In Minnesota, a landmark piece of legislation promised better resources for people experiencing mental health crises. Advocates worked hard to get Travis’ Law passed – it was named after a man killed by the police while in the midst of a mental health crisis. And it was written to ensure trained professionals would respond to these kinds of calls. But the work doesn’t stop there. Today, advocates say the law isn’t always being enforced. We’ll hear from families and organizations in Minnesota – and around the country – who are teaming up to keep their communities safe and supported during mental health crises. In this episode, we’re talking about creating new systems to support mental health. Learn more about how you can build change at actblue.com/buildthechange or follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
In Minnesota, a landmark piece of legislation promised better resources for people experiencing mental health crises. Advocates worked hard to get Travis’ Law passed – it was named after a man killed by the police while in the midst of a mental health crisis. And it was written to ensure trained professionals would respond to these kinds of calls. But the work doesn’t stop there. Today, advocates say the law isn’t always being enforced. We’ll hear from families and organizations in Minnesota – and around the country – who are teaming up to keep their communities safe and supported during mental health crises.
In this episode, we’re talking about creating new systems to support mental health.
Learn more about how you can build change at actblue.com/buildthechange or follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
Build the Change
Episode 6 - TRANSCRIPT
ALOK
Hey listeners: this episode contains descriptions of violence, police brutality, self harm, and mental illness. Listener discretion is advised.
In 2021, something big happened in Minnesota. The state legislature passed a landmark piece of legislation known as Travis’ Law.
MICHELLE
And Travis's Law was named after a young man named Travis Jordan, who was killed by Minneapolis Police.
ALOK
That’s Michelle Gross — the Minneapolis activist who wrote the law.
Travis Jordan was shot and killed by police when he was in the middle of a mental health crisis.
At the time, in Minnesota, if you wanted a mental health crisis responder, you needed to call a specific phone number. It varied county by county. And it was not 911.
MICHELLE
We do have mental health crisis response teams in all 87 counties of this state. They were just being underutilized because people had to know the magic number, you know, in, and each county had their own number.
ALOK
Travis’s Law changed that.
The law made it a requirement for 911 dispatchers to send calls about mental health crises to a specially-trained team of mental health responders.
Just getting Travis’s Law passed in the first place was a huge undertaking.
MICHELLE
I'd always known this was a problem, but I looked at that and I said, we can't have this anymore. That's just too wrong. We need to, um, address this connection between mental health and police. We've got to, to break that connection.
ALOK
Michelle runs Communities United Against Police Brutality, or CUAPB. It’s an organization dedicated to supporting victims of police brutality – and often, their families, too. And she knew this wasn’t an isolated incident.
MICHELLE
The job of police is to investigate for the existence of a crime, who might be involved in that crime, and gather evidence for those people's prosecution. That's the job of the police. And we don't dispute that job, that's fine. But mental health crises…Those are people with an illness. And we formed a mental health work group, because we do all of our work through work groups. And we spent about eight months researching the issue.
ALOK
From there, they wrote a bill that requires 911 call centers to dispatch mental health crisis responders when those calls come in.
Michelle and her team took the bill to the state house…
MICHELLE
And they initially saw this bill as being sort of an anti law enforcement bill.
ALOK
Legislators on both sides of the aisle weren’t convinced. But Michelle and her team kept up the work…
MICHELLE
We had Flo Ching, the mother of Travis Jordan, testify multiple times at committees about the, the need for this bill and what happened to her son. We also had mental health professionals and practitioners testifying about it…And we tried really hard to help them understand that it was actually helpful to law enforcement because they didn't have to place their resources into calls that were very lengthy.
ALOK
Their work paid off. The bill gained momentum…
MICHELLE
It got lumped into what's called an omnibus bill, which is like, we're running outta time, so we're just gonna lump all the bills together…But we, you know, we squeaked it through.
ALOK
Travis’ Law was passed.
MICHELLE
And, and that's saying something, because rarely do bills pass on the first go.
ALOK
It felt like a major win. In the wake of so many deaths, Communities United Against Police Brutality had mobilized to provide a real solution. One that would save lives.
But the work doesn’t stop when a law is passed. Change doesn’t happen overnight. Even after Travis’s Law was passed, people in Minnesota still don’t necessarily get the response they need – and have a right to – when they call 911.
