For those of you who come to see the annual PowerPoint, it's going to be a little different this year.

And we call that addressing Michigan's greatest challenge.

And of course, when the mayor and the police chief are here talking, you know that we're talking about the state's mental health system.

Right.

And we really are.

Because when the state's mental health system fails, people have psychotic breaks.

You know who deals with them in the state?

It should police officers every single day.

And in Detroit, Chief White's actually built a mental health division within the Detroit Police Department because it's what he had to do to cope.

The drug shootings, the gang shootings have dropped dramatically.

But, you know, the violence we're dealing with today, last week, two brothers arguing over who the best performing artist said gets so heated, one shoots and kills the other.

Couple days ago, 72 and 75 year old woman sitting at the table, longtime friends arguing gets overheated.

One of them grabs a knife and stabs the other.

What we are seeing is a level of violence which, you know, we sit with.

You are officers, your command staff, who say no number of police officers in the world could have prevented that crime.

And so talk about what you face now, because this is a different challenge for the Detroit Police Department.

You know, it really is.

I joined in 1996.

I came on the job like I said, I would be a traffic cop, wanted to reduce crime, wanted to do those things, but I could not anticipate the impact of the mental health system on policing and what we're dealing with and what we're up against.

When you look at that 15,990 calls, those are people who call.

What about the other several thousand that didn't call?

And that's still, you know, representative of, you know, double digit responses to mental health crises on a daily basis.

So calls for mentally ill and violent, almost 25, 30 calls a week that somebody is mentally ill and violent, nearly always armed that you are handling.

And so let's talk about this.

Is this Detroit or as you talk to chiefs around the state, what are they saying?

They're seeing an uptick.

You know, nothing good came from COVID.

But what COVID did tell us and show us is the impact on isolation and and how it impacts a person's mental health.

Now, we can't unsee the crisis of mental health in our communities.

Every chief that I've talked to has gotten an increase in numbers.

Nothing like Detroit.

But but certainly they're seeing in their communities an uptick of violence.

Even in Farmington Hills recently, a brother shot a brother.

We see it over and over again.

We had a, like you said, the two seniors that got into an argument and the impulse decision making and the inability to resolve conflict that's resulting in homicides.

So we're in a meeting with the Chiefs leadership and a couple of his leadership folks are talking about these murders violently mentally ill people and say, you know, it's been like this since Lafayette Clinic was closed.

The meeting ends and you know, this is to me is an attitude of helplessness.

The chief walks into the office with me and says they closed Lafayette Clinic 30 years ago.

We need to stop talking like this is a new problem.

He said, I want to start a mental health division within the Detroit Police Department.

I want to stop complaining about the problem and recognize the fact that we are the front line.

Will you support me on the funding to create something within DPD?

And this was I mean, I was just astonished.

what Police chief wakes up and says, I'm going to create a mental health department within a police department, but that was your plan.

Talk about what you were thinking.

Well, you know, we see it every day.

And, you know, we I said often, you're not going to rest your way out of crime.

We know that there are things that impact decision making.

We know when someone shoots someone because of road rage, that's not something that you can talk someone out of.

There's something going on.

We know when we're averaging a barricaded gunman a week and someone is isolating themselves in a home with a gun threatening to kill themselves because your girlfriend or boyfriend broke up with them, that we've got a big problem.

So we needed to look at ways that we could safely handle these runs and B, get the officers the training that they need because we know we're losing officers.

We've got officers that have been shot.

We've had officers that have been killed by people who are in mental health crisis.

And so this was just a pathway to do something different.