 Ableton On Air is sponsored by Green Mountain Support Services, empowering people with disabilities to be home in the community. Washington County Mental Health, where hope and support comes together. Media sponsors for Ableton On Air include Parkchester Times, Muslim Community Report, WWW, this is the Bronx dot info, Associated Press Media Editors, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, US Press Corps, Domestic and International, Anchor FM, and Spotify. Partners for Ableton On Air include Yechad New York and New England, where everyone belongs, The Orthodox Union, the Vermont Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired, The Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Montpelier Sustainable Coalition, Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity. Ableton On Air has been seen in the following publications, Parkchester Times, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, WWW, this is the Bronx dot info, and WWW dot H dot com. Ableton On Air is a member of the National Academy for Television Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England chapter. Welcome to this edition of Ableton On Air, the one and only program that focuses on the needs concerning the achievements of the different label. I've always been your host more than a cider. And on this program today, we talk about team two, but before that, we'd like to say special thanks to our sponsors, Washington County Mental Health, we love support services and many others, including the partnership with the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, the Division for the Blind of Visually Impaired of Vermont, Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity and many, many, many others. With us, we have Christian Chandler from team two. We're supposed to have another guest, but that person has not shown yet. However, we'd like to say thank you for joining us on this edition. Happy to be here again, you bet. What is the missions and goals of team two? Well, team two is a statewide training for first responders really in a nutshell. The missions and goals are really to build the relationships necessary for first responders to be able to collaborate in responding to a mental health crisis call. So we offer the training in five regions around the state with the purpose of building those relationships with fellow first responders who you might be responding to a call with in that region. For police dispatchers, mental health crisis workers, EMTs, emergency department personnel are invited because of that handoff in a mental health crisis. I also invite state's attorneys to attend. That's about who gets notice of the trainings and the dates and things. So the goal is really just to hear about what's working in that region for them, what isn't working to give some people some ideas about how to better collaborate and come to a really peaceful resolution in a mental health crisis. Please tell our viewers and listeners about the program and really how it works. Sure. So team two was the idea of Mary Moulton just about 10 years ago when Mary came to the state and she came to the Department of Mental Health. She came from Washington County Mental Health where she had been a crisis screener and for many, many years. And when she came to the state level, she realized that not every part of the state enjoyed the same great collaborative relationship that they have in Washington County between crisis workers and law enforcement for many, many years. And so she had this idea about let's see if we can't improve that around the state. And so she brought together a bunch of stakeholders from various police agencies, state agencies, consumers, advocates, lots of people from different mental health agencies. And we met for probably over a year trying to come up with a curriculum that would fit into one day because we realized, Mary realized, we actually in discussion, we realized that it'd be a lot easier to get people to a one day training as opposed to two day or even a week long training, which is what's done in a lot of other parts of the country. So that started 10 years ago, I was at the Department of Mental Health then as an assistant attorney general working with Mary and once we got the basic ideas down about what we wanted in the curriculum, she kind of handed it over to me and asked me to make this happen. So in 2013, we started our first train the trainer program around the state again. So people are trained by their peers. There's 35 instructors in the five regions around the state. And I've brought one of them here with me today from the central region, from the Montpelier PD. And I will pause right there so I can have Victor introduce himself. We'll be right back in a couple of minutes to talk more about team two. We'll be back after these words. Welcome back to Abel Doronner and joining us is, what is your name, please? A Victor and a Hossa. I work for the Montpelier Police Department. So we're talking about team two and how it started and all that. Have you pre-perceived any notions regarding team two prior to training? Like what type of training have you received and any expectations thus far and how is team two working as a program? So before I took team two, the only, the closest training I had in mental health was the ACT-80, which is required by the Academy, which Christian actually also was my trainer there. So when I took team two, I thought it was gonna be similar to that. And