The Pharr Police Department and Tropical Texas Behavioral Health announced Friday that the Department of Justice awarded a $550,000 grant for the agency’s mental health unit.
The grant, which was awarded on Dec. 16 of last year, will help the department sustain and grow its mental health unit, according to Pharr Chief Andy Harvey.
The unit was established in December 2020 as a means of educating officers about how to respond to cases in which a person is experiencing a mental health crisis. The unit has been Harvey’s effort to ensure his officers will not resort to excessive use of force, improper use of force and improper incarceration in such scenarios.
Tropical Texas Behavioral Health has partnered with the department since the unit’s inception.
“They are a critical piece to our mental health unit because they add not only their expertise but also their resources and their networks to help us help the people out here,” Harvey said.
Harvey said that the department’s collaboration with Tropical is unique because the unit has a clinician from the behavior health center embedded into the mental health unit. He said that the clinician responds to mental health crises with police officers while also assisting with follow-ups to make sure that people are getting the proper help they need.
“It’s been running for a while, in which we’ve embedded one of our Tropical clinicians into a designated mental health unit that Chief Harvey set up for the city of Pharr PD,” Tropical Texas CEO Terry Crocker said Friday. “As that began to gel and began to make an impact, we backed that up through our business development piece, and now we’re trying to find funding opportunities to try to offset those costs.”
Crocker said that the $550,000 grant will hopefully do just that, while also helping to expand the program. He added that he is seeing interest from other police departments throughout the Rio Grande Valley in establishing and developing their own mental health units.
“Everyone agrees that mental health issues make up a good amount of what officers do throughout their day, throughout their shifts, as a part of their job,” Crocker said. “We just see it as the best practice to have some officers there who are trained and specialized; a specialized team that can respond when indicated by the police department with critical incidents.”
Harvey said he’s glad to see the fruits of his labor continue to grow within the agency and benefit the citizens of Pharr.
“To see it grow and manifest the way it has, and to know that it’s going to continue to grow is so good for our city,” Harvey said. “I just really can’t wait to see what the next step is because this thing is growing. It’s making more of an impact than I thought it would. It’s really exciting.”
