 Major sponsors for Ableton on Air include Green Mountain Support Services, empowering people with disabilities to live home in the community, Washington County Mental Health, where hope and support come together. Media sponsors for Ableton on Air include Park Chester Times, Muslim Community Report, WWW, this is the Bronx.info, Associated Press Media Editors, New York Power Online Newspaper, U.S. Press Corps Domestic and International, Anchor FM, and Spotify. Partners for Ableton on Air include the HOD of New York and New England, where everyone belongs, the Orthodox Union, the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Center Vermont Habitat for Humanity, and Montpelier Sustainable Coalition, Montefiore Medical Center of the Bronx, Roosevelt Kennedy Center of Bronx, New York, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of the Bronx. Ableton on Air has been seen in the following publications. Park Chester Times, WWW, this is the Bronx.com, New York Power Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, WWW.H.com, and the Montpelier Bridge. Ableton on Air is part of the following organizations, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England Chapter, and the Society of Professional Journalists. Welcome to this edition of Ableton on Air, the one and only program that focuses on the needs, concerns, and achievements of the definitely able. I've always been your host, Lauren Seiler. And on this show, before we get to Washington County Mental Health and mental health and policing, we would like to say special thanks to our sponsors, Washington County Mental Health, Green Mountain Support Services, and many others, including the partnership of Higher Ability Vermont and the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont. We would like to welcome Chief Brian Peat of the Montpelier Police Department, and Susan Lameer of Washington County Mental Health. Welcome to Ableton on Air. Thank you. And thank you. But Washington County Mental Health has been working alongside law enforcement and first responders for over 30 years, historically, screeners have gone into, the law enforcement first, have gone into mental health crisis related to an emerging call. Over the past number of years, mental health agencies and in particular Vermont's designated agencies have begun a more formalized process in working together and working through mental health crisis and emerging calls. Trainings like CIT and International Program and more locally, team two have become an integral part of policing. Welcome again to Ableton on Air. Let's start with you, Chief. You're new to Montpelier Police Department. Okay. How long? And tell us a little bit about your background before arriving to Montpelier and how has your time been spent here? Well, first and foremost, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. I really appreciate it. I am, yeah, I'm new to Montpelier for the most part. I've been here since my family and I have been here for coming on two years. It'll be two years in June. And I was born and raised in the south side of the city of Chicago, went off to the military, joined the Air Force, aircraft maintenance, and then I switched over to be a federal agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. And then from there, I joined the Chicago Police Department, worked in the Chicago Inspector General's Office, worked as know-your-client anti-money laundering at J.P. Morgan Private Bank. And then I became the Chief of Police in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and then I started my gig here. And Susan, what has been your experience in mental health and why the combination of policing and mental health? Well, I am a little newer than Chief Pete is. I started my position here in August two years ago. So Chief Pete has a little bit of a head start on me. But I'm originally from Massachusetts and I've been working in the mental health field since 1994 in a variety of settings. But the most recent position that I had before I moved here to Vermont was doing crisis work. But that was in connection with an agency where we infrequently at that time interacted with police. But I have always been very interested in the intersection between law enforcement and healthcare, the criminal justice system and healthcare. And so when I learned about this position, as a pilot position, I was really excited to be part of shaping it and seeing what it could do. Okay. We understand that your position is grant funded. Yes. How is that? We understand that some people don't get paid for a lot of stuff that they do. But how is the combination of policing and your position, why is there a social worker on staff at the police department? Should I speak? You are the expert. I'll start first and then please jump in. So the funding for this position is three ways. It comes through the city of Montpelier, the Montpelier police department, the very city police department, and then through Washington County Mental Health, through a grant from Department of Mental Health. It was originally intended to be a year-long grant, and then at the year points the decision was made that it was off to a good start and to renew it again. So what I know about these types of programs, having done a lot of learning about other programs around the country, is that sometimes the funding starts one way and then it needs to shift to another more sustainable model after that. Sustainable model, how? It can look different ways. Sometimes there is funding designated because it has proven to be a worthwhile endeavor