Armed with compassion: New kind of first responder

Living in a community with such rapid-fire growth has its challenges. For law enforcement, doubly so.

We tend to imagine cops chasing bad guys and dealing with violence and other crimes. But officers, already spread thin as cities try to keep up with rising populations which outpace budget and planning adjustments, must respond to all sorts of calls. They aren’t all crimes-in-progress – emphasis on “safety” and “peace” as part of the police charge.

Police officers are also called for welfare checks by concerned relatives, to help people in other kinds of crises, and many situations involving mental health issues.

That’s why Albuquerque’s experiment is so interesting.

New Mexico’s largest city has added a “Community Safety” department to its police force. They aren’t cops. They don’t carry guns or tasers. They have specially marked patrol cars and only respond to non-violent situations with no weapon involved, thus freeing the trained police officers for other calls requiring their skills.

They are behavioral health specialists, offering police officers a new tool to help them do the job safely and effectively. When the Albuquerque Police Department gets a call they think this team could address on their own, it’s dispatched.

Instead of weapons they’re armed with expertise in social welfare and mental illness, along with water bottles and snacks. They wear jeans and T-shirts and gently work to address delicate situations such as mental health crises, needs of the homeless, addiction, and other social problems which happen every day in communities such as ours.

The Spokane Police Department planned to try something similar according to news reports last summer, by sending out mental health professionals instead of police officers in response to some 911 calls. The new unit is called the Mental Health Response Unit.

Not that involving mental health professionals in police matters is anything new. In our own community and thousands across the nation, crisis intervention teams sometimes include them when appropriate to help officers defuse or assess a situation involving mental health issues.

The difference is, historically those CIT teams include officers. This scenario proposes a specialized team without them. Plus, such CIT teams aren’t necessarily available 24/7.

Which situations are really centered on mental health issues is not always immediately apparent; police may not know what they’ll face until they get there. In recent years, high-profile cases involving escalation, shootings or other tragic consequences for people with mental illness have called attention to the complexities and challenges of these high-stress scenarios.

An estimated quarter of police shootings involve mental health crises, according to a database of public information compiled by the Washington Post. People with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed in police encounters, according to a 2015 study by the Treatment Advocacy Center.

Hindsight may be 20/20 but being able to assess and respond to any crisis, let alone one with added complexities, in a matter of seconds is a challenge for any officer.

Yet the consequences can be devastating.

That’s true for officers, too. According to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, involving behavioral specialists to mental health crisis intervention calls reduced injuries to officers by up to 80 percent.

Police officers receive some training in this area, but limitations in particularized experience, knowledge, or assessment capabilities – as well as simply being stretched too thin in growing communities – make adding such specialized mental health response units an attractive possibility. So far, Albuquerque’s experiment seems to be benefitting both the police department and citizens.

Spokane used a portion of a safety levy to fund their new unit and partnered with a nonprofit trauma center to staff it. The Albuquerque Police Department created its own unit in-house. Public expense is offset in the long run; according to figures collected by NAMI, the costs of incarceration are up to three times more than the cost of a stay in a mental health facility.

Life is a struggle for most of us at times. For some battling mental illnesses, the struggle can reach unimaginable heights, building to a critical crescendo. That, too, is an emergency worthy of community investment in public safety.

Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Email Sholeh@cdapress.com.