KEY IDEAS:
- Co-response programs unite law enforcement and human services agencies to de-escalate crises, divert arrests, and connect individuals to long-term care.
- The co-response model requires a shared mission and the seamless exchange of data among collaborating agencies.
- Successful co-response improves trust between communities and the organizations that serve them, encouraging vulnerable individuals to accept resources.
- Technology that enables secure, real-time information sharing across departments helps agencies scale co-responder teams and measure outcomes effectively.
Co-response programs bring together law enforcement agencies and human services organizations for a holistic approach to crises involving mental health, substance use, and quality-of-life issues. Co-responder teams aim to de-escalate crisis situations and divert individuals from being arrested by connecting them to community resources and providing targeted social services.
By sending trained experts such as behavioral health clinicians and paramedics to certain calls for service, jurisdictions that have deployed co-responder teams tend to see reductions in arrests, hospitalizations, ER visits, officer time on scene, and use of force, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.
However, implementing an effective co-responder program is no simple feat. The co-response model requires participating organizations to have seamless communication, interoperable technologies, and a unified understanding of their mission and strategies. At the Safety of Our Cities Conference earlier this year, Peregrine hosted a panel of experts focused on successful co-response:
- Deputy Chief Eric Barden (ret.), Seattle Police Department
- Jodie Esquibel, director of Albuquerque Community Safety Department
- Chief Mark Crowell, Waterloo Regional Police Service
- Dr. Amy Barden, chief of Seattle’s Community Assisted Response and Engagement department
Keep reading to learn about our panelists’ strategies for successful co-response in their cities.
READ MORE → Community Co-Response 101: How Integrated Teams Reduce Arrests and Improve Care
Challenges to coordinating human services response
“We're going to have to build that trust, bring the doctor to them, and start stabilizing our neighbors to make them the neighbors that we want them to be — and what they likely want to be as well.” —Jodie Esquibel, Director, Albuquerque Community Safety Department
Public safety leaders must overcome technical and cultural silos — between participating agencies, the individuals receiving services, and their communities at large — to build successful co-responder programs. Below we discuss key considerations for effective co-response.
Agency coordination
In Seattle, 12 different agencies might have contact with the same set of individuals each week, Deputy Chief Barden said. Without effective coordination, “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”
“It's like, if you had cancer and went to your oncologist, and every time you went to an oncologist, it was a new doctor, and they didn't have any access to your previous diagnoses,” Barden said. “You're starting over. Every day is a new day. Every day is their first day. And that's what we have to overcome.”
Agencies need to coordinate resources to establish a continuum of care. Each new interaction is an opportunity to learn what an individual needs, Barden said, so agencies need to work together and share their insights.
READ MORE → Interagency Data Sharing: Overcoming Barriers To Drive Collaboration
Information sharing between public agencies and nonprofits
That information sharing goes beyond law enforcement. Dr. Barden highlighted “tremendous gaps” between first responders and nonprofits, who historically hadn’t worked together in Seattle. To bridge the gap, Barden went analog: She gathered notes on a specific individual, visiting police and fire teams to ask who knew that person best.
Once the agencies started sharing information, the co-response team was able to get that individual into a shelter — for the first time in 10 years, to Barden’s knowledge. To succeed in this human-centered approach, agencies need technology that facilitates information sharing. That means anyone interacting with an individual knows their history, previous interactions, and what resources would be the most helpful.
“Our vulnerable neighbors should not have to interact with 42 different departments and services,” Barden said. “It's inhumane.”
💡 PRO TIP: Interagency data sharing is critical to successful co-response. Without a way to share information seamlessly and securely between organizations, information silos make effective collaboration nearly impossible.
Community trust and engagement
When vulnerable individuals have been pushed around between different short-term solutions, they likely harbor some distrust for government services. Agencies have to meet community members where they’re at, Esquibel said.
“We're going to have to build that trust, bring the doctor to them, and start stabilizing our neighbors to make them the neighbors that we want them to be — and what they likely want to be as well,” Esquibel said.
READ MORE → Newark Police Department: Championing Community Engagement and Crime Prevention
Impacts of successful co-response
“As much as our community may have resources and functionality in some ways, we need to continue to steal the best ideas from around the world, bring them to ours, and then also help share as much as we can. That's the power and the multiplier effect that we have seen, and we will continue to try and replicate.” —Chief Mark Crowell, Waterloo Regional Police Service
When agencies go the extra mile to implement effective co-responder programs, they can then show up for their communities in new ways, Esquibel said. But they first have to change the public’s perception, “creating a space for us to provide care to the community” and encouraging individuals to accept help.
