After more than a month on duty, the Lansdale Police Department’s new mental health co-responder is busier than ever.
Police Chief Mike Trail gave an update Wednesday night on the department’s partnership with a local mental health agency to provide added services during emergencies, and where that partnership could lead over time.
“We’re seeing so much of a bleed-over, almost every day, from calls for service that we’re able to bring the co-responder in,” he said. “Domestic violence calls, issues with respect to finances, or drug or alcohol abuse that we can refer right to the co-responder.”
After COVID-19 arrived in 2020, Lansdale police and borough council worked with nearby departments and local nonprofits and agencies to respond to homelessness and mental health issues caused or worsened by the pandemic.
Those joint efforts grew into regular meetings of the “North Penn HUB,” a collaborative of local police departments and agencies that meet monthly to solve problems they all encounter, work that includes Merakey, the local chapter of a national nonprofit that connects those in need of services with adult behavioral health, autism, addiction recovery, veterans’ aid, aging, child and family, and other services.
Merakey works on a similar program with Philadelphia police, with a goal of reducing the need for arrests, emergency room visits, and other police responses for calls that can be handled in other ways.
In April council issued an RFP for a mental health co-responder, and in June council awarded a contract to Merakey, to develop a mental health co-responder program that would respond along with police to certain types of emergency calls. That program went live in late August, and Trail said Wednesday that the results have been immediate, although for now hard to quantify.
“She’s keeping her own spreadsheets, and we can’t necessarily co-mingle our records” due to medical privacy rules, Trail said.
Police are working on ways to modify their existing records management systems to better collect that data and find ways to de-identify statistics so the council committee can get regular updates. Once that info is available to present to the public, the chief said, the public safety committee will likely get quarterly updates from the co-responder, and Trail said he’s aiming to have “a more comprehensive report” ready for council by the end of the year.
“Ultimately, the goal is that I would like to see this become a funded position within the borough,” he said, once the current grant funding for the position ends after 2024.
“There’s a lot of work to be done to get the metrics, to show that it’s of value,” Trail said.
Councilman Andrew Carroll asked if the co-responder had helped on mutual aid calls with other departments, and Trail said the answer is both yes and no.
“We actually have had people come into the station, who now know we have a mental health co-responder, and they’ll live for example in Franconia, and come into our station and say ‘Hey, can you help me?’ Literally this week, that came across my desk,” Trail said.
Funding for the position is currently provided by a grant the borough applied for and received, the chief added, but if and when the effectiveness data is compiled, the department would then be able to approach other departments to discuss sharing and/or expanding the program.
“Hopefully, I can go to the other municipalities and say ‘Hey look, here’s what we want to do, can we all share in the cost of this?'” Trail said.
This article appears courtesy of a content share agreement between North Penn Now and The Reporter. To read more stories like this, visit www.thereporteronline.com.
See also:
Lansdale Police Say Mental Health Co-Responder Already Seeing Results
Mayoral Musings: Lansdale One Step Closer to Adding Mental Health Responder to Police Department