JAY
I personally – I'm convinced if the state laws had been followed, um, and all of those times that we called to ask for help, crisis response team had been there, um, you know, Brent would be here with us.
ALOK
In partnership with ActBlue, this is Build the Change, a show about the people at the center of progress.
I’m your host, Alok Vaid-Menon. I’m an author, poet, actor, and advocate…And your companion for this trip around the country. We’re in search of the most compelling causes, and stories from the candidates, activists, and everyday people driving them forward.
In this episode, we’re talking about the people fighting for better access to mental health resources. We’re zooming in on the story of how families and organizations in Minnesota – and around the country – are teaming up to ensure that their communities are safe and supported during mental health crises.
Real change takes sustained engagement. And that takes a movement.
At CUAPB, Michelle Gross works directly and intentionally with victims of police brutality and their families.
MICHELLE
So we run a 24 hour hotline. We refer people to lawyers. We help people investigate their own cases. We go to court with people. We pretty much do what people need to help them get legs under them after a bad incident, you know, after an incident with the police.
ALOK
And when people are looking for help, it’s not just a one-time engagement.
MICHELLE
We are about social justice, not social services. So if people want our help, they actually have to come to our meetings.
ALOK
In the Twin Cities, one of those families Michelle has worked with is the family of Tara and Jay Sykes.
TARA
Jay and I are a blended family. We've been together for 20 years.
JAY
Three boys…
TARA
Three girls. We call ourselves the Brady Bunch.
STACIA
From a sibling standpoint, yeah, we're all really, really close.
ALOK
That’s Stacia, Brent’s sister.
STACIA
Brent’s the oldest and he's like the leader of the bunch. You know, he helped raise us, as we like to say.
ALOK
In 2011, Brent was in his early twenties. And he’d also started struggling with his mental health.
TARA
Man, as a mom you would know when something's wrong with your kid. Um, and I just knew there was something not right. He shut us all out. And he, we were just fearful that he was gonna hurt himself. He was such a sweet, giving young man, but he would harm himself.
ALOK
One day, Tara was especially concerned for Brent’s safety. She found out he had hurt himself. And she was trying to figure out what to do…
TARA
I just happened to be at the clinic for another appointment, I think it was with one of the other kids. And they had these little flyers there…
ALOK
The flyer had the number for a mental health crisis hotline. She dialed…and told the operator about the situation.
TARA
And, um, that was enough for them to send, send us a crisis team to our home.
JAY
We didn't even know, we had no idea what a crisis response team was.
STACIA
Right.
ALOK
It was the family’s first encounter with a crisis team, and it made a big impact.
JAY
They just talked to 'em, let him express, but they were trained. It was very obvious that they knew what they were doing, how they were doing it. One stayed and talked with Brent and the other one came to us and basically said, yeah, you guys, there's there, there's something mentally going on here of some type of illness…
TARA
Um, one of them went and called for EMT and police backup. And they came in, um, convinced Brent to go to the hospital. And from there, like he was diagnosed bipolar, schizoaffective.
ALOK
This was back in 2011, about a decade before Travis’s Law was passed. The experience showed Brent’s family that if they called for help, trained mental health professionals would come.
After Brent’s diagnosis, he was able to get additional support. He continued to live and work independently. But managing mental illness is rarely linear.
TARA
There's, there's never gonna be something that you just take this pill every day and it, it controls it, it doesn't work like that. It's, it's not like controlling your blood pressure.
ALOK
So Tara and Jay took comfort in knowing they could call the hotline for help.
Then, Brent moved to a more rural county in 2015. Now, he lived more than an hour’s drive away from the rest of his family. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the death of his biological father, Brent started struggling.
So Tara called the hotline again. She told them the same thing: her son was hurting himself. And she needed someone to check on him.
Instead…she was told that the hotline didn’t serve his new zip code.
Here’s how Brent’s sister Stacia remembers it:
STACIA
And they told us that there was no crisis team available in that county. And so, correct me if I'm wrong, we tried for another county and they told us they could not cross county lines.
TARA
Correct.
JAY
Right.
ALOK
Tara was panicked. She was more than an hour away. Brent was refusing her calls. And she wanted someone – a professional – to check in on him ASAP.
So, she dialed 911. She told the dispatcher that her son was having a mental health crisis.
Under Travis’ Law, the dispatcher was supposed to offer to send a crisis response team – with mental health professionals trained to respond to these kinds of situations. In addition to police or EMTs, as they see fit.
