A three-person team from the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office connects overdose survivors and people in mental health crisis to treatment services. Money runs out by the end of September. The Crisis Response Unit has one sergeant and two deputies who follow up with people who received Narcan after an overdose and link them with services.
Sheriff Mike Bouchard told the commission on August 4 that his office lacks the budget to keep funding the existing positions. “If you come up with the money, we still have those positions. But we don’t have the money in our budget to fund those positions,” Bouchard said, according to The Detroit News.
Federal money that had supported the program was cut in the first half of 2025, according to Commissioner Gwen Markham. The Sheriff’s Office applied for a $375,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to help bridge the gap. The federal agency hasn’t approved that grant yet.
Fully funding the team for the next fiscal year would cost about $250,000. Commissioners have been talking about where that money might come from. Markham said she believes commissioners will probably fund it for another year whether the federal grant comes through or not.
Commissioner Angela Powell said the team helps patrol officers by taking on the work of managing people in crisis. This frees deputies to handle other calls. “This is a unit that is changing lives, it’s reducing the number of people we have to put in jail, and it’s bringing the resources to them, to help them,” Powell said, according to The Detroit News.
Bouchard said the department can’t rearrange its responsibilities to keep the program running. “We run very lean, so we don’t have people where we can say, ‘Oh OK, we can just take that person and put them there,'” Bouchard said.