Crisis Team Hits The Street

Social worker Yichu Xu and ​“peer recovery specialist” Nanette Campbell reported for duty Tuesday to start helping cops and firefighters deal with emergency calls — and pilot a new way of dealing with people in crisis.

They spoke with Ollie Cooper, a regular on the Green, about his search for housing and health care. Cooper also spoke about how a brush with cancer has compounded his challenges. They spoke about available social services and shared contact information for follow-up discussions.

It was the first encounter of a new mission that New Haven launched steps away, moments earlier: Sending teams of social workers and New Haveners with ​“lived experience” to supplement the work of firefighters and cops on emergency calls.

The mission is called ​“COMPASS.” That stands for ​“Compassionate Allies Serving Our Streets.” It’s the culmination of a two-year process sparked by the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd: the creation of a ​“crisis response team” to send social workers and peer counselors to help people who otherwise might end up arrested or hospitalized and in escalated encounters with the criminal justice system.

Tuesday began a pilot phase of the program: COMPASS will have a green-jacketed two-person team on duty from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week. Cops and firefighters will still respond first to 911 calls. If they conclude a COMPASS team would better handle the situation, they’ll tell 911, which will dispatch COMPASS.

The hope is that six months from now, 911 dispatch will send COMPASS teams directly to some calls without tying up cops or firefighters. The plan is to move to 16-hour-a-day shifts in July 2023, then longer shifts a year later.

The goal is to have COMPASS eventually respond to up to 10 percent of all 911 calls, or up to 11,000 a year.

“The right person at the right time with the right skills will help you out,” Mayor Justin Elicker promised at a press conference held on the Green to announce the program launch.

Police Chief Karl Jacobson spoke of how the program will eventually enable stretched-thin cops to focus on work where they make the most difference.

He spoke how over 24 years as a cop, he found himself sent to calls where he couldn’t truly help the person with the mental health or addiction or housing problems that were at the root of the emergency.

“It’s very hard to go to the same calls over and over again” without providing more fundamental help, he said.

“Now we can do something for people that we weren’t able to do before … We’re excited about it.”

Carlos Sosa-Lombardo, who will oversee the effort as city community resilience director, said New Haven’s pilot differs from crisis teams in some other cities by including a community advisory board as well as an evaluation process to refine the program based on data.

New Haven’s police union has filed a grievance against the city about COMPASS as part of ongoing contract negotiations. A state labor mediation board declined to stop the program from moving forward; the grievance remains to be settled.

Firefighters union President Patrick Cannon said Tuesday that he plans to file an objection as well: ​“They didn’t bargain with us” over the roll-out, he said. ​“911 is not equipped with the manpower to deal with the start.”

AFSCME Local 884 President Kym Bray, whose union represents the 911 dispatchers at the Public Service Answering Point (PSAP) call center, echoed that complaint. She said because of understaffing, dispatchers are in some cases already working 70 – 80 hours a week, in shifts of up to 16 hours. COMPASS will now require them to deal with more people in emergencies when they need to contact the outreach team, she argued, which could mean delays in responses to other people calling in emergencies. Bray argued that many of the services encompassed in COMPASS are already offered in the city.

PSAP Director Joseph Vitale Jr. said he believes his team can handle the small pilot. He acknowledged a 10-person staff shortage. But he said the department has trained six new dispatchers who are now ready to start, with three more about to start a three-week training process. He also said that in many cases a COMPASS call won’t require extra work on the part of dispatchers, but rather the making of a call to the crisis team rather than to, say, the AMR ambulance service.