Warren County Sheriff’s Office and LifeSkills receive grant for Crisis Response

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – The Warren County Sheriff’s Office and LifeSkills received one of the The Mobile Crisis Response Awards from Gov. Andy Beshear.

The grant will be used so that the WCSO can train to better equip their deputies to notice, react and respond to people experiencing addiction or mental health crisis and also for LifeSkills to hire a full-time Qualified Mental Health Professional who can respond to a crisis with the WCSO.

This will mitigate the chances of negative police interactions with people in crisis. For Melanie Watts, the director of Community Engagement for LifeSkills, it feels like years of work are paying off.

“I think this is just another wonderful tool, if you will, to put in the officer’s tool belt to be able to use to utilize on the street and to give people, again, what they need in terms of accessing mental health services and and just having a better community. I’m I’m over the moon,” Watts said.

For law enforcement and for Warren County sheriff Brett Hightower, it is enabling the department to keep itself both in line with the needs of this growing community and in line with changes that many departments across the nation have made to increase their effectiveness in responding to mental health crisis.

“We saw this grant post and so we met with our local partner of life skills and sat down and talked to them about how we could take this grant and implement this grant into the direction we’ve all been talking about of how to provide the best services for for people within our community dealing in mental health crisis,” Hightower said.

The grant will become available in about six months. In the meantime, Watts and LifeSkills will be developing protocol for the position and for their staff so that they can eventually hire and implement the new position to great effect.