Instead, the dispatcher only offered to send a police officer to check on Brent.
She wasn’t sure what else to do.
While she began the hour-long drive, a local officer checked on Brent. He called Tara, and reported that Brent had answered the door. Tara was relieved, and continued the drive. Brent had calmed down by the time she arrived.
But over the coming weeks, they repeated this cycle a few more times.
Brent’s family placed around eight 911 calls between September and December of 2022. Each time, they would explain that their son was experiencing a mental health crisis. And each time, the dispatcher would send a local police officer.
In December of 2022, Brent’s family made one final call to 911.
When the police showed up, things got worse. Brent was said to be holding a knife. The cops called in a SWAT team. The family tried to calm things down.
Ultimately, Brent was shot and killed by the police officers.
The Sibley County Sheriff's Office was not able to be reached for comment.
TARA
The worst part about this too is I was completely unaware that Travis's law existed until after Brent died. If I would've known that law existed, I would've lost my shit on Sibley County when I called and said, you need to send somebody. This is a law.
ALOK
Brent’s family was left to pick up the pieces.
When they started speaking out, they met Michelle Gross. And then, they realized that the resources that had been asking for – they had a legal right to.
Through Communities United Against Police Brutality, they realized they weren’t alone in this fight. Other families across Minnesota were dealing with their own experiences with mental health and police.
CLAUDIA
My child didn't get killed. But at the same time, his livelihood, he's alive, but his livelihood is gone. So he's like living dead.
ALOK
That’s Claudia Sago. Like Tara, she has an adult son, Jomari, who faces significant mental health challenges.
CLAUDIA
He gives me a hard time a lot of times, but however, I love him anyway. He's a determined person, you know, even against the odds, he's still got this, I can do this or I got this attitude, you know? And a lot of times I have to step back because I'm looking at him like, for real, you know? But however, he usually normally do show me that, you know, he's capable of doing what he say he can do.
ALOK
With the onset of the pandemic, Jomari lost his job. He was also in the midst of a divorce. He went to the hospital to seek help, but before he got inside…
He got into an altercation with police that left him permanently injured.
Jomari had medical bills. He needed constant care. And he was facing criminal charges for the incident. Claudia wasn’t sure where to turn…
CLAUDIA
I'm 75. And, um, so I had no help. I had to do what I gotta do.
ALOK
And then a local librarian told her about the CUAPB. Claudia called the hotline, and got in touch with Michelle…
MICHELLE
And then she said her son's name for some reason, like, I didn't make the connection that her son was a guy that had volunteered with us a few years before. I said, oh my God, I cannot believe that this is the guy that volunteered with us before, and now he's been grievously injured by the Minneapolis police.
ALOK
Michelle set Claudia and Jomari up with a lawyer. She’s helping them navigate the charges against him – and to seek justice. The case is ongoing.
Michelle says her goal is to make sure victims and their families feel in control of the process.
MICHELLE
We dissect the case and we start figuring out what needs to be done. But we get people involved in working on their own cases and working on other people's cases, because when a person is harmed by policing, um, it's a very disempowering experience. And so just giving people a bunch of services wouldn't help them regain their sense of personal agency. And that's what we do. We make sure that people regain their sense of power.
ALOK
CUAPB is also creating a sense of community. Which, Claudia and Tara say, has been hugely helpful.
CLAUDIA
It does help because I appreciate people listening and it, it feels like a support group for me because I had no one, I didn't know what to do. I didn't know where to turn and I was just running into dead ends.
TARA
Well, for me it was just being connected with other families that are going through the exact same thing and that we're not alone.
ALOK
And it builds more momentum for change. Victims, their families, and volunteers come together to talk through cases and rally support for policies.
Now, Michelle, Tara, and Claudia are all among the people working to make sure Travis’ Law is enforced.
MICHELLE
We've got another bill of the legislature that's gonna put some teeth into Travis's Law that basically is gonna penalize the, um, individuals who are in charge of 911 if they don't implement Travis’ Law appropriately. And we're gonna put a state agency in charge of the implementation of Travis' Law.
ALOK
Which means anyone calling 911 to report a mental health crisis would be directed to access a mental health crisis team. And that, the families say, is what they want.
JAY
And, and, and heck, if I can get one individual with a mental health illness saved because they decided to send a crisis response team because they didn't want to repeat of Brent. 'cause they know what's gonna happen to them. Excellent. I've made a difference, but I'm not gonna stop there. I have to keep going. I have to get justice for Brent and for so many others.
