A Cambridge Police Department program that sends a social worker with a police officer to certain mental health calls has prevented many people who ordinarily would have ended up in the emergency room from being taken there, police say. The initiative, called co-response, averted an emergency room visit in 65 percent of cases that would have qualified for ER treatment, said James Barrett, a psychologist and director of clinical services.
Barrett and police superintendent Frederick Cabral reported on the co-response program to the Cambridge Health Alliance population health and public health committees at an April 17 meeting. Between August, when the program started, and February, 63 of 98 calls that ordinarily would have resulted in taking the person to the emergency room were instead handled by referrals to other services or to another police department clinician, city spokesperson Jeremy Warnick said. The figures don’t include police responses when a mentally ill person is legally ordered to go to a hospital for assessment, he said.
Besides preventing unnecessary ER visits, the program diverts people experiencing mental health problems from arrest, Barrett and Cabral said. Instead, people can be referred to community mental health services, substance use resources, assistance with educational programs or assistance with housing. Their cases can go to special, recovery and community court sessions.
“We’ve spent a good 15 years trying to deflect people in a mental health crisis from the criminal justice system,” Cabral said. “We used to say, ‘You’re seeing more people in your ED because they’re not in jail.’ Then why be in the ED?”
Barrett said the co-response team is trained to respond to a variety of situations and “has gone hands-on with people about to commit suicide … They can take as much time as needed on a mental health call.”
Clinician-police teams patrol in Central Square and Harvard Square and perform the same services, Cabral said. In a pointed reference to campaigns to establish an “alternative” to police that arose after publicized police killings of people in a mental crisis, Cabral said the co-response initiative is “not alternative policing, it’s enhanced policing.”
Cambridge had its own police killing that intensified pressure to establish an alternative to police: the death of Arif Sayed Faisal on Jan. 4, 2023. A police officer shot Faisal, 20, a Bangladeshi immigrant and a college student, after Faisal led police through a Cambridgeport neighborhood while cutting himself with a large knife. He was shot after moving toward an officer while refusing to drop the knife. Police tried nonlethal force first, but a shot from a high-velocity foam ball didn’t affect him.
Apart from co-response
Efforts to establish a city department that would provide unarmed responses to some emergency calls, and to fund a citizen-led organization that offered to answer emergency mental health calls, also with unarmed responders, stalled for months and years. Last July the new Community Safety Department started responding to 911 calls that were selected by emergency dispatchers, after completing negotiations with police unions over what types of calls the unarmed team could answer. The unions also negotiated requiring officers to wear body cameras; the equipment was deployed starting this month.
The Community Safety Department has answered 208 of incoming 911 calls that didn’t involve violence from July to the end of the year, the department said in its first impact report, released Friday. Almost all – 94 percent – didn’t require police help, and more than three-quarters were requests for “wellness checks,” the report said.
https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/25919516-042525-care-report/?embed=1
The department’s Community Assistance Response and Engagement team, known as Care, served a total of 157 community members with outreach and follow-up as well as responses, the report said. It connected with more than 5,500 people in outreach efforts. Last October the Care team increased the days it works to four a week from three and in March the team started working from Monday to Friday. The team plans to expand hours more this year, the report said.
The department has been asked to prepare a violence prevention plan, it said. It has also started responding to requests for advice and help from other city departments and plans to open that line to more city agencies this year, the report said.
Meanwhile, three years after the council approved funding the Holistic Emergency Assistance Response Team, a grassroots effort to provide support and unarmed response to people with emotional and other problems, Heart received $150,000 last August, enough to maintain a phone line two days a week. Heart also facilitates support groups for residents in crisis. The group had previously received $300,000 in pandemic funds, but said it needed permanent city funding.
Cambridge police had ruled out having police and clinicians answer calls together, but officials told a consultant that examined Faisal’s death last year that it planned to try co-response. Barrett said the initiative is funded now by a grant from the state Department of Mental Health and police hope that funding will continue.
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As a matter of policy, CARE should be sent to all situations with kids under a certain age (and should be available 24/7). School resource officers should also come from CARE.
Scary men with guns have no business harassing and threatening toddlers.
To CPD’s credit, most officers are professional, but a few are still the old-time bullies and thugs. If responding to a violent crime, that’s probably not the worst flaw.
However, last time I saw them responding to a traumatized child, the result was an escalation and a more traumatized child. All but one officer handled this well, but one bad apple was enough to poison the child on police.
If CPD has budget to build out a secret department, that means the CPD budget can be safely cut. The concept of a social worker is not bad, but should have gone through City Council review, who are responsible for budgets.
Revised headline: “A Cambridge Police Department Program is Doing A Heckuva Good Job, Police Say.”