Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., is pictured on May 3, 2016.

The Lawrence police chief told city commissioners that he supported better data collection regarding officers’ handling of people dealing with mental health issues, but that one of the barriers is having the staff to do it.

“I think we all generally agree that there is some need to address people with mental health challenges,” Chief Tarik Khatib told commissioners at their meeting Tuesday. “More than what we’ve been doing before, some way of tracking it, some way of trying to come up with best practices to try to avoid negative outcomes with the people that are experiencing those challenges.”

But, Khatib continued, putting in place a mental health squad to track the data would require that two to three officers be devoted full-time to the endeavor, and the police department has been having trouble hiring enough staff to keep up with vacancies.

“The timeline is dependent on staffing,” said Khatib, who noted that right now the department is four positions short and due to lose another 10 people in June.

Khatib’s comments were made in response to a new report by Michael Eglinski, city auditor, which concluded that better data collection could strengthen law enforcement responses to people with mental illness.

“An area where we are not yet where we need to be, in terms of the essential elements, is some of the data planning and evaluation approaches,” Eglinski told commissioners. “The data is important to be able to both manage the program but also to show how it is working and whether it is working.”

Data would help evaluate police department programs, as well as other local initiatives, such as the proposal to develop a mental health crisis intervention center in Douglas County. Currently, the data collected by the police department is limited, with the only information available being that law enforcement responded to 615 suicide attempts or threats in 2015, according to the report. Arrests and other interactions with law enforcement in which a mental health issue is involved aren’t tracked.

Improving data collection would be in line with other plans for the police department to collect more data on law enforcement contact with minorities, and would be in addition to other efforts related to mental health. Khatib said that all officers have already taken a mental health first-aid class, and about half have received a 40-hour Crisis Intervention Team training. He said the goal is to have all officers go through CIT training by 2018.

The report made four other recommendations for the police chief. Those include setting specific goals on how to respond to people with mental illness, conducting employee surveys about the mental health squad approach, and developing plans to collect data and evaluate the department’s handling of mental health issues.

City Commissioner Matthew Herbert said he appreciated the efforts being made by the department.

“I appreciate the work that the department is doing proactively, so that we don’t have to respond reactively,” Herbert said.

Commissioner Mike Amyx asked Khatib to return to the commission within 90 days to deliver an update on the police department’s progress on the recommendations.

In other business, the commission:

• Received an extension request during public comment from a representative of the Greyhound bus company. Since December 2015, the commission has granted Greyhound three extensions to continue using the city right-of-way at Sixth and New Hampshire streets, the most recent of which expired on Sunday. City Manager Tom Markus said the city would not require Greyhound to cease using the temporary stop immediately, and the commission agreed to add the issue to the commission’s agenda for Feb. 7 for further discussion.