Three Things To Read This Weekend
1. “We Are Sending The Right Experts To Solve The Right Problems.”
A young woman in Harris County, Texas took a bottle of pills out of her mother’s medicine cabinet and locked herself in her bedroom. The woman’s mother called 911 because she desperately needed help, but she also feared what would happen when the dispatcher sent a sheriff’s deputy to her home. She worried that the presence of an armed law enforcement officer inadvertently could escalate an already volatile situation.
Fortunately, in Harris County, there is a new pilot mobile crisis response program called HART—the Holistic Assistance Response Team—which is based in the county’s public health department and composed of healthcare experts, crisis intervention specialists, and case managers. The 911 dispatcher sent HART to help the young woman, who ultimately left the bedroom and got the care she needed, preventing what could have been a tragic death.
“This is about which expert should respond to a 911 call,” Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who helped spearhead HART’s creation, told Safer Cities: “When it's a robbery in progress, or a shooting, then obviously we need to send an armed sheriff’s deputy. But if we are talking about a person sleeping on a sidewalk, or a teenager who is suicidal and swallowed pills, then we need a behavioral health expert to respond. That’s the kind of crucial work that HART’s crisis intervention specialists do everyday, and this is what it looks like to fully fund public safety in Harris County—we’ve got law enforcement, we’ve got mobile crisis response, and we’ve got community violence intervention. We are sending the right experts to solve the right problems.”
HART launched barely five months ago and recently responded to its 500th call. Not only are HART’s crisis intervention specialists able to de-escalate conflict and stabilize people in the throes of an acute mental health crisis, the team also helps people get to a safe space and connects them with additional support services. Then, in the days and weeks after the initial response, HART’s case managers follow-up with people who need more help. The team handles calls related to mental health, substance abuse, homelessness, and low level infractions such as loitering—fact patterns that typically result in a law enforcement officer arresting and charging a person and booking them into jail.
Commissioner Ellis explained that a lot of the program’s power comes from the basic idea that “public safety is a law enforcement issue but public safety is also a public health issue. By addressing the underlying mental health and substance use needs that led to the 911 call in the first place, HART can resolve the immediate situation, get the person the help they need to stabilize their life, and make it much less likely the person requires an emergency response in the future.”
2. The Albuquerque Community Safety Department Is Now The City’s “Third Branch Of Public Safety”
Across the Texas border in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a more established version of Harris County’s HART program has recently responded to its 10,000th call. Albuquerque Community Safety Department (ACS) is “a city cabinet-level agency [and] the first in the nation to provide a non-law enforcement response to non-emergency incidents involving homelessness, mental health, and substance abuse incidents—dramatically freeing up both law enforcement and fire department resources,” Joseph Kolb described last week in The Crime Report.
KRQE, a local news outlet, explained ACS’s origins and how it works: “Billed by Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller as a professional training civilian force with a ‘public health approach’ to public safety, ACS now has dozens of unarmed social workers who respond to various behavioral health crises. The city said the team would likely respond to mental health, drug addiction, public inebriation, homelessness, ‘down-and-outs,’ and other low-priority calls like abandoned cars and traffic management.” (Listen to the full KRQE podcast on how “social workers are responding to crises in Albuquerque.”)
The program counts Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina as a fan: “This innovative new department is already helping to free up our officers so they can respond to high-priority calls. This third branch of public safety bridges a gap, and provides residents with the response they deserve,” the chief wrote last Fall.
3. An Interview With Megan McGee, Police Special Projects Manager, St. Petersburg Police Department.
Safer Cities recently covered a mobile crisis response program in St. Petersburg, Florida called the Community Assistance and Life Liaisons (CALL), which is a joint project between the police department and Gulf Coast Jewish Family Community Services. The central premise behind CALL is that police officers are asked to wear too many hats and other experts can help share the load. The person most responsible for CALL’s creation is Megan McGee, Special Projects Manager at the St. Petersburg Police Department. She sat down with Safer Cities to discuss CALL, which recently responded to its 6,500th call—all of them with “zero incidents, injuries, or life threatening situations.” Here’s McGee in her own words:
On why a police department houses a non-police mobile crisis response team:
“We have the perfect ingredients to fight crime and have an appropriate response to mental health situations. We can have both. [We said to officers] we are taking these kinds of calls off of your plate, it’s not that you did them wrong, but it’s what if someone else can do it better. Let’s look for someone who is better qualified to respond to these types of calls. The chief wasn’t sold on co-response [where an armed officer and a civilian handle calls together], because he said there are enough calls that are non-violent and non-criminal that we can completely divert these.”
On how police officers feel about CALL:
“No one came to me and fought the program. This was a big win for the officers. You can hear that from the officers and the communication center folks. [And] having the top down support from the chief was huge. There were a lot of questions on safety, but there was no pushback from the officers. We have officers who are highly trained in crisis response, but they certainly could acknowledge that they were limited in what they could do with these kinds of calls. Officers shared that at certain times they felt frustrated that they were limited in what they could do [when responding to calls that involve “frequent flyers” often with underlying mental health or substance use issues that require dozens or even hundred of call responses], especially when it felt like, ‘I know I’m going to come back to that house in a month and it could be worse.’”
On how it works and is working:
“The navigators respond in pairs. They are at least at a bachelors level [and also] there is always a clinical supervisor available as well … and the program director is also licensed … CALL never closes a client. They do as much follow-up as needed so that the client can get engaged with long term services. They do the crisis response, then do follow up, and longer term follow up, they are excellent about that … And 95% of their calls happen without law enforcement engagement, and interestingly, the most common reason they request law enforcement is when it’s a mental health transport [and] it’s literally just assisting them in the transport.”
On one example of CALL’s impact:
“A teenager and mother [were] having an ongoing conflict in the home which produced several 911 calls daily due to the child's behavior. Behavior would include breaking windows in the home, breaking car windows, running away and being rough with other children in the home. Law enforcement asked for CALL’s aid in connecting the family with services to reduce and prevent police interaction. After working with the family for several months and connecting not only the juvenile, but her mother, to various in-home supports, the child is now employed part-time, attending school, getting excellent grades, and there have been no calls for service at that residence since.”
