Non-Cop Crisis Team Alternative Advances

A new mobile crisis response team that would have social workers rather than cops respond to certain 911 calls won a vote of support, as committee alders unanimously endorsed transferring $100,000 in city funds towards paying for a planning study for the program.

That vote took place Monday night during the regular monthly meeting of the aldermanic Finance Committee. The four-hour virtual meeting was held online via the Zoom video conferencing platform and on YouTube Live.

During the meeting, local legislators unanimously backed transferring $25,000 from vacant salary budget lines in each of four different departments: the city assessor’s office, the health department, the department of recreation and youth services, and the parks and public works department.

That $100,000 in aggregate, if approved by the full Board of Alders, would go instead to the Community Services Administration in order to fund a planning study for the proposed crisis response team.

Modeled after community response teams already in place in other cities and states across the country, New Haven’s version would send out social workers and healthcare experts to calls for service that are related to behavioral and mental health issues, substance abuse, and homelessness.

City social services chief Mehul Dalal and city reentry services director Carlos Sosa-Lombardo said Monday that the $100,000 in requested transfers would be used to pay a qualified contractor to lead the planning process for such a program.

Additional money — from the city or the state or private partners or some other source to be determined — would be needed to get a six-month pilot off the ground. This initial planning study, Dalal said, is a necessary first step in making that pilot, and potentially a new full-time city crisis response team, an on-the-ground reality in New Haven.

“We have an opportunity here to do great things in changing the way we address situations in our communities,” said City Administrative Officer Scott Jackson during Monday’s hearing. ​“That’s what this is all about. We don’t have all the answers. That’s what this study is for, and that’s what we’re trying to finance at this point.”

Mayor Justin Elicker and a host of top city officials — including the police chief, the fire chief, and the head of the city’s Public Safety Communications department, which handles 911 calls — first announced the planned new crisis response team idea this summer. City officials are in the process of pitching the program to community management teams across the city.

Learned The Lessons Of LEAD?

Dalal said during a brief presentation to the aldermanic committee Monday that the impetus for the new program came in part from the recent local, statewide, and national uprising against police brutality and rethinking of the proper role of law enforcement in addressing systemic causes of social disorder.

“In New Haven and nationally, it’s well known that police, fire and EMS are overburdened with situations that go beyond crime and medical emergencies,” he said.

“We know that the current first response system is not really optimized to deal with chronic homelessness and mental health disorders.”

Dalal and Sosa-Lombardo said that a city review of 911 calls for service in 2019 revealed up to 11,000 ​“lower acuity” calls that could be screened and transferred to a community crisis response team. He said the emphasis of the program would be ​“deescalation, harm reduction and rapid connection to services,” with social workers who respond to such calls trained and equipped to call in relevant social service providers on the spot.

Sosa-Lombardo said that the city is looking to hire a contractor to solicit community input on such a program, intensively study how similar programs work in other parts of the country, and develop a strategic plan for how to implement a New Haven-specific pilot, pending availability of other funding.

“It is abundantly clear that if you’re going to implement a program like this, it has to be intentionally planned,” Dalal said. There has to be valid community input, particularly in regards to how and when police respond to certain calls of service. There has to be a deep study of existing systems of support and service providers that can be partnered with and built on top of, as opposed to replaced by a redundant new program. And there has to be attention paid to the unique conditions of New Haven and how such a program might fit the contours of this city, as bringing in a program developed for another part of the country and hoping it works here too.

“We’ve learned from the lessons of the LEAD program, where you can’t just take a program off the shelf that worked in another city and plop it down in New Haven and expect it to work,” Dalal said in reference to the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program that was championed by the previous mayoral administration, garnered little participation and much criticism, and ultimately flamed out. He said it’s important to take lessons learned from other cities, and also to adapt such program to a New Haven-specific context.

How would this $100,000 be spent? asked Finance Committee Vice-Chair and Westville Alder Adam Marchand. ​“We need to feel like the concept is strong enough to warrant taking these funds from other places and putting them here” as opposed to dedicating this unused money towards another part of the city budget.

Dalal said the money would be used to fund a contractor who would be tasked, first and foremost, with developing a ​“feasible operational plan” for such a program. That means, among other tasks, doing a deep dive on the city’s 911 dispatch system and proposing, when a call comes in, how exactly dispatchers will determine that a call is low acuity enough to warrant triaging to a mobile crisis response team.

Board of Alders President and West River Alder Tyisha Walker-Myers asked if the city plans to use any notes gleaned from the LEAD pilot and experiment. ​“Are we going to use any of that information that we collected from that program to see whoever’s going to be in charge of building out a better program?” she asked. ​“Are we going to use better data?”

Dalal said the city has access to the full evaluation report of the LEAD pilot, and will use whatever relevant data it can. However, ​“that was a very different model” than the proposed community crisis response team.

While LEAD centered law enforcement involvement, encouraging police officers to actively redirect low-level drug offenders towards social services, this program does the opposite, leading with social workers and having them call in police if necessary.

Board of Alders Majority Leader and Westville/Amity Alder Richard Furlow cautioned that this program strikes him as ​“more of a response to public outcry than having something done systematically” about figuring out the proper role of law enforcement and social service providers in responding to certain 911 calls.

“As elected officials, we of course need to represent the people,” he said, ​“but we need to move cautiously and make sure that this is the best use of city funds.”

During the discussion portion of the meeting, East Rock Alder Charles Decker threw his support behind the planned fund transfer, the proposed study, and the ultimate adoption of such a community crisis team program locally.

“Reducing the contact between the criminal justice system and people for nonviolent — not even offenses, for nonviolent activity is an idea whose time is well past due.”

“I would not want this just to be a study,” he continued. ​“I would want to definitely figure out how, once the study is done, how we actually turn this into action into a program.”