ALOK
Along with a broader awareness about mental illness.
CLAUDIA
I'm really hoping that the way that they handle the mentally ill people will change.
Come on, be human. And for other people who had went through this or have children that's going through this to understand, you know, be there no matter what. Support and understand that yeah, they have their moments. We all have moments.
JAY
Even if you're not currently dealing with someone who's, who might be, you know, having a health issue or, or something like that, helping to end the stigma just by learning more about it, it, you're, you are making a difference. And you can have an impact on someone's lives just by, just by learning a little bit more.
ALOK
Travis’ Law has the potential to create real change for communities across Minnesota – and even be a model for other states.
Laws to protect people in moments of crisis are just one piece of the puzzle. We also need more proactive care.
YOLO
There's a story that I often tell of a participant of one of our trainings where she shares about how for her mental health journey, um, you know, she lived in the rural south.
ALOK
That’s Yolo Akili Robinson.
YOLO
She had been diagnosed with bipolar, but her faith community, uh, told her that that wasn't real. And for I think almost several years, she struggled, um, with her condition and also didn't have support, largely because she was taught to kind of like center her faith as opposed to centering medication and different kinds of care. And it wasn't until one day that she sat down wIth a stylist, to get her hair done, and she shared with the stylist some of the challenges she was having. And her stylist was like, well, hold on. Bipolar is real. And in that experience of her sitting down with her stylist, getting her hair done, feeling affirmed, and getting connected to care through her stylist, who was like, I know someone you can talk to, all of a sudden she was in care and, and reportedly like, you know, sharing that, like how much that transformed her life.
ALOK
Yolo founded the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective in 2015. The national organization does training based on a model of peer support.
YOLO
Recognizing the ways in which in many Black communities across the United States, the people who were often doing the frontline mental health work were often not social workers and therapists because they weren't available.
ALOK
BEAM’s goal is to spread information about mental health in local communities. And Yolo is focused on making sure Black Americans – who have often faced systemic challenges or barriers to accessing good care – are getting the care they need.
YOLO
So I think the first piece is to understand that like, this isn't about jumping into situations where we have no relationship, right? When we're talking about our work, it's where we're in relationship already with people, right?
ALOK
Through a training program, BEAM equips community members who are already providing care to their peers with additional tools. And, gives them recommendations for other resources if someone is looking for a higher level of care.
It’s a model built on trust – and reaching people where they already are. Plus, people in the training meet and share examples and resources.
YOLO
By training communities on the ground across the United States with skills and tools and strategies to not only advocate for themselves, but for their communities to understand the broader landscape of mental health and what's happening in their communities – and develop a collective movement to really push forward policy and strategies. So the training is really about creating those ecosystems of care.
ALOK
To make real change, we need to be invested. And to be invested, we’ll need support. This isn’t something one person can do alone.
Michelle Gross from Communities United Against Police Brutality has advice for others looking to get involved:
MICHELLE
People who wanna organize against police brutality in their own communities? I think that's wonderful. First of all, you're taking on a noble cause, but don't do it alone. This is not solo work. You need to do this with other people because A, it's hard work. B, it's safer for you to do it with other people. But you also need it because you need perspective. You need to know what other people have experienced at the hands of police. You need to understand, what it looks like to be somebody that's different from you. As soon as you ask the question, you know, a hundred people will jump up and tell you that they've had that experience in your area and you will be able to form a group and get some real work done.
ALOK
Real change takes time. And the work doesn’t stop after a law is passed.
Which is why we can’t do it alone. Communities coming together to push for what’s right is what makes a movement – and that’s what gives me hope.
Whether it’s supporting organizations like these, mobilizing your own community, or even starting fundraisers of your own, ActBlue has the tools and resources to help.
You can learn more about the organizations featured today. Communities United Against Police Brutality, BEAM – and more – at actblue.com/buildthechange.
Build the Change is created in partnership with ActBlue, produced by Wonder Media Network, and hosted by me, Alok Vaid-Menon.
Our production team includes Edie Allard, Lindsey Kratochwill, Sara Schleede, Abbey Delk, Hannah Bottum, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Our executive producer is Jenny Kaplan. Our showrunners are Rohita Javangula and Maria Jose Hurtado.
See you next time!