A different response or just repeating the beat?
Mental health co-responders are now a bigger part of Michigan police departments. But where will the relationship go, and what does it say about how we reduce harm and reimagine safety?
Note: A similar version of this story has been published for Hour Detroit
When asked why she wanted to be a co-responder clinician working alongside police officers, Hillary Nusbaum says one of the words that resonated most with her was reconciliation.
She recalled her stepdad, someone she really appreciated, who was a former public safety director in Coldwater, Michigan, and oversaw both the city’s police and firefighters, inspiring trust between them. The theme of reconciliation followed Nusbaum to Israel, where, for five summers between 2011 and 2016, she worked at a camp bringing Palestinian and Israeli children together to relate and reconcile different narratives.
As a trained social worker and certified first responder counselor, Nusbaum wanted to work with police or military officers experiencing trauma. So, when a job opened to work with police as a co-response clinician in Oakland County — aiding the community with a variety of non-violent calls and more deeply understanding and assisting police — she took it. Nusbaum started working in August 2021, when the Co-response Community Outreach program began under the guise of the Oakland County Community Health Network (OCHN).
The initiative started among the Auburn Hills, Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills Police Departments. But according to Trisha Zizumbo, director of training and justice initiatives for OCHN, the co-response program quickly expanded. In October 2022 the Rochester Police Department opted into the program. There’s now a co-responder with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office, one with the Troy Police Department, and OCHN is actively recruiting another co-responder. According to Siiri Sikora, manager of justice initiatives for OCHN, all the cities working with a co-responder want to fund the program independently after federal grant funding has expired in 2024.
Data released to Hour Detroit demonstrates that between October 2021 to September 2022 in the three aforementioned cities, co-responders received 640 referrals. Most of those times (204) co-responders were able to leave the client stable, in the care of a family member. In many of the other calls, the client was voluntarily transported to an emergency room (174) or were given community-based resources (167). There have been eight arrests while a co-responder was on scene.
The goal of co-response is to divert people from the criminal justice system, and Zizumbo says police seem to like it.
“Every time I talk to a chief or a lieutenant or even an officer, they see the benefit of having a co-responder with them or being able to follow up,” she says.
Auburn Hills Police Chief Ryan Gagnon agrees. He says a co-responder has already helped reduce police calls to the same address and resident hospitalizations. Police officers in his department call the co-responder to help during calls related to depression, suicide, family troubles, mental health episodes or families struggling to care for young kids.
It’s on these calls where Hillary Nusbaum often finds herself. She began the job riding along with police officers, building relationships with them, getting to know their work. She’s done at least 120 hours of ride-alongs, and during that time she’s learned where she needs to stand when called to a scene, how to interact with particular officers, and when it’s appropriate to take action.
That has not always been easy.
Several officers told Nusbaum they originally didn’t want her on the beat, but changed their minds after interacting with her, and realizing the services she provides. Since she began, the co-responder has not only assisted people in the field, but also listened to struggling police in the office. Though she’s not allowed to counsel officers due to a conflict of interest, she’s done trainings for officers on suicide, PTSD and mental-health related topics, and even diverted officers to mental-health resources. Nusbaum says she still focuses on her relationships with officers to improve her work and to help police navigate their own issues.
“I see how they work every day, and I see what they do. I think it’s a very challenging job, and I think they’re faced with an excessive amount of traumatic situations weekly if not daily, and I give them a lot of credit.”
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It’s been about two-and-a-half years since a police officer murdered George Floyd. That’s two-and-a-half years since some of the largest subsequent street protests in American history — two-and-a-half years since institutional anti-Black racism, especially pertaining to police departments, became a larger part of public conversation. In the summer of 2020, with a Covid pandemic killing hundreds of thousands at home and millions around the world, many were consigned to their homes and their screens, doom-scrolling through tragedy after tragedy taking place at the hands of police.
Disproportionate police violence against Black and Indigenous communities — and the broader issue of police violence against Americans writ large — is not new. But two-and-a-half years on, much of the American public is still paying attention in a way that it generally doesn’t to the problem of police violence. And since 2020, there have been changes to both police budgets and police work.
In Michigan, police have more money than in the recent past, especially as politicians attempt to diffuse a slight increase in certain violent crimes (despite a decades-long decline in crime). And now many officers have new partners on the force with them.
Co-response work, like that in Oakland County, is widely available across the state. The co-responder is often tasked with helping individuals experiencing mental health crises, domestic disputes, and alleviating problems related to welfare checks, suicide attempts, homelessness, family challenges and more. Notably, this change is not specific to liberal hubs like Oakland and Washtenaw Counties. Co-responders have taken root in places as distant as Ottawa and Ingham, and in cities as culturally distinct as Newaygo and Detroit.
But what do these changes mean for Michigander’s interpretation of safety? What does it say about how we address harm? And, do co-responders provide a path away from police violence and toward a safer, healthier public?
The world of police work
In America, police are often trained to be warriors. This mythos, fostered by politicians, media and police recruitment videos supports the idea that police need to enter the streets like a battlefield, ready to apprehend “bad guys” and stop violence in its tracks. But addressing violent crime is a small portion of what officers actually do. Some of the best research demonstrates that cops only address real-time violence about 4% of the time in a given year, according to the New York Times. Much of the work, instead, includes less stressful and less violent tasks, like doing traffic stops and intervening in neighborly disputes.
This is true in both large cities and small towns.
