It was a snowy afternoon in Bozeman, a city of nearly 60,000 nestled among the mountains of southern Montana. Temperatures hovered in the mid-30s.
The city’s mobile crisis team had just gotten a call about a man walking around outside without shoes. The man’s family told the team he was having a mental health crisis and wouldn’t come inside.
As they drove down the highway toward the city’s outskirts, team member Evan Thiessen spoke with the relative who had reached out.
“You’re doing the right thing, and we’re going to make sure he gets help today, OK?” he said.
They pulled up the man’s police record on a laptop and saw that he did have a record of some previous encounters with police, including some that had turned violent.
Luke Forney, a licensed therapist, had that in mind as they pulled into a neighborhood of single-family homes. He stepped out of the Ford Bronco and headed toward the front door.
A Funding Problem
Many communities around the country send out teams like this one to help people in psychiatric crisis, rather than dispatching regular police.
A recent survey found there were at least 1,800 mobile teams nationwide in 2023. But financial support for them is often inadequate and inconsistent, leaving many communities struggling to keep the teams operating.
Two programs — one in Great Falls, in central Montana, and one in Billings, in south-central Montana — recently shut down. Six units remain in Montana.
The strategy began in the late 1980s in Eugene, Oregon, but …