and also cost-effective, so funding will get designated directly through the organizations involved and not having to be grant funded. Sometimes one organization picks it up, sometimes it's shared, but usually moving away from the grant is the long-range goal. Go ahead. Do you have any questions? Speak loud. I will, I will. The police and the social field is one that has a mental health challenge. Okay. My wife's question was, being the fact that you guys are together and it's a correlation, you know, a combination of team two and you guys working together, how is it really, why has social workers really gotten involved working police to kind of de-escalate situations for people that are in mental health crisis? Okay. Well, I can take a go with this one first. So I think that in crisis situations, I think that the responsibility of law enforcement in crisis situations is to make sure that a scene is safe. We don't have the training or the experience to help folks once that crisis is over. And that's when you have people like Susan who come in who can, once it's de-escalated, once that level, any threshold of danger is gone, then it is extraordinarily important that people have the resources they need to keep the crisis from happening again. And that comes into so many different factors that the police can't do. For us, it's a call after call after call. And we need folks who are specially trained, who are very adept and very good at what they do and they have a lot of empathy and care to give back to the community and that's where social workers and peers come in, is to keep those and providing resources and training and understanding and information, not just to the person who's in crisis, but to their entire support network. And if they don't have a support network, the police can't help with that. We don't have that type of a reach. They do. And that's, I think, is the good part about this. Tell us about resources and de-escalation. There has been talk and there has been usage of other ways to de-escalate a situation. There's been situations where police accidentally grab their firearm in terms of not grabbing their taser and they're supposed to grab their taser. But there has been an issue of other weapons, non-lethal, being used such as Ebola or other situations. In terms of de-escalation, would you like to talk about that in non-lethal ways that police are starting to look at different situations? So I think that the culture entirely in law enforcement, I've been in several different places in law enforcement, and overwhelmingly the people who I've had the privilege and the honor to work beside are very empathetic and they come on to the job. Describe empathy. That they feel and they want to help someone else. They want to put themselves in that person's shoes and they want to help for the benefit, for the positive. But what has recently happened within our profession is that we're constantly ebbing and flowing and the legitimacy or the trust that the community has within law enforcement is at a pretty low point right now. So it's incumbent upon us to try to figure out ways to bring that trust factor back up. And one of those trust factors is how we use force and a lot of the attention onto force. So as we work to look for less than lethal or non-lethal ways of compliance in getting folks, whether they might be hurting someone else or whether they might present themselves as a threat against whoever's responding to that critical incident, we have to invest in that. And right now, there are folks who don't want law enforcement to have weapons. They're trying to fund the police too. Correct. And with that is like, if law enforcement, we have to work on that trust factor because some folks are saying that I don't trust law enforcement to have a taser or I don't trust law enforcement to have the product that you had mentioned, which is the Bola Wrap. And these are less than lethal options. Without those options, the only thing I have is either my weapon or a hunk of steel or OC spray. OC spray. Which is basically, it's a... Mace? Yeah, you can say it's mace. I think it's a cyterium capsum spray. And it's just basically, it's an irritant. But essentially, there are a lot of less than lethal tools that are out there for law enforcement to use. We're just having a difficulty crossing that threshold to regain the public's trust enough that in our particular situation that the city of Montpelier would advocate for us or would endorse us having the Bola Wrap or the taser. And that's what we have to work on now before we can look at getting more less than lethal options. Okay. Can either of you speak on training and aid in helping in response to a mental crisis? CIT or other types of training? I'll speak to trainings that I'm familiar with and I'll let you speak about CIT because I know you're very familiar with CIT. So, Team 2 I've been involved with since moving here and starting this position and so I've been to a couple of their quarterly trainings. Those are fantastic. They're an opportunity for people in a crisis situation from different professions. So, law enforcement, dispatch, mental health to meet together and review scenarios many of which have actually happened somewhere and talk about what would you do? What could be done differently from law enforcement perspective? What are they looking at? What would mental health be considering? And so it's a very helpful way of having a sense ahead of time of what the collaboration might look like so that you're not inventing the wheel at that crisis situation. What