“When they trust the Albuquerque Community Safety Department, they then trust the police department, they then trust the fire department,” Esquibel said. “And then they then [think], ‘Maybe I will go to a shelter.’”
The Waterloo Regional Police Service has also increased its impact through collaboration and engagement. In Ontario, all municipalities must create a legislative community safety and well-being plan. That mandate is a “rallying cry” encouraging mutual accountability, and so far, they’ve succeeded in establishing tangible plans, Crowell said. Leaders need to seek out new perspectives — and those ideas can spread far beyond their jurisdictions.
“As much as our community may have resources and functionality in some ways, we need to continue to steal the best ideas from around the world, bring them to ours, and then also help share as much as we can,” Crowell said. “That's the power and the multiplier effect that we have seen, and we will continue to try and replicate.”
🔑 KEY TAKEAWAY: Community trust often has a domino effect. When residents learn they can trust one department of their local government, they become more likely to trust others. Partner agencies and municipalities should implement accountability programs as part of their co-response strategies.
Law enforcement’s role in the public safety ecosystem
Police are just one piece of the public safety puzzle. Deputy Chief Barden compared the dynamic to a SWAT operation: Each person has a specialized role, and everyone needs to work together to succeed.
“We need to adopt this team effort and team approach, because we all have different but very important roles that overlap,” Barden said.
However, that level of integration isn’t easy. Public safety leaders have to overcome biases and distrust between various agencies. Alternative response personnel might be hesitant to partner up with law enforcement, while officers might resist changing their operations. Leaders must champion integration, start a dialogue, share information, and learn from each other, Crowell said.
“It's tough work to do, because we're threatening a way of doing business, a way of sustaining things that have existed for a long time,” Crowell said. “But I've been reminded by these amazing leaders — policing, fire, paramedic services, whatever it is — we've had decades and some centuries to evolve. There's a new way of doing business, and it's happening in communities, large, medium, small, across the world, across North America.”
READ MORE → 21st Century Policing
Defining success in a public safety ecosystem
Success metrics can be hard to pin down in co-responder programs, which focus on long-term outcomes with data and responsibilities scattered across multiple agencies. Leaders need to learn how to tell their stories so they can justify the cost, Crowell said.
“How do we articulate prevention, how do we articulate the absence of harm?” Crowell said. “How do we really articulate in our communities what the effects of our work is in different ways? Telling that story is still an uphill battle.”
Shared mission
When public safety leaders unite over a shared vision, they can effectively integrate their strategies, upskill and crosstrain their personnel, and collaborate to solve unique challenges.
“The most important thing where I see real movement and progress,” Dr. Barden said, “is when there's actual moral conviction about the need, and there is a shared philosophy about how we're all integrated, how we should work together.”
Response times
Tracking long-term outcomes can be complicated, and they’re likely measured by other agencies, Dr. Barden said. That’s why public safety leaders should focus on improving their outputs instead. Barden initially focused on one key metric: reducing response times for priority-one calls, considered urgent threats to life. Previously, Seattle’s average response time for those calls was 12 minutes.
“Somebody may be deceased in five minutes, so 12 is unacceptable,” Barden said. “And I think a couple years later, I've done a good job at that — at managing those expectations and reminding people that we want excellence in first response, and we all want to be staffed up.”
Interagency coordination
Seattle agencies also aim to increase timely, accurate responses. The city has seen an increasing number of 911 calls requesting a care team, Dr. Barden said. By integrating first responders with CAD and records management systems (RMS) data, dispatch can send out the right resources the first time.
“Having CAD/RMS integrated for first responders means they can deploy the right configuration of police, fire, care and EMS,” Barden said. “It’s restoring trust in the system that we’re not just going to default to one team.”
Crime rates
The Seattle Police Department is constantly iterating based on its metrics, Deputy Chief Barden said, but “it’s hard to prove what didn’t happen.” However, with the right technology, agencies could measure how a holistic continuum of care impacts their communities’ most prolific utilizers, or those community members who call for service the most frequently, Barden said.
💡 PRO TIP: It can be hard to prove the quantitative outcomes of a co-response program to prove its value. One option is to track how many of your community’s highest utilizers were moved into stabilization before and after deploying a co-response model.
Deploy successful co-responder teams in your community
By integrating and transforming data from disparate, siloed sources, Peregrine unifies organizations both internally and across departments to ensure fast, effective collaboration when responding to crisis situations. Peregrine also makes it simple and easy to track and report on your co-responder team’s success in real time. Learn how Peregrine can support co-response in your community: Schedule a demo today.
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