per night, and it’s unclear for how long the city will be willing and able to keep paying that. The city bought one hotel in an effort to mitigate those expenses, and is looking into buying additional sites.

“The challenge ahead is about what is the next step?” said Councilmember Nithya Raman.

‘Ready to go:’ One woman’s experience with Inside Safe

When 51-year-old Shameka Foster moved from her tent on Skid Row into an Inside Safe hotel in October 2023, she was happy to be off the street.

A chef who makes vegan meats and cheeses from scratch, and who also works at a Skid Row nonprofit helping other unhoused people, Foster thought she’d be in a hotel for three to six months before she found permanent housing. Instead, she’s been in the program a year.

“(I’m) just ready to go,” she said. “Been ready, but I feel like it’s time now, like it’s past time.”

Shameka Foster outside the Los Angeles Community Action Network offices near where she used to pitch a tent in the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles on Oct. 8, 2024.

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Foster’s time in the hotel hasn’t always been easy. She’s had multiple bad or humiliating experiences — such as when a staff member walked into her room while she was changing, when the nurse in the hotel wouldn’t give her her blood pressure medication, or when she got food poisoning from a breakfast served, she said. There’s a long list of rules that she sometimes chafes under: Guests aren’t allowed, for example, and residents can’t get fresh toilet paper rolls after 2 p.m., she said. Foster doesn’t know how to access the counseling she wants to help her process the stress and trauma of everything she’s been through in the past few years.

“I’ve been going through it and shedding a lot of tears,” Foster said, “getting angry and stuff, and sick, humiliated, and just treated like I wasn’t a human.”

Her journey into housing has been frustrating, too. Whenever Foster had a question, such as how to apply or what next steps she should take, her case managers never knew the answer, she said. It took six months for her even to be matched with a housing navigator who had more expertise, she said.

Eventually, she took matters into her own hands, applied for an apartment in a newly constructed building, pestered the manager with emails and showed up at the building’s ribbon cutting.

Management at the building told her she should be able to move in by the end of the month. But she’s trying not to get her hopes up.

A tale of two encampment programs

Eight months after the city of LA launched Inside Safe, LA County kicked off its copycat program, dubbed Pathway Home. The approach was basically the same: Clear encampments throughout LA County, move the occupants into hotels, and then move them from there into permanent housing.

But the county learned from the city’s challenges. Before the county removes an encampment through Pathway Home, it makes sure it has enough rental subsidies for every camp occupant who is expected to need one. As a result, people are getting housed faster.

The nonprofit The People Concern runs two city hotels and one county hotel. People stay at the city hotels an average of 240 days, according to Maceri. At the county hotel, it’s just 99 days.

Nonprofit PATH, which operates three city and three county hotels, sees a similar disparity. And people in the county program also are more likely to get permanent housing. Just 36% of those who moved out of PATH’s city-sponsored hotels went into permanent housing, compared to 63% of those who moved out of the county-sponsored hotels, according to the nonprofit.

The county’s program is smaller than the city’s. Pathway Home has moved 145 people into permanent housing so far, while Inside Safe has moved 741.

It’s also easier for residents in the county hotels to access resources such as mental health care because the county is the one running those programs, according to Maceri and Uribe. When the county clears an encampment through Pathway Home, everything from animal control to the department of mental health has staff on site, Uribe said. That’s incredibly helpful, she said, because people are connected with those services from the beginning.

“The county, definitely, they bring the resources,” Uribe said. “It is very different.”

Some cities have said no to those resources. City councils in West Covina and Norwalk both voted down the county’s proposals to open Pathway Home hotels there, after a backlash from the community.

But the program made a big difference in Signal Hill, a tiny city of fewer than 12,000 people near Long Beach. In March, LA County helped Signal Hill move about 45 people from encampments directly into permanent housing.

As a result, the city achieved the elusive white whale status of “functional zero,” which means it has the ability to quickly find housing for anyone who becomes homeless.

“Immediately after the operation we had zero, literally zero, because everyone we knew was housed, including people living in cars,” said Signal Hill City Manager Carlo Tomaino. “That was literally everybody.”

The city had started trying to move people indoors a year earlier, and its outreach team had developed relationships with everyone living on the street, Tomaino said. But Signal Hill, which has no homeless shelters of its own, wouldn’t have been able to house everyone without the county’s resources.

The city has kept its functional zero status since then.

One couple falls through the cracks; someone else gets housing

LA County launched its Pathway Home program in August 2023 by clearing an encampment known as The Dead End along a cul-de-sac in unincorporated Lennox, near the airport. The operation moved 59 people indoors.

