1 Month In, Crisis Team Has Responded To 60 Calls So Far

New Haven’s new COMPASS team of social workers and ​“peer recovery specialists” has responded to 60 calls so far in its nascent effort to provide non-police help for people in crisis — and the city should know by this spring just how successful this intervention initiative has been. 

Jack Tebes and John Labiniec offered those updates Monday night during the latest regular monthly meeting of the East Rock Community Management Team.

They presented on the latest with COMPASS, or Compassionate Allies Serving our Streets, a city-run program that launched on Nov. 1 that sends social workers and people who know addiction and mental health struggles first-hand out to certain 911 calls related to homelessness, mental health, or substance abuse.

The two COMPASS team leaders spoke about how the city likely won’t know until the spring just how well the recently launched effort is working. 

That’s because success will be defined not only by whether the team gets someone suffering from a mental health or addiction crisis to an emergency service doorway, but, as importantly, if and how longer-term services are effectively provided, and if they stick. And that takes longer evaluation time.

That was the hopeful if sobering report that COMPASS Program Director (and Yale Psychiatry Professor) Jack Tebes and services director (and Continuum of Care Vice President) John Labieniec provided Monday night to two dozen management team participants gathered both in-person at mActivity gym on Nicoll Street and online via Zoom.

Tebes’ Monday night presentation was the second edition of taking the COMPASS presentation on the road to all the city’s management teams and other venues to inform residents about the group’s work so far. (The first such presentation took place on Nov. 22 to the Newhallville Community Management Team.)

The COMPASS (Compassionate Allies Serving Our Streets) program is the fruit of two years of community planning and coordination among city service providers following mass protests sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. 

It is in a pilot phase that features one team in action responding to calls eight hours a day; 911 dispatchers do not call them at first, but wait for a referral from a cop or firefighter on scene.

The plan is to expand the program to deploy a second and hopefully a third team next year, said Tebes, with around-the-clock shifts, and to have the teams called out directly when police or firefighters aren’t needed or aren’t the responders best trained for a mental-health, addiction, eviction, or homeless crisis.

Click here for a story about how the team responded to a mental health crisis occasioned by an eviction earlier this month.

In a press conference after the first week, the city reported 23 incidents had been responded to. On Monday night, Tebes said that by close to the month’s end the team has already logged 60 interventions.

Other cities where COMPASS-type programs have been implemented report that the social work and peer recovery teams are successfully handling upwards of 10 percent of calls that previously might have been answered by police services.

Among the many types of calls responded to thus far in New Haven, Labieniec offered on Monday night as general examples and scenarios: ​“suicides, depressed folks needing someone to talk to, but not the police, intoxication calls, outreach to the homeless, and helping when a child is being removed from home.”

Labieniec said he has been working with Continuum of Care for 20 years and he finds the COMPASS program one of the most exciting and promising initiatives he’s worked on. 

To a very attentive and supportive East Rock audience he described other scenarios that have occurred or most likely will: ​“We can be helpful with persons talking to themselves, those who want the police to step away. We’ve also been able to take people out of the woods and get them to services and the police and fire have been very supportive. We have a van and we’ve transported people to the soup kitchen, to the shelter, to a program.”

What the team cannot do, he added, is admit someone to a hospital without consent. 

“We are also following cases with people who fall between the cracks. We’re effective with those folks and with working with family members, for example, to help them navigate a system with relatives who have a child with mental illness.”

Asked in a follow-up email on Tuesday about the most frequent kinds of calls that COMPASS has responded to so far, Tebes told the Independent: ​“So far after 4 weeks of operations, we have made over 60 crisis responses to individuals in New Haven. About one third are through direct outreach by the COMPASS crisis response team and about two-thirds are at the request of first responders (NHFD or NHPD).”

“Among the most common examples of crisis response thus has been to assist individuals who are unhoused with housing,” Tebes continued. ​“We have done outreach throughout New Haven. We also have frequently support the NHFD and NHPD at their request to assist individuals they encounter with significant mental health challenges. In both types of responses our efforts are to provide the right services at the right time to individuals in crisis, and whenever possible, reduce referrals to hospital emergency departments or psychiatric hospitalization unless that is absolutely necessary.” 

When an East Rocker asked on Monday night whether the management team will receive a kind of monthly incident report, of the kind that the police district managers generally provide to the CMT, Tebes and Labieniec’s answer was complicated, because the cases and the programs are, well, complicated.

“We’ve had 60 crisis responses,” said Labieniec, ​“but we don’t know yet exactly what’s happened to them. There’s been a 24-hour follow-up, but we need to do a 30-day follow up, and that’s going to be very useful. We won’t have the 30-day follow-up until February.”

That 30-day follow-up will tell the program directors not only if the immediate crisis has been addressed, but as importantly, ​“Did people get the services needed? Were there barriers? We have already many complex cases requiring follow-up and we’re doing that piece. That’s important data to show it’s working.”

“Then we want to go back to the service providers,” added Tebes, “’Here is what we are learning about the service, or how it doesn’t stick.’ And then [the service providers] start to do things to deal with or alter what they do, and then there is another report on what they do. So there is a kind of staging and building a better system.”

And that’s why, Tebes concluded, COMPASS’s hoped-for success can’t be determined immediately, because the issue is not just responding to people in the moment of crisis but improving the provision and coordination over time of longer-term care and solutions that ​“stick.”

Tebes said that the group’s 21-member community advisory board will see the results right after they are presented to the mayor and the alders –and then the public. That board’s input is also critical to evaluating the success of COMPASS, Tebes added.

“We will present findings, to come in stages, and you should expect something in the spring.”