The Partner | January 2022
The Living Room Wellness Center Protocol Training
Exciting news! The Lake County Sheriff’s Office conducted the first of many trainings on the Living Room Wellness Center drop-off protocol. In attendance were the frontline highway patrol and command staff. This training was recorded to be available for new hires and those unable to attend in person. Future in-person, socially distanced trainings are planned for the Highway Patrol Division of the Sheriff’s Office. Thereafter, municipal police for those agencies that are partnered in the expanded COaST task force will be trained. For more information about the Living Room Wellness Center, visit icthelivingroom.org.
Join the Discussion
Let your voice be heard! Our next Criminal Justice Community Council meeting is coming up on March 16th at 6:00PM CST. Register here to join the discussion!
Crisis Outreach and Support Team Expansion
The Crisis Outreach and Support Team will be expanding their taskforce starting at the end of the month. This new expansion of COaST will feature a social worker, clinician, or peer specialist who will be partnered with a sheriff’s deputy or police officer from a partner agency. The Sheriff’s Office will have a full-time deputy and mental health worker assigned as one team. The other team will be a rotation of officers from the member agencies, and those officers will be partnered with a separate mental health worker.
All of the police officers, deputies, and mental health workers participating in this program will go through advanced training in mid-January. The initiative will be fully operational on January 31, 2022. The success and operational procedures of this pilot program will be regularly evaluated. It is the hope of the partner agencies that the program will be a success and can be expanded in 2023.
You can help inform and engage the community about this work by forwarding this newsletter to three friends and encouraging them to sign up here.
The Safety and Justice Challenge strategies at Lake County, IL are proudly led and supported by:
Lake County Sheriff's Office
Lake County State's Attorney Office
19th Judicial Circuit Court
Lake County Public Defender's Office
Nicasa Behavioral Health Services
This project was created with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge, which seeks to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails.