Crow Wing County Sheriff Scott Goddard said at a recent county board meeting that his office is seeing a dramatic increase in calls regarding mental health.

Currently, there is one call per day on average that deals with mental health. Sheriff Goddard said that from 2018 to 2020, there was an increase of over 100 calls over those two years.

In Crow Wing County, there are internal plans to potentially have mental health professionals to work alongside police.

“We’ve been asking our law enforcement officers for decades to act as essentially mental health professionals on the porch dealing with an acute mental health crisis, and they’re not well equipped to do that. That’s not what they’re trained to do,” said Tim Houle, Crow Wing County Administrator. “And so we’ve been working for years working to get further upstream, if you will, for trying to get our mental health professionals as close to the crisis.”

The amount of mental health calls received by not just the Crow Wing County Sheriff’s Office, but all police departments in the area, is expected increase as mental health continues to grow as a priority.

By — Lakeland News