I wasn't expecting the amount of collaboration that we had having people from FIRE, EMS, mental health professionals, people from state's attorney's offices and also dispatchers. I thought it was very interesting having all these stakeholders that respond to crisis is all in the same training. Define mental health crisis and how, so it's paired with a social worker and a police officer or how's it work within? Well, let's back up just a second because I think you asked just a couple of different questions right there. So I would, first of all, what is a mental health crisis? Yes, and how is it? We're kinda getting away from that term a little bit, Lawrence, we're more calling it like an emotional crisis or a behavioral issue because it can really run the gamut, right? I mean, people just are in crisis, especially now during the pandemic. People are finding themselves stressed to the max on all different kinds of issues. And so it has been a fallback for forever really. If you're in a crisis, who do you call it? You dial 911. And so you know the police are always gonna be there and they're gonna respond. And we're really trying to kinda back up from that right now and allow for some alternative types of response. And so to that end, Montpelier police have collaborated, excuse me, with Washington County Mental Health and with Berry City police to hire a embedded, what we call an embedded social worker. So somebody who is employed. Who has a new embedded social worker. Yeah, I'm explaining that. She's employed by Washington County Mental Health as a licensed clinician, but she sits with the police departments. She has an actual desk, both in Berry and in Montpelier and she can ride along with the officers. So she splits her time between the two cities and she can ride along with the officers. She can go out on her own on calls. If safety is not a concern, she can respond on her own. Because of that real variety in what is a crisis. Maybe that somebody, they just need a place to stay or they might need some food and that will put them in a crisis. That's something that Susan could handle, the embedded worker. Versus they're in an acute psychotic episode and they're causing some property destruction or something, any police intervention perhaps. But Susan can also be there to then offer resources and follow up. And I know, I think Victor has been able to benefit from having her in the department. So you may wanna say something about that. So let's piggyback off, but even before the pandemic, I mean, I'm gonna kind of add a couple of questions here. Even before the pandemic, since we're getting away from crisis, but people that have emotional situations, how before team two, right? How has the police department been dealing with that? And then now with team two, has it gotten better? Has it gotten, I wouldn't say worse, but kind of walk us through the situation. So I don't know what we did before, but I know that with team two, from an officer's standpoint, it helps open our eyes and see all the different resources that are available. And it puts us all together in one room so we can actually have conversations with the same people that we're gonna be calling upon. And it gives us a little bit of insight into their job and their role. And in turn, that helps us because then we all have a better understanding of when we're responding to a call, how we can all help each other out. Yeah, what outcomes or impact of team two trainings, wait, to be quantified or put together? Like, what have been the outcomes of team two training? Well, I think one of the things, I'll just ask Victor to respond to this because I remember when he was in training, you know, part of the curriculum for that one day includes a little segment on responding to people on the autism spectrum because that's a pretty frequent call. And it was within a few weeks, I think of the training where Victor had a call like that, he responded to that and I'll let him take it from there. We had a 911 hang-up call. There was no other information besides 911 hang-up. It mapped the address for it so I went out to the address, made contact with a mother and she told me that they, the parents had not called 911, they weren't really sure where it came from, but they told me that they had a son that had autism and they thought that he might have done it and so she went into his room, found her cell phone there and found that he had dialed 911. This is the right after I took it. You didn't actually get in trouble for actually dialing 911? Well, they weren't in trouble. In his case? No, no, no, they weren't in trouble but if someone does dial 911, we have to go out and just make sure that everyone's okay. Yeah, so I was able to make contact with their son, check their welfare, they were all okay and obviously he just made a mistake that everyone made. I think when I was a kid, I made that same mistake and I think it's something that, yeah, I was a kid, you just have to get out of the way once and then once you see the police show up, that's probably the last time that it happens but I took that time to connect with the child that was in the residence and their family and I talked to them about the team two training that I just had and I talked to them about how it would be important for the department to know that they have, they have their son that's living with autism with them and he had, the mother told me that several times in the past and she expected in the future