In Auburn Hills, about 10% of calls to police are related to substance abuse and mental health crises, according to Auburn Hills Police Chief Ryan Gagnon. Most policing, in fact, has nothing to do with intervening on knife or gun attacks, says Gagnon, meaning police infrequently need to use force on the job. Of the 21,892 calls to the Auburn Hills Police Department in 2021, there were 1,714 arrests. During that year, police force was used on 70 occasions — or less than one percent of the time.
“The overall majority of calls are not involving violence or threat of violence,” says Gagnon.
The majority of police work, then, is unrelated to the work they are trained for — things like helping those experiencing homelessness, mental health issues, and drug addiction. The same tasks sometimes given to social workers.
That might also help explain why Auburn Hills and several other cities across the state have tried to soften police work, and add clinical co-responders to the beat. It’s also likely why at least 15 jurisdictions across the country implemented co-responder programs between 2020 and 2022. Before that time, 28 jurisdictions already had a co-responder.
But co-responders haven’t always been effective in both aiding the public and preventing police violence.
In August, an Oakland County officer was taped repeatedly punching a restrained Black woman suffering a mental illness in Pontiac (an officer said she was resisting arrest). And in October, Porter Burks, was shot and killed by Detroit police during a mental health episode. In each of these incidents, co-responders were on the scene. In response to the August event, OCHN said they were disappointed with the outcome in Pontiac.
The world of police alternatives
But public conversations around police violence and police alternatives haven’t only produced co-responders.
The public is tinkering with an array of public mental health responses, and there are broadly three models, says Leonard Swanson, a crisis response and stabilization manager at Wayne State University. Mobile crisis units including mental health professionals that enter the field independent of police; office-based services where mental health experts receive patients coming to their (often) county door; and co-response models, where mental health professionals’ team with police officers — the model that’s growing most quickly in Michigan.
That’s concerning to many police abolitionists.
Many of them say the promise of softening police work is misguided because it doesn’t uproot or appropriately address harm. Angel McKissic, a senior program manager with the Just Cities Lab at Detroit Justice Center and co-founder of the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network, says, for people to be liberated, police departments cannot be expanded. They need to be abolished.
“What we need to do is to completely — even if we’re starting from mental health — divert from the institution of policing and create our own mechanisms of intervention and ongoing support,” she says.
McKissic, also a trained therapist, says harm cannot be disentangled from material conditions like access to housing or capital, or immaterial ones like misogyny and racism. Rather than co-responders, she calls for funding projects that financially empower communities to decide what safety is for themselves, and to wrestle with questions like: What’s the origin of harm and what makes us safe? In other words, the fate of safety needs to rest in the hands of neighborhoods and to be decided democratically.
But while community-led harm reduction groups are not generally well-funded by government dollars, some non-police mental health intervention programs are.
Leonard Swanson, also at Wayne State University’s School of Social Work Center for Behavioral Health and Justice, says Eugene, Oregon’s Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets (CAHOOTS) program is, nationally, the most effective field approach to alleviating mental health crises. The response team doesn’t include police.
CAHOOTS and Denver’s Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program (which also doesn’t include dispatched officers) have seen early success, the former saving about $24 million in public safety and emergency room costs, and the latter program expanding by $1.4 million in 2021 in part because health-focused first responders were able to reduce various crimes by 34%, according to an independent study.
Alexandria J. Hughes, who worked as a behavioral health therapist and is now a mental health and criminal justice organizer with the mass incarceration-ending group Michigan Liberation, says positive reports for STAR and CAHOOTS should be enough for Michigan lawmakers to adopt them, and begin turning away from law enforcement.
“We’ve always had policing. We’ve always had incarceration. We’ve never taken a chance on a non-police mental health response.”
A different response or just repeating the beat?
In Michigan, Washtenaw County is doing some of the most innovative work around who responds to what public calls for help. A 2019 county mental health millage provided funding for health clinicians to respond to calls independent of police officers as a mobile support unit that is now overseen by Washtenaw County Community Mental Health (WCCMH). About 25 of its clinicians can be called 24/7 by police officers or dispatchers to respond to scenes deemed safe enough for them. In total, Washtenaw mobile health clinicians have called for police backup 12 percent of the time. None of them have been physically injured on the job, says WCCMH Executive Director Trish Cortes.
The addition of the CAHOOTS-like and co-response approach has left Washtenaw with five general responses, which county sheriff Jerry Clayton considers on a continuum. There are police-only responses, independent mobile support unit responses, coordinated responses where the police or clinician call each other into the field for support, co-responses where a clinician and an officer enter the field together, and unarmed community-based responses, which is currently being developed.
The continuum of response is forcing police and broader community residents to shift how they consider policing, safety, and harm reduction. Police dispatchers themselves, says Clayton, need to ask more specific questions to better understand behavioral health issues, and best direct their various resources to a scene. The complexity means that, these days, a call is often registered to Washtenaw’s dispatch as one thing but is cleared by the deputy sheriff as another.
“I think what we’re really thinking about is a shifting dynamic across the entire spectrum,” says Clayton. “We’re not only talking about changing culture in the first responder world. We should be thinking about changing the culture from the societal standpoint on who should respond when, and also give ourselves some space and time as we start to work this out.”
Back in Oakland County, Hillary Nusbaum continues diving into issues facing police and the broader public, and working to reconcile officers and the people maybe calling for officers to help them. About one-and-a-half years in, she’s still doing ride-alongs with an officer when time allows. It’s in these spaces that she’s better able to understand and appreciate police, and expand her knowledge of the various needs of the communities she’s serving.
“I do think the addition of mental health working with police, together, is a really great benefit for both of us,” she says.
