City gets $550K to add social worker, training to PD
STAMFORD — The Department of Justice has awarded a three-year $550,000 grant to the Stamford Police Department to add another social worker to help with calls and to expand outreach and training.
Mayor Caroline Simmons and Stamford Public Safety Director Ted Jankowski, joined by Sen. Richard Blumnethal, DConn., gathered outside the government center Wednesday morning to announce the federal funds.
“Stamford is at the forefront of a developing national effort to employ these kinds of social workers, mental health professionals and others who will aid them — literally on the ground — to expand their reach and their capability,” Blumenthal said.
In part, the funding will help the department bring on a second licensed social worker to help respond to calls with police. The city also plans to use the money — $175,000 annually for three years — to expand outreach initiatives and expand training, officials said.
The initiatives include conducting a systems-wide needs assessment to identify service gaps, assigning a manager to oversee the program, enhancing training for relevant staff, conducting an extensive outreach campaign to engage a host of cross-sector service providers, launching Mental Health Fairs and employing a social media campaign and a progressive training regimen, according to the grant application.
Blumenthal and Simmons both underscored that behavioral health services have become increasingly in demand during the pandemic.
The National Health Interview Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that “during the pandemic, about 4 in 10 adults in the U.S. have reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, a share that has been largely consistent, up from one in 10 adults who reported these symptoms from January to June 2019,” according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“I’m gonna be really blunt: Being a cop has never been more important or more difficult,” Blumenthal said. “As we go through this pandemic challenge, the rates of mental health issues have been increasing. Opioid challenges, overdoses and substance abuse disorder have been skyrocketing.”
The challenges, he said, “require new skills and different trainings.”
The city’s effort to increase mental health services within the police department first began in January 2020, according to SPD Captain Dietrich Hohn, but took major strides earlier this year. Stamford Police embedded its first social worker through counseling nonprofit Recovery Network of Services this May. Jankowski said that the social worker has helped followup on or respond to more than 200 incidents since joining the program.
Jankowski and Hohn told reporters that the department has also decreased the number of mental health-related calls directed to the police department by 24 percent in the past year.
Having a police officer respond “could be intimidating to somebody who’s having a mental health episode or an incident,” Jankowski said. “They come in with a ballistic protective vest, and they do have weapons... so reducing the number of calls has benefited the community and benefited the individuals.”
Jankowski also said that Stamford is “at the forefront” of the local push to diversify police services, especially within Connecticut. Still, he acknowledged that the ideas implemented within the city don’t exist in a vacuum. He pointed to the Phoenix police department’s push to divert 911 calls to crisis hotlines and dispatch medics in lieu of officers as a point of inspiration for local efforts.
The Stamford Police Department has faced calls for reform since Steven Barrier, a 23-year-old Black man who lived with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other disorders, died after having a heart attack while in police custody in 2019. More than two years of protest and community activism sprung up as a response.
In March 2021, Barrier’s mother Valerie Jaddo and co-plaintiff Connecticut Legal Rights Project filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Stamford, its police department and four individual officers. That lawsuit puts forth a series of demands that includes having the city create and maintain an “organization, managed by people with first-hand lived experience of emotional distress/psychiatric disability, operating 24/7, providing confidential, individualized, non-medical support to people in crisis.”
While the communitybased organization proposed is meant to provide counseling to individuals experiencing psychological distress — like a social worker would — the ongoing lawsuit specifically states that “embedding social workers in police departments” would not absolve the city of the responsibility to support a mental health community center.