that he would elope from the residence and possibly run into traffic, try to run to school, which is very dangerous. So it gave me the opportunity to turn that pretty simple call 911 hang up into an opportunity to let the other officers on the road know that we have this community member that we should take extra time and care with and I was able to let the rest of the department know that should they respond in the future, and I don't know if, I probably shouldn't say the child's name, but when they're responding to him the mother told me things that he liked, things that he didn't like, that he was non-verbal, that he was attracted to water even though he- So the certain non-verbal cues with autism that you were being trained on within- Right, with team two, and recognize those when I was on scene at this 911 hang up call and the mother was very surprised at the amount of knowledge that I had and I told her that was from my team two training and she said she wished that every police officer had that same training so that they'd have that same understanding. Did you wanna ask, go ahead with some of your questions? Yeah. Staying away from that other one, go ahead. Yeah. What improvements have been made since our team two has been in- What improvements in police response? In helping people with mental health issues? Sure, that's a great question Arlene, thank you. Well, as Victor just touched on, the training itself just opens people's eyes to a gamut of possibilities and not just responding to people on the autism spectrum, but it's a scenario-based training and every year we have three scenarios in the day and every year we change them a little bit depending on what's going on. There may be a current issue statewide that I've heard a lot about so we'll add that in. So it has, I will say it has improved the relationships between mental health crisis teams and their local law enforcement and the state police. Obviously, do other states have something similar to team two? They do not. We've actually presented team two at a few national conferences where I've had the opportunity to go and present and I've learned that other states actually don't do this and this is really geared because we are a small rural state it makes sense to do this kind of training in a one day, eight hour training that because we have so many small police departments it makes it a lot easier for them to be able to attend, first of all, as opposed to what's the national training really is a 40 hour training and it's really hard for local departments to send all their officers to a whole week of training because who would mind the shop? So the improvements have been, they're anecdotal, but I will tell you that meaning that I hear about various calls around the state where people have responded and they've gotten a much better resolution that they attribute to the training just as Victor just talked about. I mean he attributed his ability to make that, respond that way on that call directly to the training that he took and so that's what I, we don't keep, it's hard to keep statistics on that. We do do a follow up evaluation of, we send a survey to everybody six months after they've taken the training, anybody who's attended to see if they're using the tools that they learned in the training and I'm gonna say, I think it's about 92% of the people say that they continue to use those tools, they continue to have really good relationships, improved relationships with their fellow first responders and they have a much better understanding of how each other does their job really. They learn each other's limitations and their language during the training and they've been able to retain that, which is great. Mm-hmm. How long? Yeah, like how many? Eight hours. Yeah. Over three days. No. It's eight hours. And it's one day. It's one day, yeah. And it's offered in at least six times a year in five regions around the state. So the Northwest region, which is Chittenden and Franklin counties, they get the training twice a year. Everybody else gets it once a year. But I have added, I mean there's always some additional trainings like some police departments might ask for some extra training and we'll figure out a way to do that for them. What is the value of recognizing the importance of mental health and policing? Either both of you can answer this question. I think that every day we get a call for service that in some way, shape or form involves someone either having a mental health crisis or having a crisis in general and having the team two training under your belt helps you better respond to those incidents because it gives you a better understanding of the services that are available and it gives you a better understanding of how those services is gonna help that person. I think Lawrence, if I can just add to that, I think it's important to note that team two is funded by a collaboration between the Department of Public Safety and Department of Mental Health. They collaborate in a grant but it's year to year. So it's, and this is not a training that's mandatory for police officers. It's voluntary. You said that? Yep. Okay, look at that. Should it be in all, should team two or a version of team two be in every single police department globally because this is new. This might be new, but due to the fact of the situation with the way people proceed policing, in various incidents all across the globe, not mentioning any particular incidents, but should