On a recent Tuesday more than a year later, that stretch of road was empty — no tents in sight.

But nearby, a handful of people had pitched tents under the 405 Freeway overpass. Perched on a milk crate on a hill above those tents, 52-year-old Jennifer Marzette ate Burger King for lunch with her partner, Enrique Beltran, as cars whizzed by.

The couple lived at The Dead End encampment off and on for about eight years. But when county workers came to move the camp’s residents into a hotel, Marzette and Beltran were told they weren’t on the list, Marzette said. She speculates they probably weren’t at their tent when staff first came by to collect names.

Jennifer Marzette and her partner Enrique Beltran kiss each other while in a cove under the 405 freeway in Inglewood on Oct. 8, 2024.

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So they’re still sleeping on the street, now a few blocks away from their former camp. They’ve been trying to get into housing or a shelter program together, but have had multiple false starts. They got a housing voucher, but it expired in January, before they could find an apartment that would take it, Marzette said.

In February or March, they were told they could move into a “family room” at Exodus Recovery’s “Safe Landing” shelter, she said. But they were two hours late to their appointment (the complexities of life on the street sometimes make it hard to get to places on time, Marzette said) and lost the spot. Then, earlier this month, a caseworker said they would get a room at a local hotel. That fell through, Marzette said, and she suspects it’s because they found out she was arrested for domestic violence and jailed briefly in December, over what she says was a misunderstanding during an argument with Beltran.

“I was crying the other day,” she said, as she recounted all of the missed opportunities for someone to help her. “I felt like…that’s just how it goes.”

Chris Felts had a much different experience. He was homeless for two decades, sleeping on sidewalks and in parks, or in doorways when it rained. The 68-year-old had tried several times to get into housing, but it always took so long that he got discouraged and gave up. In February, the county moved him into a hotel in Santa Monica through Pathway Home. Then, in June, he got his very own studio apartment, subsidized with a rental voucher.

Now, he’s re-learning how to live indoors. He’s practicing his cooking and trying to take care of his health by walking between 5,000 and 7,500 steps a day in his neighborhood.

But the best part, Felts said, is finally having privacy.

“I have a chance to just be by myself,” he said. “When you’re homeless you don’t really have that opportunity. There’s always going to be people around.”

Most Orange County residents favor offering undocumented residents a pathway to legal status rather than blanket deportation, according to a new poll from the University of California, Irvine School of Social Ecology. But that’s not true for a majority of Republicans (54%), who favor deportation, the poll found.

Jon Gould, dean of the School of Social Ecology, said the poll demonstrates the stark difference in public opinion on immigration between Republicans on one side, and Democrats and independents on the other.

“ Majorities are very much in favor of immigration, paths to legal citizenship, and are hesitant to use the enforcement power too strongly," Gould said of the poll results. “It’s surprising in a purple county that we’re seeing both a strong majority one way, and a cleavage where one of the political parties [Republican] is off by itself compared to independents and Democrats.”

Orange County is considered “purple” because the county’s 2 million voters are nearly evenly split, with one-third each registered as Republican or Democrat, and another third registered as No Party Preference or with a smaller political party.

There was agreement across political parties on some issues, Gold said. The majority of respondents agreed that violent criminals should automatically be deported, and that immigrants who are U.S. veterans should never be deported.

UC Irvine School of Social Ecology polled 1,200 Orange County adults on immigration issues in March 2026.

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Gould also said the poll of some 1,200 adults demonstrates the nuanced opinions that most residents have on the subject of immigration. For example, a majority of all respondents (61%) support limiting immigration from countries the government deems dangerous or unstable.

Results of the UC Irvine poll on immigration show agreement across party lines on some nuanced questions.

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Some other key takeaways:

• While 62% of respondents said they disapproved of President Donald Trump’s handling of immigration issues, a smaller margin, 55%, disapproved of his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border.
• A majority said immigration fills essential low-wage jobs (76%) and enhances civic life (67%). A plurality also said immigration strains public services (48%).
• Only small percentages of all respondents said they supported automatic deportation for immigrants convicted of non-violent crimes (23%), unemployed immigrants (16%), recent arrivals (11%), and non-English speakers (10%). 
• On the question of ICE, 73% of Republicans said they supported the agency’s actions, whereas 67% of Democrats and 40% of independents said the agency should be abolished.

