Photo via ACS website.
One year into its implementation, the Albuquerque Community Safety (ACS) Department is gaining traction in addressing street-level mental health, addiction and homeless related crises— much to the relief of the city’s besieged police and fire departments.
As a city cabinet-level agency, the ACS is the first in the nation to provide a non-law enforcement response to non-emergency incidents involving homelessness, mental health, and substance abuse incidents—dramatically freeing up both law enforcement and fire department resources.
“ACS is an alternative to policing,” says Mariela Ruiz-Angel, director. “The deputy chief of police told me his officers are not social workers.”
The first-year service data is compelling.
Marcela Ruiz-Angel, ACS Director
Through June of this fiscal year ACS has responded to 10,909 calls for service. Between April and June, they responded to 393 behavioral health issues and 130 suicide-related crises. The overwhelming amount of their calls involve the homeless, responding to 1,042 issues related to unsheltered people.
Ruiz-Angel cautions these numbers do not adequately measure the impact the services have had on the community yet.
“We have to look beyond one year,” she says.
With these high call numbers comes the need to quickly expand the current staff of 64 responders. Ruiz-Angel says the department is actively recruiting Community Responders, Behavioral Health responders, and administrative staff.
Homelessness Increasing
The city’s homeless population is estimated to be over 1,500 according to the 2019 Point-in-Time Report compiled by the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness. It has been steadily increasing since 2016.
Ruiz-Angel estimates that some 80 percent of these folks do not want help.
Therein lies how the public perceives ACS, which serves as facilitators to targeted services, whether it be for homelessness, substance abuse, or mental illness, rather than enforcers or laws or ordinances.
Ruiz-Angel says the relationship with Albuquerque law enforcement has been constructive.
The Albuquerque Police Department (APD) has welcomed relinquishing the non-crime associated calls they receive, while providing valuable feedback in safety matters for the staff in certain encounters.
The ACS comes as a welcome relief to the APD, which was criticized by the Department of Justice prior to its 2014 settlement agreement for its poor handling and overzealous use of force in mental health crisis situations.
One of the most widely covered incidents involved James Boyd., a homeless man with an alleged history of schizophrenia, who was shot and killed in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains on the city’s eastern fringe after he refused vacate his makeshift campsite after a three-hour standoff.
Freeing Law Enforcement Resources
“This innovative new department is already helping to free up our officers so they can respond to high-priority calls,” said Albuquerque Chief of Police Harold Medina in a press release early in the department’s evolution.
“This third branch of public safety bridges a gap and provides residents with the response they deserve.”
Matt Dietzel, Commander of The Albuquerque police Crisis Intervention Team, says the APD and ACS crisis models compliment each other.
“It’s worked out very well having both parts of the team be city employees in terms of stability, our previous non-profit struggled to hire and maintain the employment of their clinicians, despite a good effort to do so,” says Dietzel.
“A good number of ACS’ responses right now are involving individuals experiencing homelessness, which has freed APD from having to take all those calls which is great for everyone involved.“
One recipient of the ACS services is a pregnant Jenna and her boyfriend, both in their early thirties and living in a makeshift camp consisting of a tent and tarp attached to the outfield fence of a west side little league field beneath two massive trees that offer some relief from the brutal high desert sun.
“They (ACS) came by the other day and asked how we were doing and provided us a book with numerous resources as well as water,” says Jenna who was also surprised by the response of a police officer called by a disgruntled local resident by the sight of the camp.
“The officer said he wouldn’t bother us, and [asked] whether we needed anything.”
Jenna and her boyfriend, entering their eighth year of homelessness are both currently employed in minimum wage security jobs at stores close to their camp trying to dig out of their circumstances.
ACS workers, Albuquerque. Phlto courtesy ACS
She said there are so many homeless in the city and only so many resources in regard to housing.
“The city is trying but they can only do so much,” she says over the barking of her two pit bulls tied to a tree supporting one side of their blue tarp.
The ACS has not totally eliminated the need for APD’s crisis intervention teams.
All APD officers are trained in Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) strategies. So every 911 call receives a CIT response.
Officers respond to over 70 percent of clear behavioral health calls each month, despite only having around 45 percent of the field volunteering to be trained. Officers are also trained to call for an enhanced Crisis Intervention Team (eCIT) officer in situations where a call may need one, but that wasn’t apparent at the time of dispatch.
Mobile Crisis Team (MCT) take a lot of these calls too, either by direct dispatch from the comms center or by recognizing that a call may have a behavioral health component and self-dispatching to the incident.
This would might suggest a race to the scene between agencies, but Dietzel says the opposite occurs.
Other First Responders Mobilized
“ACS doesn’t respond to calls with weapons or with a clear criminal element, those calls would go to APD,” says Dietzel. “ACS and APD use Mobile Crisis Teams in situations where more scene security is needed on a call that is right on the edge of being safe enough for an ACS response.”
He says it also helps that ACS is dispatched via Fire and Rescue’s dispatch system. Basically Albuquerque’s 911 is set up with all calls originally going to APD call takers who then send the call to Albuquerque Fire Rescue (AFR) if there is a medical complaint for EMS response or if it is a sufficiently low threat to merit an ACS response.
AFR’s alarm room then dispatches the call to an ACS responder. APD never actually sees that call so there is no race to the scene between APD and ACS, unless ACS calls us to assist for whatever reason.
Dietzel says the reforms have undoubtedly elevated crisis intervention and improved interactions with people who may have a behavioral health diagnosis.
He believes the bigger impact comes down to having clear policies for each level of force and accompanying those policies with training and then accountability.
Joseph J. Kolb, MA is a former fellow at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Center for Media, Crime, and Justice. An instructor in the criminal justice programs at the University of New Mexico-Gallup and Valencia campuses, his authored books include Teen Violence in America: How do we save our children? and Blood Ties: How a Mexican prison gang became a Mexican cartel proxy. Kolb is a former corrections officer in New Mexico.
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via Thecrimereport
