Paul Bass file photo
Police and medics attend to people poisoned by a bad batch of K2 on the Green.
Social workers, mental health experts, and medical professionals would respond to certain 911 calls as part of a new community crisis response team envisioned by City Hall.
Mayor Justin Elicker announced that planned new program during a Tuesday afternoon press conference on the second floor of 165 Church St.
The newly pitched program would have the city’s 911 call center dispatch specially trained social workers and healthcare experts to calls for service that are related to behavioral and mental health issues.
The goal of the program would be to provide social services rather than criminal charges or a hospital visit for people in crisis.
Mayor Elicker at Tuesday’s presser.
Flanked to his left and right by top city police, fire, emergency dispatch, and social services staffers, as well as by Clifford Beers CEO Alice Forrester and Connecticut Violence Intervention Project head Leonard Jahad, Elicker said that the new mobile response team plan is still in its early stages.
The city needs to do months of community outreach, issue a request for proposals, evaluate responses from interested service providers, find funding for the project, and then design the program in detail before launching a one-year pilot in mid-2021.
But once in place, he said, the new response team could institute a transformative shift in how the city provides care for people in crisis who are are typically greeted by a police officer or by an ambulance trip to the emergency room.
This program would ensure that “people with the right skills and the right experience arrive to provide the right care at the right time,” Elicker said.
Social services chief Dalal: Move away from band-aid solutions.
City Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal said the team represents an opportunity “to envision a future where law enforcement is not the de facto system for responding to mental health crises.
“An opportunity to transition from band-aid type solutions to a more systemic approach for our neighbors who are in crisis.”
Elicker, Dalal, and Project Fresh Start Coordinator Carlos Sosa-Lombardo said that the crisis response team program would be modeled off of similar non-police response outfits the city has studied in Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Georgia, Iowa, and Massachusetts. One of the best known such programs is CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon.
Elicker said the coming months of community outreach, through community management teams and other venues, would make sure that whatever New Haven adopts is tailored to the specific needs of this community and not just picked up wholesale from elsewhere in the country and made to work here.
How It Works
Project Fresh Start Coordinator Carlos Sosa-Lombardo.
Sosa-Lombardo said that a local community crisis response team would respond primarily to calls for service that are not related to crime or emergency medical care.
Examples of such activities include intoxication, loitering, welfare checks, and psychiatric issues.
“They will answer calls that are mainly related to behavioral health, substance abuse, shelter and basic living,” Sosa-Lombardo said.
Dalal said dispatchers at the city’s 911 call center would be specially trained to determine whether or not to send the new crisis response team instead of police, fire, or ambulance personnel out on a call.
If the new emergency crisis response team members are called in, Sosa-Lombardo said, they would assess the needs of the individual in crisis and then connect that person to other social services at that moment of need.
“These first responders would not be law enforcers,” he said. “They would not carry weapons.” They likely would carry police radios, and could call in the police if they determine law enforcement is needed.
Dalal said that a review of city emergency dispatch data from 2019 showed that up to 11,000 dispatches in New Haven could have been screened and possibly diverted to such a crisis response team.
City 911 call center chief George Peet.
Public Safety Communications Director George Peet, who runs the city’s 911 call center, said that his team receives roughly 7,000 telephone calls a week. Around 2,000 of those calls come through 911, he said, and the rest through the police non-emergency number.
“To see a crisis intervention team is an incredible step in the right direction,” he said. “It’s definitely something we need.”
“Not What Defunding The Police Looks Like”
Chief Reyes: This is not defunding the police.
Police Chief Otoniel Reyes also threw his support behind the program. He said officers are currently called on to respond to “issues that we cannot arrest our way out of” involving deep-seated mental health and social issues like substance abuse disorders and homelessness.
Such a mobile crisis response team would provide a new mechanism for triaging these individuals and helping them get what they need for long-term care, he said.
“This is not what defunding the police looks like,” Reyes said. “This is about providing the right services and making sure that we’re hitting the mark in what we’re all trying to achieve, which is a better city, a healthier city, and better outcomes for our citizens.”
Elicker said that such a program nevertheless does address some of the current “national outcry for change” that has also been felt in New Haven through mass anti-police brutality protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“Throughout our history we’ve put an overemphasis on addressing societal problems with law enforcement,” he said. “Too often police are called to address problems stemming from gaps in social services. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
City staffers and community partners at Tuesday’s presser.
Elicker said that the mobile crisis response team represents one part of a broader reckoning with the historic “criminalization of Black men” as well as with the decades’ long accumulation by police officers of more and more social responsibilities.
Sosa-Lombardo said that other cities that have adopted such programs have seen significant positive impacts such as reduced calls to 911 for non-emergencies that are not related to crime; reduced ambulance trips to hospital emergency rooms; and greater access to a continuum of care for people with mental and behavioral health disorders, all while allowing police more time to dedicate to fighting crime.
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full press conference.
Why waste dollars and sense having trained law enforcement deal with drag-racers ?
New Haven has a highly paid Department of Traffic and Transportation.
Those "professionals" should be able to function without involving the dreaded cops.
Put those "resources" where all the squeaky-wheels cause the most moaning.
Police are better utilized in getting to know and earn the trust of their regular beat.
People.
Let TTP handle automobiles.
It's not rocket surgery.