Non-Cop Crisis Team Pitched To West Siders

You can’t throw a rock in New Haven without hitting a nonprofit organization, quipped one neighbor.

Yale-New Haven Hospital services are all over the place. And there already are mobile units out there from a range of state and local mental health services.

So why does the city need for yet a new agency, however worthy, especially when government budgets are so tight?

That criticism arose at the latest neighborhood discussion of a brewing effort to create a mobile crisis response team to handle many nonviolent 911 calls currently taken by police.

Instead of getting their back up at such criticism, organizers of the effort said that’s precisely the kind of community input they wanted to hear — an address.

The interchange played out Wednesday night at the regular meeting of the Westville/West Hills Community Management Team, which drew more than 30 participants and was chaired by Josh Van Hoesen via the Zoom teleconferencing app.

The newly pitched program would have the city’s 911 call center dispatch specially trained social workers and healthcare experts to calls for service 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; and to deescalate potentially dangerous encounters.

Earlier this month the Board of Alders voted to transfer an aggregate of $100,000 from four vacant salary budget lines in four different departments to fund a planning study for the proposed crisis response team. The idea is that the study, including soliciting community input, will result in a pilot to be launched some time next year.

Read about that here.

Wednesday night’s pitch was the second to community management teams for city Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal and Community Service Administration (CSA) Project Fresh Start Director Carlos Sosa-Lombardo.

Last month they took their road show to the Fair Haven community management team, where it was received with sympathy along with practical questioning of just how it would work, and where the funding will come from.

Among the West Hillians and Westvillians, a good number of whom have social services professional experience, the questioning Wednesday evening was more pointed.

“You can’t throw a rock without hitting a nonprofit,” said Dawn Bliesner. ​“I realize there are many non-emergency calls, but I don’t know it’s to a crisis level that it has to be a new agency. We have APT, we have drug addiction recovery programs on every block.”

“This is exactly the feedback we want, the engagement at this early stage,” said Dalal. ​“We don’t want to create new infrastructure. We want to build on those nonprofits that already do mobile crisis work.”

State Rep. Pat Dillon, who represents Westville and whose background is in community health, brought up a specific instance: ​“How does this work on the ground differ from the teams we fund currently out of DHMAS,” the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services?

“Those are more like case management services for people who have severe mental illness,” replied Sosa-Lombardo. ​“This would be different. This would be a mobile team responding not only to 911, but out there following up with high utilizers and also in the hot spots identified by police and fire.”

“There are a number of the cases, families I’m aware of, it was hard to see the bright line between criminal justice and an emerging psychotic episode,” Dillon said. She said these cases often involves ​“a 17 to 24-year-old male who would have entered the criminal justice system, but they were delusional, throwing a computer on the floor, threatening to blow up a post office. This is a real case. Going forward we need to better understand how this differs from the mobile teams we already have, which are not adequate, and how people would be funneled in and followed up.”

“We’ve been in extensive conversation with DHMAS and CMHC, and this would be an added service, synergistic and complementary,” replied Dalal.

“We already triage a lot of calls through 211,” said Alice Corrigan.

“It’s a complement to 211,” Dalal replied. ​“This would be a different access point.”

“From personal experience many of my clients when we do their safety plans, many do not call 911; we put it in a hierarchy,” Corrigan noted.

City budget gadfly Dennis Serfillippi turned the conversation to funding.

“My sense is conceptually it’s a hard program to argue with,” he stated.

“What doesn’t make sense is how the city could fund this study at $100,000 when you have the FRAC [Financial Review and Audit Commission] asking for a study of police and fire. The city hasn’t funded those basic studies, and over the next five years the city will spend millions on police and fire, and we don’t know if it’s spent appropriately. ow we fund this program carving it out separately. We call the police if we have a noise disturbance. This is not a good use. I don’t know how this jumps the queue.”

Local businessman Lenny Speiller said he supports the project idea in part because down the road it could save government through harm reduction and alternatives to incarceration.

Dalal said he has seen such savings reflected in some studies, though those students have not been peer-reviewed. Once a pilot it set up, he said, the city will look at if it saves money on police time, as well as the financial impact on hospitals and state social services.

Westville Village Renaissance Alliance (WVRA) Director Elizabeth Donius expressed support for the program. ​“I’ve had a few situations that could have been addressed in the village by this,” she said. She hailed the police officers who de-escalated the situations, including ​“tracking down a caseworker for the individual who was on the border of being violent.”

Following up in this manner and connecting individuals with services should be part of the mission of the proposed team, she said.

The meeting confirmed what official have already found in this planning stage, said Dalal: that there is ​“substantial interest in community input” in formulating and configuring the ultimate service.

“Contrary to the presentation in the media,” said Dalal, ​“this is not only planning. There’s a six-month planning process involving the community, but then we launch a pilot in the field as early as the fall of 2021.”