Federal Funding Boosts Forsyth County Mental Health Crisis Response Team

Sgt. Terry Hawkins has been logging the mental health call volume at the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office since the department's Crisis Intervention Response Team stood up in December 2020. "The latest statistic that I've been able to pull shows that the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office is responding to just over seven calls a day that have mental health involvement," Hawkins said. A $277,598 federal grant secured by Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock is now aimed squarely at expanding the team built to answer those calls.

On a typical response, the CIRT model sends Hawkins, the team's sworn deputy lead, alongside Julie Zemke, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with Avita Community Partners who works exclusively with the Sheriff's Office under the co-responder arrangement. Zemke, who specializes in mental illness and substance abuse, conducts on-scene assessments, works to de-escalate, and maps out care pathways for individuals in crisis. The goal is treatment, not a jail booking. Certified Peer Specialist Josh Bell, also from Avita at 125 North Corners Parkway in Cumming, completes the core team. Together they represent a formalized partnership between law enforcement and behavioral health that the new funding is intended to scale.

National data on co-responder programs supports the model. A 2025 study in Nature Human Behaviour found a 16.5 percent reduction in involuntary psychiatric detentions, roughly 370 fewer detentions over two years. Stanford University research found a 16 percent drop in involuntary detentions and a 17 percent reduction in mental-health-incident calls. In Colorado, 98 percent of more than 25,900 co-responder calls between July 2020 and June 2021 ended without an arrest.

Senator Warnock, announcing the award alongside Ossoff, said mental health crises "require a deft mindset and proper training" and framed the funds as an expansion of access to appropriate care. The Sheriff's Office said it "gratefully acknowledges Congress for the $277,598 of discretionary funding that supports the expansion of the FCSO's Crisis Intervention Response Team."

The money is arriving into a county under significant demographic pressure. Forsyth County's population reached approximately 280,096 as of July 2024, up 11.5 percent from 251,285 in the 2020 Census, making it one of the fastest-growing jurisdictions in the Atlanta metro. A larger, more geographically spread population means more calls across more miles, and more shifts that a core two-person unit cannot currently cover.

The unanswered question is measurement. The senators' announcement frames desired outcomes: improved de-escalation, reduced incarceration for mental-health-driven behavior, better long-term connections to care. But FCSO has not yet published baseline data on diversion rates, repeat-call volumes, or average response times for mental health incidents. Without those numbers established now, residents will have no public benchmark against which to judge whether the $277,598 produced results twelve months from now.

That accountability gap matters especially because this is one-time federal money, and the question of who funds additional clinician hours and training after the grant expires has no public answer yet. The Mental Health Association in Forsyth County leads a separate five-day Crisis Intervention Team training for deputies and first responders; the United Way's Mental Health C.A.R.E. program offers an alternative-to-incarceration track for offenders whose charges stem from serious mental illness. CIRT feeds its most successful diversions directly into that ecosystem, and the long-term value of this investment will depend on how rigorously the Sheriff's Office tracks what happens next.