team two be or a version B in every single police department, do you think? I think that here for my team two should definitely be mandatory for any law enforcement officer, mental health, professional, anybody that works at a state attorney's office, firefighters, EMTs, they're all gonna benefit from that. Globally, I think anybody in public service or really anybody at all would benefit from having some sort of mental health training. Your take on that? Well, I think, we've discussed this a lot over the years since team two started, especially I would say in the last three years or so the legislature has actually asked me that very question. Like why, if this is such a great training, why isn't it, why don't we make it mandatory? Like some of the other trainings are for police. And my response is I think you have a different approach when you come to a training because you wanna be there or you're there voluntarily, maybe your supervisor has asked you to come, but as opposed to if it's mandatory because law enforcement has a lot of other required trainings they have to do every year. And it's just, I think you get a whole different attitude and perspective when you're there because you're interested in the topic and you wanna be there. That being said, I do think that a lot of other states have a required follow up training every year in mental health for police and we do not, Vermont does not. The only requirement Vermont has is that initial eight hour training that Victor alluded to that I teach at the police academy along with a clinician and a law enforcement officer, that's required by statute in Vermont. But other than that, there is no other requirement. And I would love to see a requirement for a refresher in mental health, specifically geared for mental health response, whether it's four hours or eight hours or if it's every year or every two years, but something because things change. The law changes certain political events can change how a community, a pandemic, can really affect how a community responds to crisis. And so I think it would be beneficial to have a follow up training. Can you describe a scenario without violating HIPAA, obviously? But can you describe a scenario where training was put into use? I think that the 911 hang-up one was a great one. I think that to add off of what I already said about that, after that call, cause that was probably, that was late at night, a couple of days. After 12 midnight, probably around midnight that that call came in. A couple of days after that though, the mother asked me to go back to the house because her son had a gift for me. And I went and he had wrote a thank you officer on a piece of paper and drawn on it and decorated it for me as a little token. And I thought that was pretty special. I think that we respond to mental health calls, like I said, every single day. I think that the impact that we make can be positive or negative. And if we can make those positive connections, it's great because then we can build relationships throughout the community that are gonna be everlasting. I think that that was a very good experience for me certainly and for that family. What is the, well we have some, obviously we have a little bit more time left. Perhaps an obvious question would be, but what is the ideal outcome in a scenario following a mental health question? The ideal outcome? Yeah, like what have outcomes been or I don't know, can you tell what an outcome would be if you're there or not? I think I understand your question, so the ideal outcome in any mental health crisis would be that everybody, that it gets resolved safely with nobody getting hurt and that the proper resources are provided to the individual to hopefully prevent another crisis happening again in the future. I don't know, that's my take on it. I don't know, I'd like to know what Victor's take on it. I think that's absolutely right. I mean, we want everyone to be safe. We want them, I'd like everyone to be happy with the outcome that they have and if that means that we show up on scene and provide a courtesy ride to someone to go somewhere that they need to get resources, I think that we would very much so do that for them. The best outcome for us is making sure that that person gets the type of help and services that they need. I'll say, Lauren, I think Lauren's just for your viewers that one of the things that we really focus on in any mental health training with police is to slow things down and to take the time, excuse me. What do you mean by slow? What do you mean by slow things down? To really evaluate the situation, to think about, not just rush in and to think about, get as much information as possible on the way to the call and then during the call and to partner with the correct experts in the field and if it's a mental health call, it would be hopefully partnering with Washington County Mental Health crisis screeners who would be able to come to the scene or at least provide assistance over the phone and just slow things down and take your time and this has been, this is not new really but it's, I would say in the last couple of years more and more police chiefs and administrators have realized that this is really what's gonna keep their officers safe as well as the subject safe is if you can take that time to establish those relationships just as Victor did in that 911 hang-up call, he took, he didn't have to go back and meet this kid and hang out with him in his room and