New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Metal detector remains at CT mental health clinic — for now
NEW HAVEN — Officials rejected a committee’s recommendation to phase out use of a metal detector at the Connecticut Mental Health Center and install alternate security measures, opting to delay a final decision pending feedback.
The security measures near the entrance to the Park Street facility, which have included armed state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services police officers, unarmed security guards and a walk-through metal detector, came under scrutiny this year. Critics say the measure pose a barrier to care and criminalize clients.
The CMHC “(serves) individuals with Medicaid, Medicare or no insurance — populations overrepresented by Black and Brown communities,” the Rev. Kelcy Steele and Hamden-based police accountability advocate Rhonda Caldwell said in a Yale Daily News op-ed they co-authored earlier this year. “Guards with guns are notably absent at other outpatient clinics.”
The CMHC, which is jointly run by the Yale Department of Psychiatry and DMHAS, convened a “Front Door Group” to assess the security measures used in the lobby area and determine next steps.
The New Haven Register obtained an internal email listing the committee’s recommendations, which were made over the summer. They include removing the metal detector by next July, installing voluntary lockers for clients to store their belongings, stationing only unarmed safety officers behind the vestibule “in clothing that is distinct from and more relaxed than armed police officer uniforms” and not having any armed police officers visible in the lobby area.
The email also indicates how CMHC
CEO Michael Sernyak and DMHAS Acting Commissioner Nancy Navarretta responded to those recommendations. It suggests leadership put off the question of the metal detector’s future but agreed to purchase the lockers, modify security guard uniforms and mostly comply with the request about armed police.
“Armed police officers will be located primarily outside of the lobby area. Office space for the police has been moved,” the response to the question of armed police says. “There will be times when officers will be completing rounds or be required to respond to safety or security issues which may occur in any part of the facility.”
Asked to clarify whether armed officers ever would be stationed in the lobby area, DMHAS spokesman Art Mongillo issued a statement in an email to the New Haven Register .
“The officers will continue to provide safety and security services at Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC),” he wrote in the statement. “Their office will be within the building but not in the entrance or lobby of the building.”
He did not specify the exact location of the office.
As for removing the metal detector, the Front Door Group recommended that, before doing so, “educational activities for CMHC staff and clients ... be developed and implemented to ensure that the removal of the metal detector and other changes to the front door will be presented in an evidencebased, anti-racist context.”
Those activities were to take place over the “coming three months” and include a survey “to broadly assess client experience and preferences with regard to safety issues.”
The committee also asked leadership to develop “an alternative to the metal detector and other changes to provide improved building safety (e.g., closed-circuit cameras and swipe cards for staff entry to areas off lobby and other areas of the building),” according to the email.
Mongillo’s statement suggested there are “no immediate plans to change other safety measures.”
Instead of removing the metal detector, 12 months will be taken to “survey a more representative number of people receiving services at CMHC, which will allow for more meaningful input into decisions regarding safety and security by the individuals accessing services,” Mongillo said.
Sernyak and Navarretta’s response does not address incorporating educational activities for staff and clients. Asked why, Mongillo’s wrote, “CMHC will survey people receiving services at the building and the survey will inform future steps to be taken.”
The commissioner and CEO cited a previous survey conducted by the Front Door Group in their response to the recommendations, according to the internal email, which notes that a slight majority of respondents — 51 percent — preferred the metal detectors stay in place.
It also said most clients agreed, though “admittedly, only a small number of clients participated in the survey,” indicated that number was 20.
One CMHC psychiatrist who served on the panel questioned whether the decision should be based on popular opinion.
“Popular opinion is not rooted in science, and health equity, by definition, is assuming a responsibility to undo wrongdoings towards the marginalized. The marginalized will rarely carry the majority vote, but they are no less important,” Carmen Black wrote in an email to a reporter.
Black is a psychiatry professor at Yale School of Medicine who studies iatrogenesis, or the harmful effects brought on by medical interventions. She is an expert in the effects of racial discrimination on patient care.
She has researched the use of metal detectors in health care settings, she said, and said her findings cast doubt on whether they deter workplace violence.
“There has never been a study in the United States evaluating outpatient hospital violence, so the use of metal detectors in outpatient settings in completely unfounded in fact,” Black wrote, noting most of CMHC’s practice is in outpatient care.
For hospital-based violence affecting inpatient care and emergency rooms, most “is not armed assault and would not be helped by metal detectors,” she said, citing a 2020 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and a 2018 hospital security survey.
When there is criminal intent, “metal detectors may just shift the location of violence to places like parking lots and ambulance ramps,” she wrote, indicating her conclusion was based on data from several studies.
Black also said metal detectors represent a barrier to care.
“Community members and (CMHC) patients gave testimony to how the presence of metal detectors serves as an unwelcome, triggering reminder of the discrimination and police brutality they face in the community,” she said, referring to accounts shared during Front Door Group town halls. “It creates a barrier and deterrent for people to come seek treatment.”
DMHAS did not return a request for comment about the effectiveness of metal detectors or respond to a question about how the agency is addressing concerns that the metal detector poses a barrier to care.