do you mean by inventing the wheel? You're not trying to figure out how to collaborate because you've already had discussions with very clear feedback back and forth about this is what I would be focusing on. I would be securing the scene. Okay, I would be waiting for you to secure the scene but I would be paying attention to who seems in the most distress and whether there needs to be more than just me there because there's maybe multiple people. So, those are... And what if I'm interjecting for a minute what happens if a scene and Chief just can go to YouTube? What happens if a scene is, you know, you walk into somebody's house, an example. They're holding a chair, they want to throw the chair or they want to throw something else that can hurt somebody. And it becomes a really bad situation. How do you de-escalate a really bad situation? I'm so glad you asked the question. I'm sorry. No, I'm so glad you asked the question because these situations can take a turn very quickly. And someone can get some severely hurt. So, one of the things that makes me feel lucky every day and my role is that, you know, officers from Montpelier, officers from Berry City are outstanding at, you know, utilizing me on the scene to the extent that that's safe, helping me get out of harm's way in a situation where it might not be safe. I'm sorry to ask you this. Do you have to wear a bulletproof vest? I have a bulletproof vest that I wear, you know, on a number of occasions, so. Wow, yeah. That said, you know, the police, they're excellent at that piece so much so that I, instead of being in fear for my safety in a situation and freed up to focus on that part about, you know, what are people experiencing, what do they need? And the other piece that I would add is that, you know, police have been responding to these kinds of calls for a long time. What the public sometimes sees in the media is when something goes awry, what they don't see is over and over and over again the skill that many of the officers have in, you know, asking somebody, what's bothering you right now? Is there something we can be helpful with instead of, you know, coming in in that sort of forceful way that draws criticism? Okay. Did you want to ask a question? Go ahead. That is your, yeah, there's the police. How does the police, let me see if I can piggyback up what you said. If a person is homeless or has some severe issue, how does the police and how do you deal with that situation? Well, there are many regulations that are built into codes of conduct, ethics, as well as the law for both of our respective professions. So in those cases, we try not to get involved with something that we're conscious. We don't want something to spiral out of control. So as we... What do you mean by that? Well, we could, some people may be set off with a uniform person, with an officer approaching them and asking them, especially if they haven't done anything wrong. So if an officer can go up to someone and ask, are you okay? Are you in crisis? Is there anything I can do to help you? That person may get upset. And if there's no lawful reason for a police officer to stop somebody, then any use of force that happens as a result is that police officer is responsible for it. So there have been a host of new laws that have come out in different ways in which we're trained. So when we come across those types of situations, we typically... Those are typically situations that we're called to. So that someone in the public has seen someone who appears to be in crisis, or is to them disruptive, or is to them is in some type of a situation that requires help. In a lot of cases, just be very blunt. Some people are just uncomfortable seeing someone who has an impairment. And the first thing they may do is just say, this makes me feel uncomfortable. I'm gonna reach out to the police. And then that draws law enforcement into a situation in which law enforcement doesn't need to be there in the first place. And that's why it's essential that we have things like Team 2 training and CIT, because in Team 2, we get on this very... I know Susan. Susan knows Brian. And we're close. And we understand each other. And if something happens, I know I can pick up the phone and say, Susan, there's this issue that's going on. Susan's gonna be able to take it, because she knows who I am and I know who she is. And building those relationships are vital for us to bridge those gaps of services. So when we do see somebody who needs help, we're able to reach out to the right person to get as much help as we can. Susan, did you want to piggyback off that? I was just so interested in what you were saying. So the question again was about what if somebody has sort of multiple needs, and then you had started talking about the specific guidelines about times when intervening might make things worse and how we have to figure out whose best positions to respond. We very often time see people that have multiple situations going on. So there might be a mental health issue and homelessness and substance use related problems. Or someone waving a weapon at the same time. There can be a lot going on. And so it speaks so much to the importance of having an entire police organization and an entire mental health organization, because I'm one person, and when I don't happen to be working, or if it needs more than just me, the screeners from Washington County Mental Health are coming out. And they have for the last 30 years worked very closely with police responding to some of these situations too. And when somebody, like one of the