2 Years Later, Crisis Response Pilot Yet To Start

Two years to the day after the Elicker Administration first announced plans to launch a non-cop emergency response initiative — and one year after a pilot program was initially supposed to start — the social worker-centered team has still not begun responding to certain 911 calls. 

City public safety departments haven’t even been trained yet on how this nascent program will work.

According to top city officials and the Yale psychiatry professor overseeing the effort, all of that should soon change, now that a contract has been signed, team members have been hired, and the relevant training of police officers, firefighters, and 911 dispatchers is scheduled to take place next month.

That’s the anniversary status check with the city’s long-in-the-works, and long-delayed, community crisis response team.

That City Hall initiative — now known as COMPASS, or Compassionate Allies Serving our Streets — will have specially trained social workers and ​“peers with lived experience” instead of armed police officers respond to certain 911 calls related to homelessness, mental illness, and substance abuse.

Mayor Justin Elicker and Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal first announced plans for such a program at an Aug. 18, 2020 press conference, held in the midst of local and nationwide protests against police brutality. Dalal said at the time that a pilot program for this project should begin in ​“mid-2021.”

These two years later, that pilot — with crisis response team members out in the city, actually responding to certain emergency calls — has still yet to start.

In the view of Elicker, Dalal, and Yale Psychiatry Professor and COMPASS Project Director Jack Tebes, much progress has been made over the past month ever since the city and Yale University signed a final contract for the effort in mid-July.

According to Tebes, that long-awaited COMPASS pilot should finally begin in the early fall, with the new goal start date being some time in October. (In a separate interview Thursday, Dalal declined to say when exactly he thinks the pilot will begin.)

Similar programs are already up and running in other municipalities across the country, including the decades-old CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon, and the new MACRO program in Oakland, California.

“These projects are complicated, and, unfortunately, in government, oftentimes there are many hurdles that make it difficult to get things done as quickly as all of us would like,” Elicker told the Independent in a Thursday morning phone interview. 

“Not a day goes by when I don’t wish we had COMPASS for actual incidents that I run across myself in the city, or hear other people confronting. And I am confident that, once the program is running, our public safety employees and our residents will realize what a great value this program is to the city.”

Contract Signed. Training In September. Pilot In October?

So. What’s the latest?

Dalal told the Independent on Thursday that the city and Yale University signed a contract for the program in mid-July. 

That’s the three-year, $3.5 million deal that the Board of Alders approved on May 3. The contract is designed to allow the project’s programmatic lead, the Consultation Center at Yale — which is a part of Yale University — to work with subcontractor Continuum of Care, the city’s Department of Community Resilience, and other city departments to set up and expand a COMPASS pilot program. 

Click here and here to read more about that contract. Click here to read the final, signed 36-page contract in full.

“I know there was an extensive negotiation period,” Dalal said about that contract. ​“We’re thrilled” that the document has been finalized and signed. 

“Since that time, we’ve had extensive planning discussions with the COMPASS team, the police department, the fire department, PSAP [that is, 911 dispatchers at the city’s Public Safety Access Point], really getting into the details of developing standardized operating procedures and identifying what training staff would need to interact with the COMPASS team.” 

He said the COMPASS team now has to ​“onboard” staff it recently hired, develop a training curriculum for city public safety workers, and then train city police officers, firefighters, and 911 dispatchers on what COMPASS is, when to direct calls to them, and how to interact with them. 

That training should take place in September, Dalal said.

In a separate phone interview with the Independent on Thursday, Tebes — who in addition to being COMPASS’s project director is also the director of the Consultation Center at Yale — confirmed that COMPASS is indeed moving ahead.

He said that the team recently hired two social workers and two ​“peers with lived experience.”

Those are the people who will travel around in the COMPASS van — which the team also now has — responding to certain 911 calls, once the pilot begins. 

In addition to those four recent hires, he said, Continuum of Care has assigned two supervisors to the program.

That means the team has a staff right now of six. Tebes said COMPASS is also actively looking to hire another social worker and another ​“peer with lived experience” to provide weekend coverage for the pilot.

“Our target is early fall,” he said about the new hoped-for start date for the pilot. ​“Our target is October.”

When that pilot starts, he said, it will see a COMPASS team out in the city responding to certain 911 calls eight hours a day, seven days a week. If all goes well, the pilot will then expand to two eight-hour daily shifts.

In between now and October, he said, the team has to finalize its standard operating procedures and training modules for all city first responders. It then has to train city cops, firefighters, and PSAP dispatchers on what to do. 

“We want to make sure everyone is trained before we roll out the program.” That should take place in September.

Why has it taken so long for even a pilot program to start?

Click here to read an Independent article from February of this year, which looked at the source of program delays 18 months after the Elicker Administration’s first announcement — as well as at the shifting timelines for when the pilot should start. Those reasons for delay cited by Dalal and Elicker at the time included an extensive community outreach effort and trouble nailing down a subcontractor that would be the ones to actually hire, train, and employ the social workers and peers with lived experience responding to certain 911 calls.

Tebes pointed to many of the same reasons on Thursday when talking about why it’s taken so long to get this pilot off the ground.

He said the city and Yale held 14 focus groups, three community forums, two ​“co-design sessions” to solicit community input across 2021. The COMPASS group has also put together a ​“community advisory board,” and has participated in a federally supported, interstate effort to study similar community crisis response teams, how they work, and what makes them most effective. And he said the local team has developed a ​“comprehensive evaluation” program and ​“data dashboard” that will allow COMPASS to accurately keep track of who it’s serving and how effective it is at getting people long-term help for their various social service needs.

“We feel like we’re ready now,” Tebes said. ​“We feel like, had we jumped into this when it was first announced, we may not have done due diligence” to make sure this program works.

The newly announced pilot start date of October 2022 comes 24 months after the Elicker Administration first proposed the crisis response team program in August 2020. In October of that year, the alders voted to transfer $100,000 to fund a planning study for the nascent police-alternative initiative. The city then held press conferences about the project throughout 2021, before hosting a town hall at Hillhouse High School in October. That town hall wrapped up a months-long effort of gathering community input on what New Haveners think of this planned emergency first response team transformation. In January of this year, Elicker tapped Carlos Sosa-Lombardo to be the inaugural director of the city’s new Department of Community Resilience, which will oversee the community crisis response team rollout. In March of this year, the city held a celebratory roundtable conversation with U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro about $2 million of federal funding going towards this project. And in May of this year, the alders approved a $3.5 million contract for the project.

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the crisis response team’s original August 2020 press conference.