Thomas Breen photos
Nebiyou Masresha at Thursday night’s town hall on the city’s emerging “crisis response team” plan.
Speaking up, clockwise from top left: Sylvia Cooper, Marcus Spinner, Bill Morico, Krystal Augustine, Celeste Fulcher, Rick DelValle.
As an Afghanistan War veteran who suffers from PTSD, a suicide prevention specialist, and a social worker-in-training, Nebiyou Masresha knows what does not help a person experiencing a mental health crisis: A police officer pointing a gun in their face.
Masresha offered that take Thursday night during an emotional, cathartic, and cautiously optimistic town hall held in the Hillhouse High School cafeteria on Sherman Parkway.
In Hillhouse’s cafeteria.
He spoke up during a 100-person gathering convened by the city’s Community Services Administration (CSA) along with the Connecticut Mental Health Center, CommuniCare, the city library, the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, and The Consultation Center at Yale.
The purpose of the two-hour meeting was to solicit public input on one of the Elicker Administration’s most ambitious — if still nascent — proposals for how to transform New Haven’s emergency first response system.
That is, a so-called “community crisis response team” that will send social workers and trained mental health professionals instead of police officers to certain 911 calls related to homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health.
City social services chief Mehul Dalal.
“We’ve heard a lot about the gaps and potential downsides of calling 911” as it exists today, city Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal told the crowd.
“What this program means to do is send an appropriately qualified team trained in mental health issues, trained around substance abuse issues, trained in deescalation, to go to calls where appropriate, and handle the situation on the scene.”
The program, which the Elicker Administration first announced in August 2020, is still in the planning stage. Comments gathered from Thursday night’s in-person meeting, two previous virtual town halls, and a dozen-plus focus groups will make their way into a report that the city and the Connecticut Mental Health Center will use to inform a future pilot of the crisis response team in action.
Anyone interested in sharing their thoughts on the program with the city can do so by clicking here, or by sending an email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), or by texting or calling 475 – 212-2510.
Shirley Lawrence (right).
Even as many who turned out for Thursday’s meeting were cautiously optimistic about a 911 response team better trained to respond to mental health episodes, the overall tone of the meeting was much heavier.
Newhallville community activist Shirley Lawrence perhaps captured that somber and reflective note best when she said, “Where I come from, the whole neighborhood is traumatized. Our neighborhood is traumatized. There’s not enough words to explain what we’re going through, waking up with dead bodies in the back yard and the front yard.
“For those that don’t experience that, for you to sit back and say, ‘That’s in that neighborhood’ … We can’t do it by ourselves. We’re going to need people from all walks of life to come and help us. And we need it, like, yesterday.”
Goal: Deescalation
Kay Reynolds (right).
Thursday night’s meeting was loosely structured around several prompts, such as: What has your experience been calling 911 for a family member or friend experiencing a mental health crisis? What kinds of trained professionals do you think should respond in such situations?
The roughly two dozen people who spoke up over the course of the meeting offered what felt at times like different melodies in a polyphony of hurt, disappointment, and trauma.
Masresha, who served in the national guard in Afghanistan and who is currently getting a master’s degree in social work from Quinnipiac University, said he has spoken with fellow veterans who have had police officers point guns at them while they are in the midst of a mental health episode.
Treating someone who is “suicidal” like they are “homicidal” does not help at all, he said. “The police tend to escalate the situation, coming in with weapons drawn. Bringing in a social worker would be much easier, because they know how to deescalate,” he said.
Kay Reynolds said that, based on her firsthand experience with police responding a crisis call at home, she has lost all faith in New Haven officers.
“When the police are dispatched to a person in crisis, the unfortunate part is they treat that person in distress like a criminal,” she said. “That is not deescalation. It actually makes the person worse.” She said she has experienced police officers who are “rude” and “insensitive. At times, they are threatening and disrespectful. That’s no way to deescalate.”
Addie Kimbrough.
Newhallville alder candidate Addie Kimbrough said that, when she used to work at the Columbus House homeless shelter, she saw police “rough up” people going who were clearly going through withdrawal for a drug addiction.
She also recalled a time when she called 911 on a man who was “really drunk” late at night on Dixwell Avenue. She stuck around to make sure the man was OK. “Police just threw him around,” she said. “That’s not what people need. They need help.”
A West River resident spoke about recently calling 911 because a neighbor was “in distress.” By the time the ambulance arrived, the man appeared to be doing better. He refused medical care and went back into his home. But the ambulance stuck around until police officers arrived, and then police officers wound up going into the man’s home. “I don’t want to call police for my neighbors that I don’t know very well and have it become harmful,” she said.
Nish Pandya.
Nish Pandya, a pediatrician at Yale Children’s Hospital, said he has “lost count of the number of kids we’ve taken care of in the emergency room” going through the exact situation that so many described on Thursday.
That is: a kid is in distress, a parent calls 911, a police officer arrives and, ill equipped to help with the mental health episode, winds up only agitating the child further.
“The police they’ve interacted with have not helped deescalate the situation,” he said, “If anything else, they’ve escalated it further.”
Pandya and several others who spoke up Thursday praised the prospect of having a trained mental health professional respond to such calls. They also spoke about the need for having people nearby who a person in crisis trusts — a family member, a friend, a neighbor — so that that person experiencing a mental health episode is not just surrounded by strangers, even if they are trained professionals.
Shafiq Abdussabur.
Shafiq Abdussabur, a retired former New Haven police sergeant and current Beaver Hills alder candidate, raised a host of questions about how the community crisis response team would work: How it would dovetail with current police and fire department responsibilities? What kind of training and certifications would its team members be required to have? What kind of oversight will team members have? Is there any evidence that such a program would help reduce violent crime?
Standing alongside his son Ismail, who is a city police officer, Abdussabur spoke about the strain that the cops are currently under: working mandatory double shifts, facing budget cuts, all as gun violence is on the rise.
He promised to keep an open mind on the program. And he conceded one of the main points behind the city’s push to create such a program in the first place.
“Cops were never designed to handle mental health incidents,” he said. “The system was never designed for that.”