New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
New Haven crisis response team to expand after seeing ‘huge success’ in pilot run
NEW HAVEN — The city’s nNon-police crisis response team that launched last year ,Elm City COMPASS, will expand in July with a second response team with longer hours, after the program handled more than 250 cases during the pilot phase, officials said.
For the first three months of the team’s operation between Nov. 1, 2022, to Jan. 31, Mayor Justin Elicker said it had completed 249 crisis responses with 37 percent of those being through 911 calls and 63 percent self-deployed outreach efforts. He noted that as of last week, the team had responded to about 275 cases.
During the pilot phase, the COMPASS team works from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and is dispatched by first responders. After July, the team will operate from 8 a.m. to midnight with a goal of being dispatched directly by 911 operators, officials said.
Jack Tebes, director of the COMPASS program and a psychiatry professor at Yale University, said the team’s average response time was 13 minutes and it spent about 45 minutes at a scene.
Elicker said 70 percent of the responses were related to mental health or substance use incidents while another 30 percent were for resources, housing and other services.
“I think that the evidence you’re helping folks here today both in the numbers and in many of the stories that we’re hearing shows that COMPASS is already a huge success, and we’re excited to continue to build on this program,” Elicker said.
Carlos Sosa-Lombardo, director of the city’s Community Resilience Department, said the city also is considering expanding it to a 24/7 service next year.
“The program is already bringing to life a lot of issues that we have in the crisis system,” he said, noting the group also is collecting data to identify needs and improve the program.
John Labieniec and Nanette Campbell would know what the need is like out there. They’re director of the response team and recovery support specialist, respectively.
Labieniec said the team’s follow-ups to 911 calls sometimes go into weeks and months into connecting people to the right care. He also said it takes time to build trust with people who have lost faith in the system.
Campbell recalled an incident with a woman in crisis who remembered her face and name and came to her, which allowed the woman to get the care she needed.
“Because she just said she wouldn’t go to the hospital, get any help, but she did when she saw me come back,” Campbell said. “That was awesome, it was amazing.”
Labieniec added that the team has found that family members of those in crisis usually need support and care, as well.
City officials have put an emphasis on community involvement in the COMPASS program since the announcement of it two years ago. Ta’LannaMonique Lawson-Dickerson, a community organizer who’s a part of COMPASS’ community advisory board, encouraged community members to reach out to have a voice in this.
“It’s not going to survive if we don’t have community engagement … to hold folks accountable,” Lawson-Dickerson said, noting this is just a beginning.
“We heard a lot of information, a lot of statistics and I kind of just want to process that this is real. We’re making real change,” she added. “The work that the folks up here and out there have been doing is having a real effect in real people’s lives and that’s exactly what this is about.”
Police Chief Karl Jacobson praised the program, saying that police need help from someone with “better skills than us” and the COMPASS team is the answer.
The idea of the new emergency response team was formed following a national conversation about policing after the death of George Floyd in 2020. The pilot phase was funded by a $2 million grant from the federal government.