Implications for the upcoming elections and immigration reform

Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement has taken a heavy toll in Orange County. Some families have lost breadwinners to deportation, while others have sought to limit their exposure by quitting jobs and staying indoors. Spending in the county decreased by about one-quarter of a percent immediately after enforcement ramped up last year, according to a separate UC Irvine study. That led to a $4.5 million decline in sales tax over an eight-week period, the study found.

Students protest ICE on Jan. 27, 2026 in front of Anaheim City Hall.

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Jill Replogle

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A growing number of cities, plus the county itself, have set aside funds to support immigrant residents with basic needs and legal services.

This support reflects what Gould called a “sea change” in public opinion since 1994, when two-thirds of Orange County voters cast ballots in favor of excluding undocumented immigrants from public education and other public services. That ballot initiative, Proposition 187, was ultimately found to be unconstitutional and never went into effect.

Gould said the majority of respondents’ positive views on immigration in the recent poll shows how much the county has changed. It’s also a reflection of the vast demographic shifts that have occurred in the county in recent decades as a result of immigration and refugee arrivals from countries like Vietnam.

Nearly 40% of residents polled said both of their parents were born in another country; 82% of Asians polled said both parents were born in another country.

Slightly more than one-third of respondents said they personally knew someone who is undocumented.

Gould thinks the results of the polling bode well for the prospects for immigration reform — despite decades of failure in Washington to strike a deal between Republicans and Democrats. The shift in public opinion might not lead to change in policy yet, Gould said, “but politicians generally follow where the wind’s blowing.”

 “At a time where we're being led to believe that immigration pits people against one another, it's intractable, these battles will go on forever," he said. "I actually think what we're seeing in the data here is that there is a supermajority support for a number of policies on immigration. There is actually potentially a solution here.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Jacque Langston was driving down Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood when he came face-to-face with an odd sight: sea creatures floating across one of the city’s new, spiraling digital billboards. 

“Why am I looking at jellyfish? That has nothing to do with me,” said Langston, an Inglewood native. For Langston, the video billboards that have come to dominate stretches of Inglewood’s major roads are a square peg in a round hole.

“The city has never been touched like that,” Langston said. “Now you’ve got a mini-Vegas.” 

A digital billboard is seen on La Cienega Blvd. at Florence Ave. in Inglewood on April 18, 2026, in Los Angeles.

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Video billboards have proliferated in Inglewood in recent years, targeting the influx of people driving into the city for concerts and sporting events at SoFi Stadium, the Intuit Dome and the Kia Forum. 

Last summer, though, they became a flashpoint for a series of lawsuits that revealed fractures in the once-close relationship between the city and its major entertainment venues. The various parties are now fighting over lucrative advertising territory as major international sporting events approach.

That legal drama — reported last week by The LA Local — also threatens to undo the contract that underpins SoFi Stadium’s financial relationship with the city. 

Langston and other Inglewood residents might get a chance to weigh in on the billboards in November’s election, due to a proposed ballot initiative that would bar most advertisements on public streets. But that ballot initiative itself has now prompted its own potentially costly legal fight involving the city, which receives a steadily increasing stream of revenue from billboard companies, and people with ties to the billionaire-owned stadiums.

Meanwhile, the bright LED video screens have divided local opinion. 

Vanessa Cowan, an Inglewood resident, said the gleaming screens are a sign of progress in the city. “I like them,” she said. “It has a different look.” 

A person walks past a digital billboard on Prairie Avenue in Inglewood on April 18, in Los Angeles.

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Khnum Alexander, owner of Swank Men’s Fashion on Manchester, called the billboards “monstrosities” and said advertising on the screens is too expensive for small businesses like his. He also questioned the new, twisting screens that billboard company WOW Media has recently begun to install in groups of three across the city.

“Do we really need more?” he asked. 

Down the street from Alexander’s menswear store, EZ Will Driving School owner Will McDaniel felt differently.

“I’m all for it,” McDaniel said. “People are afraid of change. Change to them feels awkward.” 

If city leaders have their way, the Billboard Blight Elimination and Neighborhood Preservation Initiative won’t make it to voters this fall.

“What is packaged as an initiative by and for Inglewood residents appears to be a product of avaricious puppeteering by a billionaire developer,” lawyers retained by the city wrote in a March 4 court complaint filed in an attempt to block the initiative. 

That developer, the city’s lawyers contend, was SoFi Stadium owner Stan Kroenke. Attorneys later amended the complaint to include Intuit Dome owner Steve Ballmer.

