DENVER – Days after a gunman entered a suburban Denver movie theater, killing 12 moviegoers and injuring 70 others, Gov. John Hickenlooper and Colorado health officials began talking about revamping a state mental-health system that had been devastated by budget cuts.
On Thursday, the Democratic governor signed into law an expansion of mental-health services in response to July’s Aurora shootings. By early next year, the state plans to establish walk-in crisis centers around Colorado, a 24-hour mental-health hotline, and mobile units to travel to rural areas where access to mental-health services is limited.
Lawmakers budgeted nearly $20 million for the expansion, which includes more short-term residential services.
Thursday’s law was largely inspired by the case of James Holmes, who is charged in the Aurora shootings.
Holmes had been seeing a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado, where he was a graduate student, before the shooting.
That psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, told a campus police officer before the July 20 shootings that Holmes had threatened and intimidated her about a month before. He was not placed on a 72-hour psychiatric hold.
Hickenlooper announced the mental-health initiatives in December, just days after the mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school. He acknowledged at the time that there would never be “fail-safe system” to prevent violence. But he said expanding services would be a wise investment, noting, “The common element of so many of these mass homicides seems to be a level of mental illness.”
Colorado lawmakers also responded to the theater shootings by passing limits on ammunition magazines and broadening background checks to include online and private firearm purchases.
The National Rifle Association opposed those measures. The head of the NRA, David Keene, told The Associated Press around the time the bills were introduced that lawmakers were focusing too much on banning certain guns instead of fixing what he called a “devastatingly broken mental-health system in this country.”
Arvada Democratic Rep. Tracy Kraft-Tharp, a sponsor of the bill to increase mental-health services, said the mass shootings made the issue a priority after years of budget cuts since the 2002 recession.
“The mental-health system received some drastic cuts, and we haven’t been able to recover,” she said.
Currently, some people seeking help go to hospital emergency rooms, where they sometimes can wait for hours. Or they go to the state’s mental hospitals in Pueblo and Fort Logan, where the number of beds has decreased, Kraft-Tharp said.
