Crisis-Response Team Ups Its Game

The city’s non-cop crisis crew will now be on call for twice as many hours a day, remain reachable through the night, and respond directly to emergencies without police or fire intervening first.

Those are some the updates for how COMPASS — the crew of city funded social workers and peer counselors known as ​“Compassionate Allies Serving Our Streets” — will do its job as it moves from a pilot program and into a long-term strategy for dealing with mental health and substance abuse crises.

City officials, cops, firefighters, community members, social service workers, and PSAP (911 public safety answering point) workers all gathered Wednesday by Kimberly Triangle — the center of a one-mile radius within which more than a third of all COMPASS responses have taken place over the past year — to announce the formal expansion of the COMPASS initiative.

“Now we’ll be able to work along with the police as well as independently,” putting the program more closely in line with its original goal of taking cops off of calls they may be ill-equipped to answer, said Nebiyou Masresha, a member of COMPASS’s community advisory council.

As Mayor Justin Elicker reminded his audience Wednesday, COMPASS was launched in November following conversations about reimagining policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis cops. The goal was to send mental health specialists to emotionally strenuous scenes where police presence and arrests might either escalate the situation or otherwise prove unproductive.

Between last November and this June 30, COMPASS responded to 537 crises in New Haven. Thirty eight percent of those were emergency calls to which police and fire departments responded prior to calling in COMPASS to support or replace their presence. The remaining 62 percent of responses were instances of independent outreach performed by the COMPASS team, which often involve approaching people living on the streets and connecting them with basic resources like food, showers or shelter.

All of that work was accomplished by a team of two working an eight-hour shift between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. seven days a week. (Read more about what a typical work day for COMPASS staff looks like here.)

Moving forward, COMPASS will deploy two teams of two each day between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. and 4 p.m. through midnight, doubling their hours and expected impact.

When 911/PSAP workers receive emergency calls that do not involve medical, criminal or violent emergencies, they will refer COMPASS workers, rather than cops or firefighters, to the scene.

Since late June, COMPASS Program Director Jack Tebes said, COMPASS has responded directly to about 10 PSAP calls. He said the crew is still taking the transition to direct dispatch slowly and with caution to keep social workers safe.

For example, City Director of Community Resilience Carlos Sosa-Lombardo recalled a recent instance in which COMPASS was sent to relocate a group of people experiencing homelessness whom a caller had described as ​“agitated.” Cops were sent as backup to COMPASS, standing nearby so they were ​“far enough away where they’re not gonna excite anybody but near enough that they can respond if needed,” Lombardo said.

Police Chief Karl Jacobson noted that cops are increasingly calling on COMPASS for help as they familiarize themselves with the program. Police referrals made up 82 percent of emergency calls responded to by COMPASS in June; 12 percent were fire referrals and 6 percent direct dispatch. That compares to 69 percent between November and May.

Emotional distress, public disturbances, homelessness, and substance abuse are all issues cops deal with everyday but are often unprepared to adequately handle, Jacobson said. ​“Arrests aren’t gonna change it.” The ability to call on COMPASS, he said, allows cops ​“another avenue to go instead of thinking to themselves, ​‘I didn’t do anything, I didn’t help at all.’”

“What makes this project so important is that it’s not just about the response to the right call, but about finding the right resource for the individual,” stated COMPASS Coordinator John Labienec. 

He recalled a scenario when he responded to a call for help from cops themselves, who were all unsure how to deal with a mentally unstable man sleeping outside the steps of the police station. 

“He was so paranoid there were people coming to kill him,” Labienec said. ​“He thought the police department was safe because there were guns there. He asked in reference to a shelter, ​“Are there guns there? No? Then why would I go?’” 

Over the coming days, Labienec repeatedly visited the shelter-skeptical individual. One day he took him to Dunkin’ Donuts for a meal. The next day the man agreed to a trip to a shelter to take a shower. On the third or fourth visit, he agreed to stay in transitional emergency housing. After three months there, he was able to find his own apartment and is now working a part-time job. 

“The more resistance you get from somebody the more painful their experience has been,” Labieniec reflected. ​“It takes time to build trust with individuals, and that’s what this team is dedicated to doing. This is something that’s just only going to continue to grow.”

Over the course of the summer, officials said, they plan to hire more COMPASS staff to deploy three teams of workers. That may mean more staff overlapping hours to respond faster to incoming calls or growing COMPASS to run 24 hours a day.

Continuum of Care, the nonprofit contracted by the city to operate COMPASS, recently purchased a house on Winthrop Avenue that will serve as a COMPASS crisis center; read more about that here.