“Voter suppression”

In February, Inglewood resident Shannon Roberts filed to circulate a petition to prohibit commercial billboards on public streets, sidewalks and medians. The petition, a step towards getting the billboard initiative on the ballot in November, also seeks to prohibit business arrangements for the city to profit from billboard deals. 

“Public spaces belong to people, not billboard companies,” Roberts wrote, adding advertising should instead prioritize public safety messaging, such as emergency alerts, not advertising for profit.

“Inglewood should not be for sale to billboard companies for decades at a time — especially when such arrangements permanently alter the character of our beautiful city and erase the legacy of those who fought to preserve our neighborhoods,” Roberts wrote.

Roberts did not respond to a request for comment. When The LA Local reached out to her lawyer, a veteran campaign spokesperson responded.  

John Shallman has been a consultant in Southern California politics for decades and formerly worked for the Clippers when they moved to the Intuit Dome. 

He is now working with Roberts to get the anti-billboard initiative on the ballot; their website and campaign are called Inglewood Not for Sale.

He said he’s never seen a city sue one of its residents over an idea they’re attempting to put before voters.

“It’s voter suppression,” Shallman told The LA Local. “You can run a campaign against it, but trying to stop it from getting in front of citizens at all, that’s a big red flag. We’re all about voter empowerment. They’re the public’s streets, parks and medians. They control how they’re used and how they’re sold.”

Inglewood Mayor James Butts did not return a request for comment. The city’s lawyers argued in court filings that the initiative shouldn’t be allowed to go before voters because it would unconstitutionally restrict speech, lay out illegal zoning guidelines and hurt the city’s contract with WOW Media, the company that controls many of Inglewood’s billboards. 

Shallman believes that the Inglewood City Council cut a bad deal in April 2025 with WOW Media when the city approved a 20-year contract, which can be extended for decades. “It’s sort of biblical in its length of time,” he said. “The city decided that the profit of one company is far more important than the residents who will have to live with these billboards.”

The campaign has already collected several thousand signatures, Shallman said. 

Shallman dismissed the city’s accusations that the coalition he works with does not authentically represent Inglewood’s residents. Though Roberts’ name is on the initiative, the filing fee was paid for by Gerard McCallum II, a longtime associate of Hollywood Park.

Shallman said the initiative is raising money from all sorts of supporters, including those tied to the Rams and Clippers professional sports teams.

“You’re talking about an insignificant sum of money that pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars that will be spent to sue this Inglewood resident,” Shallman said of the filing fee.

Inglewood’s November election could be packed

WOW Media is opposing the billboard initiative through its own campaign, Inglewood Residents for Stadium Accountability. 

CEO Scott Krantz wrote in a statement to The LA Local that the billboard initiative, which does not include stadium billboards, would deprive the city of up to $2 billion in revenue over 40 years.

“The stadiums share none of their advertising revenue with Inglewood residents. We trust the people of Inglewood to see the stadium owner billionaire’s scam for exactly what it is,” Krantz wrote.

Krantz and Inglewood Residents for Stadium Accountability are also backing a pair of initiatives that could have a big impact on stadiums’ bottom line: The initiatives seek to remove admissions tax caps for large venues and limit how much some parking lots can charge during major events. 

Longtime Mayor Butts is also up for reelection in November, as are Councilmembers Gloria Gray and Alex Padilla and a few school board members. 

Wherever the votes land, Inglewood’s rapid transformation doesn’t appear to be slowing down. 

“Times are changing around here,” said Rick Todd, who sat at a table on Manchester Boulevard on Thursday, selling jugs of soursop tea. Up the street, a video billboard flicked between an Inglewood police recruitment poster and an ad for “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” “This goes along with it.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom promised to help thousands of homeless Californians when he launched a new mental health court in 2023. So far, it has struggled to help the sickest, most vulnerable people, but a Southern California lawmaker is carrying two proposals this year that she hopes will fix gaps in the program.

Both bills reopen the debate among families and advocates over when it’s appropriate to put someone into mental health treatment without their consent.

One bill would create a pathway for the most severely incapacitated people to go directly from Newsom’s voluntary mental health court into involuntary treatment in a hospital. The other would make it easier for EMTs and other first responders to refer people to mental health court. Both bills recently passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee, despite concerns from disability rights advocates that they would force more people into unwanted treatment.

“While early implementation shows promise,” Sen. Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas, said during a recent committee hearing, “barriers in the current petition process are preventing the program from reaching many of the individuals it was designed to serve.”

