St. Louis Samples Elm City’s ​“Secret Sauce”

Philip Brooks saw two police officers and two trauma clinicians welcomed by a family into their home Tuesday. He has never seen that happen in St. Louis — yet.

Brooks, a community health worker visiting from St. Louis, observed that interaction between a family and two New Haven police officers and two clinicians from the Yale Child Study Center during a ride along. He’s part of a team of police officers, clinical professionals and child advocates who came to the Elm City for two days to observe those interactions up close and personal by riding along with officers and clinicians and participating in a longstanding multi-agency weekly meeting.

The visitors came away impressed with New Haven a 24 – 7 trauma response program with cops and clinicians working together. The New Haven Police Department and the Yale Child Study Center have run their Child Development-Community Policing program for 27 years. The St. Louis visitors plan to launch a similar program back home.

“If we can do it my district, we can do it in any district in the city,” Captain Perri Johnson, District 6 commander for the St. Louis Metro PD, said in a conversation with reporters at the Child Study Center on South Frontage Road Wednesday. ​“I think something like this, with the officers that I do have that want to reach out, it’s something that we can do.”

Johnson said that District 6 is one of the most violent in St. Louis, with 67 shootings last year alone. Already this year, district police officers have collected 225 guns from the streets of the district.

The trip to New Haven grew out of his desire to combat that violence. St. Louis Metro PD as a whole is in the process of rebuilding trust with its citizens after demonstrations erupted in the city in 2017 following the acquittal of a former department police officer who was charged with murdering a black drug suspect.

The department has been under investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice and faced a lawsuit from the ACLU over its handling of demonstrators during those protests.

Despite all that, Johnson said, people want to have a relationship with their police officers. ​“They’ve expressed it,” he said. ​“We just haven’t been able to give a solid platform on what that looks like.”

St. Louis has since hired a new police chief, John Hayden, who has vowed to implement community-based policing. And implementing a program similar to the New Haven-Yale Child Development-Community Policing program could be part of St. Louis’ new community policing strategy.

“It’s A Process”

Jerry Dunn, clinical professor and executive director Children’s Advocacy Services of Greater St. Louis, said that the team has learned in just two days that the partnership between the New Haven police and the Yale Child Study Center is the ​“yeast in the dough, rather than the icing on the cake.”

“This is integrated across your department, across your officers, across your district and the different disciplines,” she said. ​“That’s what I would love to be able to replicate.”

Felice McClendon, project manager for Urban Strategies, a national nonprofit that focuses on mobility for low-income families, said that the replication of the relationship building that New Haven has established will help make the pilot something that St. Louis can sustain even after its funding from the Bureau of Justice runs out.

She said police officers are expected to respond to every possible scenario. To do that well requires the kind of interdisciplinary conversations that the Yale Child Study Center and New Haven police have been engaged in for nearly three decades.

“St. Louis has been known for siloing,” she said. ​“I don’t think there is any city that is not known for that in some way — people stay in their lanes so to speak — and they don’t get the opportunity to have true interdisciplinary conversations. But that’s part of the secret sauce.”

St. Louis Metro PD Officer Larry Dampier said his big takeaway from the visit to New Haven was that the program could play a major role in changing the perception of why the police knock at the door.

“We often say we’re never called for a birthday party,” he said. ​“There’s always a problem when we’re called. Knocking on the door initially the person is like, ​‘I didn’t call you. What do you want?’ The officer and the clinician talking with them say, ​‘There was an incident a couple of weeks ago and we just wanted to talk to you about it.’

“I think that lowered their level of stress and it was more like they’re here to help you,” he added. ​“Letting the kids and parents and adults know that we don’t just knock on the door but we do care, that was my take away for the day. That was the biggest point I learned.”

Steven Marans, director of the Childhood Violent Trauma Center at the Yale Child Study Center, said that other communities have adopted the model developed through his agency’s partnership with New Haven police. It has proven effective in tackling the development of post-traumatic stress disorder. The program has most recently developed a toolkit in collaboration with the International Association of Chiefs of Police to help departments develop responses to children exposed to violence.

“It’s nice that the country as a whole is focusing on children and trauma and trying to rewrite the script on how we’re dealing with these events,” said Newhallville top cop Lt. Renee Dominguez.