play with him but he did and that just goes a really long way and I know, I've heard from lots of other officers and other consumers where they're like, wow, if we just take the time to really talk to somebody and figure out what it is that's at the core of the problem, we might be able to resolve it now as opposed to having to go, you know, hands-on and into a big scuffle thing. The situation becomes worse if you know that. Right, right and that's really what we, and we really want for the situation to not become worse, right? We want it to be, we don't want the presence of the police to escalate the stress or the concern and we know that for some people that can be difficult, right? Seeing the police come to their home or to a scene can sort of increase that anxiety or increase that stress. And so that's the other thing we talk a lot about is just how an officer's gonna approach a particular call, whether they're gonna come lights and siren or they're gonna just come park maybe farther away and walk up, you know, really focusing on what's still gonna keep them safe but what might actually benefit the subject of the call. Any questions? Go ahead, go ahead. Oh yeah, all kinds of female officers taking the training. Yeah. Does the training differ between, you don't mind me asking this, does the training differ between male and female? Like is there a certain other training that the female takes that the male doesn't take or is it all one training? It's all one training. You know what? Yeah, no, there's nothing different for her. Certainly, I know that like, I know the regular police training involves like obstacle courses and other things. Sure. Yeah, I just wanted to. There's a lot of exercise involved in the police academy and the women do it as well as the men. Okay, no, I hope that wasn't a bad question. No, and I can tell you, so I do some training at the police academy for the Vermont State Police and a couple sessions ago, for the first time they had more women in their class than they did men, actually. I just did one couple weeks ago for them for this current class and it was all men, it was 13 men. So it was just a little bit unusual that they didn't have any female applicants or recruits. Normally they have quite a few. I know they've made a big effort to try to recruit more women and minorities. Okay. Please, okay. What is the value? Oh, wait, very good. Anything you want to say more about Team Two and the future of Team Two? I just think, I thought of another great example of that training being used in the field. I responded to a call that there was a female that was in the bathroom. She had fallen and the people I called said that they didn't really know what was going on and they weren't sure if it was a medical call, they weren't sure if they needed to fire the Department of Police Department. It was very vague. Well, she got stuck in... The call came in very vague. And when calls like that come in, typically they dispatch the police just because they want someone, they want a first responder on scene to see what's going on. And I walked in and the people that had called, this is at a hotel, they called and they said, we don't understand what she's saying, we don't know what she wants, but she seems like she doesn't want anybody to help them. She keeps moving her hands around and it seems like she doesn't want people to be around her. So we just left her alone and we called you. I go into the bathroom and it was a female that was sitting on the ground and I could tell she was crying, introduced myself, hi, I'm Officer Victor, what can I do to help you? And she turned to me, she made some movements with her hands that at first, I didn't really recognize what were and then I quickly realized that she was deaf and the way that she communicated, she couldn't talk, but she could write. And so I just like Christian said, what all law enforcement officers are trying to do now sew things down, sewed everything down, recognized what was in front of me, took out a pad and a pad of paper and my pen and just wrote and that's how we communicated back and forth and realized that she had been recently discharged from the hospital, she didn't have a ride home. She knew the name of her social worker, so I called them, they came right over from the hospital and helped me get a better understanding of this person and I was able to provide her a ride home and that's really all she needed. So that call came in very vague, got on scene, recognized what happened, sewed things down, called in additional resources and then we had a really great outcome of- Are police officers in the monthly police department, do they have training in sign language or anything with deaf individuals? In this case? I know I don't. So I had to use the resources that I had available and I was fortunate that writing on the piece of paper, that was the best way to communicate with her and that's what her social worker said that that's how she communicates with people. What's the future of team two? Well, hopefully it continues on. As I said, it's usually it's a year to year grant from the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Public Safety. That's just part of their budgets. So we've really seen the benefit of the training just over and over again, saving resources. So I think it's a good investment. So I certainly hope it will continue. I think we may expand the audience a little bit. I've had some requests from like college security