CARE Court launched in 2023 as a major piece of Newsom’s strategy to get people in the grip of psychosis off the streets. It allows family members of people with untreated schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders to refer them into the court-based program, where they can work with a judge, a public defender and a case worker on a plan for medication, therapy, housing, and whatever other help they may need.

But a CalMatters investigation found the program is falling short of expectations. As of January, California courts had received 3,817 petitions on behalf of prospective CARE Court participants and approved just 893 treatment agreements. At its outset, the Newsom administration estimated between 7,000 and 12,000 Californians would qualify for the program.

Some families who attempted to use CARE Court to help their severely ill loved ones told CalMatters they were disappointed by the results. They thought a judge could order their family members into treatment. But that turned out not to be the case. If someone is too sick to realize they need treatment, CARE Court can’t help, which means that their case can be dismissed while the person continues to languish on the street.

That’s the problem Blakespear is attempting to tackle with Senate Bill 1016. It would allow anyone filing a CARE Court petition to request that a judge order a mental health assessment to determine if the subject of the petition is “gravely disabled” or a danger to themselves or others – if the subject can’t comply with voluntary treatment.

Depending on the results of the assessment, a judge could order that person into a conservatorship, which would likely mean a stay in a locked psychiatric facility and mandatory medication.

The idea is to create a formal bridge between voluntary treatment under CARE Court and involuntary treatment through a conservatorship.

Adding the specter of forced care will make people with mental illness less likely to accept help from CARE Court, Samuel Jain of Disability Rights California said during the committee hearing.

“SB 1016 adds an expensive, coercive and convoluted layer to CARE Court that will drive up costs and further erode the rights and trust of the Californians that our system is supposed to help,” he said.

An unhoused person secures their belongings on a bicycle near a homeless camp in north Sacramento on Jan. 26, 2026. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters

Family 'frustrated' by CARE Court

Jennifer Farrell, who filed a CARE Court petition in late 2024 for her brother in Alameda County, sees it differently. Farrell’s 59-year-old brother, who struggles with schizophrenia and meth use, had been homeless off and on since 2017. He was able to stay housed via CARE Court for a few months, but then he left his placement in September and disappeared into the streets.

It was clear he needed more help than CARE Court could provide, but the program had no way to elevate him to a higher level of care, Farrell said.

“I was really frustrated at that point,” she told CalMatters.

Farrell’s brother spent three months deteriorating on the street before a case worker found him in December. He was hospitalized on a temporary psychiatric hold and eventually placed on a conservatorship. He’s still in a locked facility, where he’s medicated and seems to be doing much better, Farrell said.

To Farrell, it’s “absurd” that there isn’t already a direct link between CARE Court and a conservatorship — a connection that she thinks could have saved her family some grief.

At CARE Court’s inception, Newsom said people who didn’t follow their CARE plans could be moved into a conservatorship. But Farrell and other families CalMatters spoke with said if their loved one couldn’t consent to treatment, there was no clear path forward.

Technically, CARE Court judges can order participants to follow mandatory “CARE plans” — something that happened just 32 times between late 2023 and January — but judges can’t force participants to comply.

Easier CARE Court petitions

Blakespear’s other bill, SB 989, addresses another CARE Court challenge: the low number of people participating.

Filing a CARE Court petition is a complicated, time-consuming process. Whoever is filing the request needs the person’s medical records. Then, they need to appear at the first court hearing — something overworked first responders don’t always have time to do.

That’s a key reason that people who work in public safety, such as firefighters and EMTs, say they don’t file CARE Court petitions, said Meagan Subers of California Professional Firefighters, who spoke in support of the bill at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

SB 989 would create a framework for first responders to refer clients directly to their county behavioral health department, which could then file a CARE Court petition on their behalf. The county would have 30 days to decide whether to file.

Some counties already make an effort to train and support their first responders in filing CARE Court petitions. Stanislaus County allows first responders to refer CARE Court clients directly to the county.

But that collaboration isn’t happening in a systematic way across the state, Subers said. This bill could help fix a broken system where first responders are constantly cycling people with severe mental illnesses in and out of emergency rooms, she said.

“When our members have to run these calls repeatedly on individuals and take them to the hospital, knowing that they’re going to have to respond to that person again, my members tell me that they feel helpless,” she said. “We see this pathway as another option for them.”

Blakespear’s bills follow a similar effort last year by Sen. Tom Umberg of Santa Ana to make CARE Court more effective. His new law, which went into effect in January, expanded CARE Court to include people who experience psychosis as a result of bipolar disorder. The program initially was exclusively for people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other limited psychotic disorders.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.