In January, Lexington received a grant of $850,000 to form a crisis response team made up of the Lexington Fire Department Election Police Department and a full time mental health professional.

Yesterday, Mayor Linda Gordon introduced the city of Lexington to the new mental health professional who arrived last month from California for this job.

We are taking an enormous step forward in our ability to respond to mental health emergencies.

Earlier this year, Governor Andy Beshear announced that our city received an $850,000 federal grant from the Kentucky Department for Medicaid Services to establish a crisis response team.

The application for the three year grant was the collaborative effort of both the Lexington Police and Lexington Fire departments.

This grant allows our city to hire a full time mental health professional to respond directly to mental health calls in conjunction with the Lexington Police Department.

Responding with a full time mental health professional directly to mental health calls with officers will help the focus of keeping people with mental health illnesses out of jail and in treatment or on the road to recovery.

My role would be more so for the acute mental health stabilization.

So in the past I've connected with UK adolescent inpatient arrears, behavioral health.

So my main goal is to de-escalate and then encourage the residents to either self present to hospital to provide them and connect them with resources through our community care medicine team and whatever way that may look like.

The Crisis Response team is slated to work weekdays when most mental health calls occur.

Our city receives approximately 3000 mental health calls a year, with fewer calls coming in at night and on the weekends.

I hope that I'm able to provide people with a positive interaction.

I want everybody to be familiar with who I am.

The services that we all provide as a collective in the hopes of lessening that negative stigma of mental health and substance use.

The grant also provides overtime funding for currently 45 police officers who have taken specialized training in responding to mental health emergencies.