Crisis-Response Crew Adds Third Shift

The city’s non-cop crisis response team will now be on call until 3 a.m. each day — with double the staffers working during the peak hours of 7 to midnight — as the Elicker administration again expands its effort to send social workers and not police to certain 911 calls about homelessness, mental health, and substance abuse.

Mayor Justin Elicker, city Department of Community Resilience Director Tirzah Kemp, Elm City COMPASS Director Jack Tebes, city Public Safety Communications Director Joseph Vitale, city Police Chief Karl Jacobson, and a host of others gathered outside the Fair Haven police substation at 295 Blatchley Ave. Wednesday afternoon to announce and celebrate that expansion of the Elm City COMPASS program.

COMPASS, which stands for ​“Compassionate Allies Serving Our Streets,” grew out of the city’s response to the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the subsequent local and nationwide movement for police reform.

After two years of planning, the team — overseen by the city and run by city-hired contractor Continuum of Care — launched in November 2022 with one two-person team deployed each day between 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The program expanded in July 2023 to two two-person teams and two daily shifts covering 8 a.m. to midnight.

And now, as announced on Wednesday, three two-person COMPASS teams will be on call across three different shifts between 8 a.m. to 3 a.m., every day of the week. 

Those shifts will take place between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., between 4 p.m. and midnight, and between 7 p.m. and 3 a.m. The final two shifts of each day will therefore overlap between 7 p.m. and midnight, meaning two teams will be on call during that time, which Elicker described as when most COMPASS-relevant 911 calls are made. COMPASS now employs six full-time crew members and six part-time workers to handle these three shifts.

Elicker and Vitale also said that COMPASS will now be directly deployed to certain 911 calls — primarily those involving people loitering, speaking to themselves, or sleeping on benches — unassisted by police. Jacobson said that the COMPASS teams will have police radios and will be able to call for law enforcement help if they need it. But, now, for the first time in a sustained way rather than as just a pilot, COMPASS will respond to certain 911 calls solo.

As Elicker, Kemp, Tebes, and COMPASS Coordinator John Labienec said, each two-person COMPASS team consists of one licensed social worker and one ​“peer specialist” with lived experience of addiction, mental health challenges, or homelessness.

Elicker said that, since launching in November 2022, COMPASS has responded to more than 1,600 calls. See the chart above for a breakdown of call types; click here to read the latest full COMPASS report. Tebes told the Independent that around 90 percent of these responses have been for different individuals in crisis; the remaining 10 percent have been ​“repeat” calls for people whom COMPASS has responded to multiple times. 

As an example of the types of calls the crew responds to, one COMPASS team member told the Independent that, earlier on Wednesday, she responded to a Yale police call for help regarding a man who had laid down blankets on the sidewalk in front of the university’s downtown campus. She said the COMPASS team took the man to a Hill clinic where he is a patient so he could receive his scheduled methadone dose; they then drove him to Continuum’s recently opened Rapid Evaluation, Stabilization, and Treatment (REST) hub on Winthrop Avenue.

The city’s COMPASS program provides an ​“empathetic, compassionate, humane, and trauma-informed approach to care,” Kemp said.

“For the first time,” added Tebes, ​“we have comprehensive supports at a system level for when someone calls 911 with a mental health crisis.” That network of care is not perfect or complete, he said. But, with the help of COMPASS, it is getting better.