Dalal: Take time to do it right.
The start date for a pilot program of the Elicker Administration’s non-cop emergency response initiative has been pushed back yet again — as the city looks to sign on a subcontractor to train, employ, and supervise social workers and mental-health professionals to respond to certain 911 calls.
That’s the latest with the Elicker Administration’s long-in-the-works — and repeatedly delayed — plans for changing up how the city responds to some emergency calls related to homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health issues.
Mayor Justin Elicker and city Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal first announced plans for that program — dubbed the “community crisis response team” — in August 2020, a response to “Black Lives Matter” protests calling for changes in policing.
In August 2020, the mayor and Dalal estimated the pilot would begin in mid-2021. In May 2021, they said the pilot should start in the fall of 2021. In August 2021, they said the pilot would begin in January 2022. In January, inaugural Department of Community Resilience Director Carlos Sosa-Lombardo said the pilot would launch in the “first quarter” of this year.
Now the estimated pilot start date has been pushed back yet again.
Asked for an update on Friday, Elicker and Dalal told the Independent that the mobile crisis team plans have hit a few speed bumps as of late.
Latest guess for when the pilot might roll out? In a few months.
A subcontractor that had previously agreed to provide specially trained workers for the program backed out during budget negotiations after learning about the extent of liability and supervision the project entails.
Dalal said the city and the project’s main contractor and “programmatic lead,” the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC), have found a new subcontractor for the initiative. The city is currently in “late-stage budget negotiations” with this new potential subcontractor, he said.
After that contract is signed, the subcontractor will need to hire and train staff and procure the necessary vehicles for the program.
Only after all that is done can a six-month, on-the-ground pilot program begin to help the city figure out if this crisis response team is worth holding on to for the long run.
Without giving a specific start date, Dalal said the pilot will likely not begin for a few months.
“We’re trying to get this started as fast as we can,” he said. He said the city has to balance the urgency of the need for a program like this, with the importance of setting up a program that is effective and sustainable.
Other cities like Denver and Portland took up to three years to get their similar crisis response teams off the ground, he claimed.
“There’s still a point to do this,” Dalal said, even if it’s taken longer than expected.
Paul Bass file photo
Police and medics attend to people poisoned by a bad batch of K2 on the Green.
The newly announced delay comes 18 months after the Elicker Administration first proposed the crisis response team program in August 2020 in the midst of that year’s mass protests against police brutality. In October of that year, the alders voted to transfer $100,000 to fund a planning study for the nascent police-alternative initiative. The city then held press conferences about the project throughout 2021, before hosting a town hall at Hillhouse High School in October. That town hall wrapped up a months-long effort of gathering community input on what New Haveners think of this planned emergency first response team transformation. In January of this year, Elicker tapped Sosa-Lombardo to be the inaugural director of the city’s new Department of Community Resilience, which will oversee the community crisis response team rollout.
All the while, the expected start date of the pilot has been pushed back and back and back, as it has been again.
Elicker also told the Independent on Friday that, even with these delays, the crisis response team is worth pursuing, and worth taking time to get right.
“We currently don’t have a good tool to address many of the challenges that consistently come up in the community around substance use disorder and mental health,” he said. “We regularly get community members who are concerned because there are individuals that are disruptive or struggling with issues, and the police response is just not appropriate.”
“We don’t have the right solution,” he continued. “I think it’s very, very important that we have this solution.”
He pointed back to the city’s adoption of the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program under the previous mayoral administration. That program was developed in Seattle, he said, and wound up not being a good fit in New Haven before Elicker’s administration ended the pilot soon after he took office in January 2020. One of the reasons that program didn’t work, he said, was that the city “didn’t spend enough time talking to community partners, building consensus” around what the program can and should achieve.
The mayor was asked about how this project appears to be delayed not just because of extended community input, but also problems hiring contractors and subcontractors to work it. Elicker responded that the delays have indeed arisen from both deliberate planning and unexpected staffing problems.
Asked for when he would like to see the pilot begin, Elicker replied, “I would like to have seen this start yesterday.”
Asked for a date in the future when he expected to see the pilot begin, he replied, “I don’t want to give you a date,” and deferred to Dalal’s estimate that the pilot should begin in a few months.
In response to the Police Accountability Act, Branford hired a social worker to work in the police department. This worker is not a police employee, but a town Counseling Center employee. However, she works directly with police, taking over when police encounter people with mental health and social needs. Police remain the first responders, but she is a second responder, following up to ensure people get the services they require with the goal being that the police will not need to respond to them again.