screeners or myself is able to be involved in this situation, then there can be either at that time or shortly after. Some really, if the person wants to, looking into, you know, what do you need? How can we be helpful? Is there something that we can do to help things from being so bad or feeling so bad again? So then that's where... Chief, is the training, you know, team two has their separate training. CIT has their separate training. Is the training enough when you're dealing with mental health because now, certain police departments around the country and also globally, some don't know certain types of challenges like autism, deafness, et cetera. Are the trainings going to get more or is the training enough? I mean, there's never enough training. Go ahead. So in Vermont, so with team two, it's an extraordinarily invaluable piece. It's a very good thing to do in a city or in a state that is rural and has so many other challenges that a lot of places don't. So CIT is a very good thing. Team two is critical. But above the training, I think Washington County Mental Health Services has been doing this. There's a lot of talk in the media that all of a sudden we'll hear Kahoot's model, the Kahoot's model that's going on in Washington. And Kahoot's is something, it's a partnership similar to what we have here, but if it's a non-crisis or if it's a non-emergency situation that requires police, Kahoot's goes out. Well, Kahoot's has been there for, you know, it's been there for a few years, but Washington County Mental Health Services in Vermont has been doing this a lot longer than that. And we're not giving our state the credit it deserves for pioneering these types of relationships and programs long before other people have been doing this. So Washington County Mental Health Services is critical. And with the amount of training and experience that they have, it's great, it's essential. But what we need more than training is resources. We need more peers. We need more people like Susan. We need more housing. We need more respite centers. We need a lot of these different things that can help people get on track rather than, you know, the investment in training is critical. But now that we understand where our gaps are, we need to fill those gaps. So it's essential that we work with our legislators and our leaders and our communities to get funding for this because, you know, when we start filling these gaps, then there are going to be less calls that Susan and I will be responding to, less crisis calls. And that's the whole goal. So if we want to get serious about this, it's not necessarily the training because we already know what we need to do. It's how are you going to pay people what they're worth so that there's not a vacancy and we can't find social workers, we can't find teachers, we can't find a lot of things to do this. We need to start investing in it if we're serious about it. So it all goes down to the federal government. They need to have more money, but that's correct. Or is it state budget or federal? I'd say state, municipality and federal. We have to put our money where our mouth is. Okay. Speaking of which, misconceptions of law enforcement, mental health, cases, situations. Anybody want to take that question? What are some misconceptions around? So if I may. Go ahead. I'll throw this one out. I think that the current law enforcement has its sins to bear. We have a past and we have, and we will have a future of things that we did not do too well. And we're going to continue to make mistakes and we'll continue to be bad apples in law enforcement. It's an unfair burden, I think, to simply say we need to augment law enforcement. As in adding more people or having a different profession step up to fill a void. It is unrealistic and unfair to the folks who are working in mental health to include professionals and peers to say we need more social workers problem is solved. Not all the time. But it's a magical thing that some folks may think that if I call a social worker instead of a cop social worker is going to come in there and as soon as they walk through the door it's going to be rainbows and butterflies and everything is solved and that is not the case. Because when the social workers come in there and they de-escalate and now the crisis has subsided it's relaxed a little bit. Social workers are going to say, now where can I send them to? Do I have money or is there funding out there to get this person to a doctor? Is there funding out there to get this person to get the medication that they need? Is there funding out there to get them and their support group counseling? No. So the social workers are not working with the resources that they need as well. So in application for mental health professionals I think that it's they are in the problem I think that they get shouldered with so that they can automatically think you can just parachute them into a crisis situation and everything is going to be solved. Did you want to ask another question? Well you want me to, I'll do this one. I have, okay since you said that how has the pandemic, you know pandemic shut everything down there was problems during the pandemic with mental health, mental crisis how has Washington County mental health and the police department, all police departments in this case work together you know not wave a magic wand, make things better because obviously there were some challenges with the pandemic. Go ahead. I can start first with that so much of the time police were still policing and screeners and myself and other people in