Ellie Park, Multimedia Managing Editor

Elm City COMPASS announced expansions to its crisis response service, which dispatches social workers and peer allies to address community crises, due to the program’s large success and demand.

COMPASS, or Compassionate Allies Serving Our Streets, will now deploy teams to crisis sites for three additional hours each day, Mayor Justin Elicker announced on Sept. 25. The program will also begin to accept direct calls from 911 dispatchers, without requiring an initial response from police, fire or EMS teams.

“It’s taken a lot of hard work, a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of listening and support to get this across the finish line and to continue to ensure that it grows,” Elicker said at the press conference.

The City of New Haven created Elm City COMPASS in November 2022 in collaboration with the Consultation Center at the Yale School of Medicine and the nonprofit organization Continuum of Care. The program helps community members with mental health, substance abuse and housing crises.

It emerged as a response to the murder of George Floyd, in the wake of demands to minimize the role of police in managing health and housing crises. COMPASS dispatch teams include an unarmed social worker and a peer with lived experience, who respond to crises together.

Growing hours, staff 

According to Jack Tebes, director of COMPASS and professor of psychiatry and public health at the School of Medicine, the newly announced expansions are part of the three-year implementation plan first conceived in 2022.

Under its expanded service hours, COMPASS will conduct community outreach work and respond to 911 calls every day from 8 a.m. until 3 a.m. To prepare for the added shift, COMPASS hired two new social workers and peer community members and acquired a new van to travel to crisis sites. A new team will work nightly shifts from 7 p.m. until 3 a.m.

The expansion will help conduct community outreach in public settings frequented by unhoused people. COMPASS staff refer these people to crisis management resources, especially ones related to housing.

“We could quickly see that the outreach that’s needed, for example, at Union Station would take up the van’s time and the team’s time, and then there wouldn’t be another team to serve the 911 calls,” Tebes said. “So now, by having two teams, we can do that outreach to key areas where we know folks have a high need, but we can also still have a van available to do 911 calls.”

The expanded hours also ensure that staff members will not have to work beyond their allotted shifts, especially when calls come in just before midnight. The new shift “soft launched” in late August, and COMPASS callers have already made use of the added availability, Tebes said.

Although COMPASS is not expanding to a full 24-hour shift schedule, community members will be able to seek necessary support at the 24/7 Rapid Evaluation, Stabilization and Treatment Center — REST — created in May by Continuum of Care.

The power of direct deployment

COMPASS also announced that it will begin responding to direct calls from 911 dispatchers. 

Until now, first responders like police officers and firefighters had been deploying COMPASS once they arrived at the scene of a crisis. Now, 911 dispatchers in New Haven have updated their computer protocols so that COMPASS is displayed as a direct deployment option alongside police, fire and EMS teams. 

Ana Juarez, a member of COMPASS’ Community Advisory Board, believes that while police play an important role, confrontations can sometimes be harmful to someone experiencing a mental health crisis.

“Being an immigrant in the city was always kind of scary,” Juarez said. “We grew up learning to fear the police. I feel like if people want to get our help, people who are unhoused, or people who are suffering from some sort of mental health crisis, they don’t really want to see a person in uniform show up, let alone four or five, six of them.”

Juarez described a mental health crisis she experienced in August 2022, before the official launch of COMPASS. She recalled police surrounding her and talking about her condition without directly addressing her. Ultimately, she landed in the psychiatric hospital at Yale New Haven Hospital — an outcome she thinks COMPASS services could have prevented. 

Juarez believes COMPASS has the resources to provide sustained, practical support to people in crisis while also connecting them with somebody who has a shared experience, which police are not always capable of.

Jorge Camacho, lecturer at Yale Law School and policy director of public safety research center The Justice Collaboratory, noted that this change comes at a time when the New Haven Police Department is aiming to address a staffing shortage. 

80 percent of COMPASS’ 911 referrals come from New Haven police. Camacho believes that direct dispatch to COMPASS will help concentrate limited police resources on situations for which the police are better trained, and where arrests might be more necessary. Despite efforts to train police to manage mental health and substance use crises, he thinks that social workers and peers with lived experience may be better suited in some circumstances.

“For every police officer that you train to serve in that kind of role, you have one less police officer who’s available to serve in the more conventional police officer role that is still needed,” Camacho said. “You still need people, for example, to respond to violent crimes in progress, right? You need that. And that’s not something that a crisis intervention worker is intended to respond to.”

In some circumstances, like domestic violence, both police and COMPASS could be helpful resources, Tebes said. 

Roughly two-thirds of New Haveners call 911 when they have a mental health or substance use crisis, Tebes said. This, he added, “makes a city realize that they need to have a mental health and substance use team” to respond to calls. 

He anticipates that, as these expansions are rolled out, community members will feel more confident that their crises will be met with the appropriate personnel — police or otherwise.

With its expansion, COMPASS currently employs over two dozen employees.