Skagit deputies and crisis clinicians reimagine policing

SEATTLE — In a newly launched pilot project, civilian mental health crisis responders are riding alongside Skagit County sheriff’s deputies on 911 calls. It is the latest example of reimagining policing in the Pacific Northwest.

Skagit County Sheriff’s Office Detective Anne Weed broached the idea for a partnership months before the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police ignited the national debate about reform. Weed said two existing mental health clinicians from Compass Health are now being “embedded” with regular patrol deputies. They get assigned the 911 calls involving people acting out who may have mental health problems or addiction issues.

“911 is the number that people call when they need help because that’s the only number that people know when they need help,” Weed said in an interview from the sheriff’s office in Mount Vernon. “In law enforcement, we do have mental health training and de-escalation training, but we’re not clinicians.”

Among the goals of the partnership with Compass Health, a major provider of psychiatric and substance abuse treatment services in Northwest Washington, is to reduce arrests of people caught in a cycle of homelessness, hospitalization and jail. As elsewhere, a small cohort of chronically and pervasively mentally ill people account for a disproportionately high number of police contacts.

“Without a clinician on scene, we would give them a card and say, ‘You can call this number or you can call this person and they’ll offer services for you,’” Weed said. “But when you just hand somebody a card, the likelihood of that person calling is very slim.”

The Skagit County model is a little different than others in this vein regionally – in Eugene-Springfield, Seattle and Olympia, for example – in that the clinician and sheriff’s deputy respond to calls together in the same patrol car. Alternative models have dispatchers deploy an unarmed case worker instead of an officer to certain calls.

Embedding with the deputies enables responses to a wider range of clientele and provides safety to the mental health clinicians in sketchy situations involving suicidal subjects, paranoia or people threatening domestic violence, according to Marla Johns, who manages Compass Health’s mental health crisis response team in Skagit County.

“I don’t want to be the police. That’s not what my area of expertise is,” said Johns. “I want somebody however with me whose experience and expertise is in scene safety, assessment of the environment and making sure things in that way are stable so I can do my job.”

Weed and Johns received funding for two mental clinicians to start off with on the sheriff’s office embed project. Those two positions provide coverage ten hours per day, seven day a week for mental health-related 911 calls in the unincorporated parts of Skagit County. The mental health responders wear civilian clothes to distinguish themselves from law enforcement and lessen the anxiety of the person drawing their attention.

In the Skagit Valley, Compass Health managers said they have already heard interest from city police departments about joining the mental health embed project just started by their county sheriff’s office.

“In a roundabout way, we are in tune with the moment,” said Brandon Foister, clinical director for crisis response and stabilization for Everett-based Compass Health.

The pilot project in Skagit County is authorized through the middle of next year but Weed and Marla are already so pleased with how it is going, they anticipate it will be extended. The embedding of mental health clinicians with sheriff’s patrol deputies is funded with a combination of state and county health care dollars and general tax revenues.

This is a condensed version of the story first published by Northwest News Network, Oct. 2, 2020