roles that responding to imminent needs were still doing what we do and in person often whenever that was possible there was a little bit of use of the phone like sometimes for example if someone is having a mental health crisis and they're in the emergency room a screener will meet with them there was a period of time when that sometimes happened over a monitor instead of in the same room in order to be careful about you know COVID precautions so those kinds of things happened I know that I'll speak to Berry City and let you speak to the Montpelier police about this but there was a period of time before vaccines were readily available when case numbers were high when the question became is there a way this can be handled by phone if it's not a safety issue can there be communication through phone and it be handled that way so that was something that was happening and sometimes that wasn't possible and then we were out on the scene and the Montpelier police department reminded me of where you guys very short staffed during the pandemic and how has the mental health crisis been with the MPD I think so we were facing the same challenges everyone else was the same level of anxiety, depression that we all felt during this period of uncertainty so we were short staffed and we still continue to be short staffed but a credit to the folks that I work with have they see their profession as a calling and they see their service as something that needs to be done and they just inspire me because every day they would get up and they would go out and they would help and they would come back and not only that but come back home and their families are susceptible to anything that they bring back into the house whether it's COVID, whether they got it so their families are on board so for me personally it really reinforced my belief in this work and first responders and people who do the work Susan does and I just just in awe by it and very appreciative of it we have a couple minutes left the future of law enforcement and mental health and you know, preventing crisis or crises go ahead it's a big topic we can go a little over if we need to I would echo what Chief Pete has already said that you know I work day shift on weekdays and on weekends are you on call? Not when I'm not available Washington County screeners are responding to things that I might have when I was there so really I think police departments that are interested in this model communities that are interested in this model should have access to a mental health person each shift, each day would be ideal and I think in rural areas that's tougher in the country they're doing that now where it's a team of people so that's one thing I would say my position is they used to refer to it as embedded but I spend my days at either of the two police departments primarily that's like 97% of the time where I am and for me personally that's also really important because I need to understand more about how policing works and how we can work together and then the part that Chief Pete said about building relationships the relationship building part happens that way so I would love to see a future where in communities that were interested in this model there was 24-7 embedded mental health availability would be my dream Chief anything else? I couldn't say it better myself but that's what it needs to be and it needs to be a partnership and law enforcement within our profession we can't silo ourselves off anymore we need to make sure that we're sharing information with everyone because we all have a stake in our community and it's vital we speak to each other we get along with each other and we help each other in ways we can to serve the people who we need to serve in our community we would like to thank you for joining us on this edition on mental health and its services you can go to www.wcmhs.org that website once again is www.wcmhs.org and for more information on Ableton on Air you can go to www.orkamedia.net that's www.orcamedia.net we would like to thank our sponsors Washington County Mental Health Green Mountain Support Services and many others and the partnerships of Higher Ability Vermont and the Association for the Help of the Association of the Blind of Vermont and the Division for the Blind of Vermont I'm Lauren Seiler I'm Lauren Seiler see you next time major sponsors for Ableton on Air include Green Mountain Support Services empowering people with disabilities to live home in the community Washington County Mental Health where hope and support come together media sponsors for Ableton on Air include Parkchester Times Muslim Community Report www this is the Bronx.info Associated Press media editors New York Power Online Newspaper U.S. Press Corps Domestic and International Anchor FM and Spotify Partners for Ableton on Air include Yechad of New York and New England where everyone belongs the Orthodox Union the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired Center Vermont Habitat for Humanity and Montpelier Sustainable Coalition Montefiore Medical Center of the Bronx Rose of Kennedy Center of Bronx, New York Albert Einstein College of Medicine of the Bronx Ableton on Air has been seen in the following publications Parkchester Times www this is the Bronx.com New York Power Online Newspaper Muslim Community Report www.h.com and the Montpelier Bridge Ableton on Air is part of the following organizations the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Boston, New England Chapter and the Society of Professional Children and the Society of Professional Journalists