officers who aren't police officers but and who don't get a lot of mental health training but do respond to a lot of mental health crises. So we have that request. We've got, I've had some requests from the Department of Corrections. So there's a way to. Isn't Department of Corrections officers? So wouldn't that. But they're not first responders. This is really geared towards first responders. Okay. They work in the prisons. Yeah. Or in the field. But there's, so I hope that it will, it could expand. I've had some requests from some other states about how to model the training in their states. So we'll see. Hopefully it'll keep going. Well, anything else you want to, Alexa? I think something important to understand about team two is it's not a stagnant training meaning. Not just one day and it's finished. Well that, and I think that we've seen people that don't just take it once they come back and take it multiple times after that because the training material adapts I think with the current environment that we work in and with the updates from law enforcement, mental health, state's attorney, and all the other stakeholders that go to the training. So it's not something that you go to twice and it's the exact same material every single time. It keeps growing. It keeps building. And that's very important for training purposes. Any questions you would like to add and involve with team two? So I started at the Berlin Police Department in March of 2019 and I just recently switched over to the Montpelier Police Department at the beginning of September. And I started, I forget when I did my first team two training. I want to say it was like April of, we were on Zoom, right? Yeah, it had to been 2020. So beginning of 2020. Yeah, before we end, I was, I know we should have done this question at the beginning, but during the pandemic, team two must have been a little. We had to pivot. We had to pivot a little bit, Lawrence. So we did the trainings virtually on using Zoom with everybody safe in their own environments. That was all of last year. And this year we're having two in-person trainings of the four that were scheduled for this fall. Two have been, will be in-person and two are on Zoom. Is it hard to do a training of police training on Zoom? Oh yeah, it's a lot harder. But it's also has, I mean, during the pandemic, there were more participants than I've ever had because they could do it by Zoom. They didn't have to travel. They didn't have to find parking. They didn't have to worry about being away from picking up their kids or whatever. So we had way more people sign up and register when they could do it virtually. So that's why we left it with a couple of trainings still by Zoom, also because of the, there's a couple of regions that are really big. The Southwest region is Bennington, Rutland and Addison County. And so there's a lot more travel for people. Here in Montpelier we did the training in-person at the end of September. We were able to use a really big space over at the Pavilion building so people could spread out. But also the central region is, you know, people aren't coming from very far away. It's just Washington and Orange counties. So it was relatively easy for people to get here. Okay. Well, we would like to thank you for joining us. Thank you for having us. And thank you so much. For more information on Washington County and its programs, you can go to www.wcmhs.org. That's www.wcmhs.org in more information on, is there a number for people who are in crisis that would like to? The crisis number? I don't, I actually, I don't know the crisis number. So if you're in crisis and need assistance with Washington County Mental Health, you can go to 1802-229-0591. That number is 802-229-0591. Well, we would like to thank our sponsors, Washington County Mental Health, Green Mountain Support Services, and many others, including the partnership with the Association for the Blind of Vermont, the Division for the Blind of Vermont, Central Vermont, Habitat for Humanity, and we would like to especially thank today the Montpelier Police Department and Officer, how do you pronounce, how do you pronounce your name? Everyone calls me Officer Victor, but my last name's Hena Hosa. Okay. Officer Victor Hena Hosa of the Montpelier Police Department, and thank you to Christian Chandler of Team Two. This puts an end to Abel Denonair. I'm Lauren Seiler. I'm Lauren Seiler. See you next time. Abel Denonair is sponsored by Green Mountain Support Services, empowering people with disabilities to be home in the community. Washington County Mental Health, where hope and support comes together. Media sponsors for Abel Denonair include Park Chester Times, Muslim Community Report, WWW, this is the Bronx.info, Associated Press Media Editors, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, US Press Corps, Domestic and International, Anchor FM, and Spotify. Partners for Abel Denonair include Yechad, New York, and New England, where everyone belongs, The Orthodox Union, the Vermont Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Montpelier Sustainable Coalition, Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity. Abel Denonair has been seen in the following publications. Park Chester Times, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, WWW, this is the Bronx.info, and www.h.com. Abel Denonair is a member of the National Academy for Television Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England chapter.