Harris County, Texas, which includes the city of Houston, has a population greater than the population of 24 individual states. The Harris Center for Mental Health and Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, the county’s safety net provider, provide 21 master’s-level clinicians to ride along with Harris County Sheriff’s Office deputies and Houston Police Department officers in what it calls Crisis Intervention Response Teams (CIRTs) to respond to people with mental illness in crisis. But, on some shifts, they may have only one CIRT team between the two law enforcement agencies covering a population of nearly 5 million people.
Enter the Clinician and Officer Remote Evaluation (CORE) program, which Harris Center CEO Wayne Young, LPC, M.B.A., FACHE, calls “a force multiplier.” Begun as a pilot program in the fall of 2017, CORE is “a str