Non-Cop Crew Cruises To Crisis Calls

“Hello, yes, this is Nanette,” a crisis response team worker said as she answered her cell phone, all while rummaging around a blue minivan crammed full of Quaker Chewy granola bars, white undershirts and donated blankets in search of a pen and paper to jot down notes on an incoming emergency call. 

Nanette Campbell’s colleague and the van’s driver, John Labieniec, pointed her to a stray blue Bic and passed over a crumpled flier on which to write.

Another day. Another call. Another test for a pilot city program seeking to find a new solution for certain housing, mental health, and substance-use cries for help.

“Get the name of the cop,” Labieniec reminded Campbell. 

“Start driving to Townsend Avenue,” Campbell instructed Labieniec. 

A couple of minutes later they turned away from the East Shore: ​“The patient is so paranoid they don’t want us to come out anymore,” Campbell explained.

No need to respond to that call. Time to wait for the next call — and to shift gears and check in with how those who have previously been helped by the van of outreach workers and their network of colleagues, known as COMPASS, are faring days, weeks, months after their initial emergency.

Campbell and Labieniec are members of New Haven’s new 10-person crisis response team called COMPASS, standing for Compassionate Allies Serving Our Streets. The crew, originally pitched as a social worker-led alternative to calling the cops, is piloting as a program offering broad mental health help to New Haveners. 

The Elicker Administration first proposed the program in August 2020 in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The COMPASS pilot team finally hit the ground and started working last November, with the goal of serving as a mobile social know-how in situations where police or firefighters may be ill-equipped. 

Staffed by green-uniform-clad social workers and mental health specialists and people with lived experience of homelessness or substance abuse, the team travels across the city in response to 911 calls and on their own proactive initiative.

Cops and firefighters on the scene currently call COMPASS when they want assistance; the team is not immediately sent to the scene by dispatch centers. COMPASS also performs independent outreach work helping New Haveners who have been evicted, are living outdoors or are otherwise in need of support around housing, substance abuse treatment, or mental health care. 

The COMPASS crew typically works in pairs of two out of one van — as Labienec, COMPASS’s coordinator, and Campbell, a peer counselor, were doing on Thursday. 

Though technically falling under the city’s Department of Community Resilience, the team is run by the mental-health-support nonprofit Continuum of Care, hired last March to serve as the ​“boots on the ground” for COMPASS’s daily work. The group is based out of the top floor of Continuum’s offices at 384 Edgewood Ave. 

COMPASS workers are currently on call between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. seven days a week. Most of the time they’re out of the office, patrolling New Haven, reaching out to residents in need, or responding to 911 calls.

In July, the scope of COMPASS is expected to expand into a larger initiative, with hours stretching from 8 a.m. to midnight, more staff and a system that will immediately dispatch the social workers and peer recovery specialists to scenes of crisis not just in addition to police, but sometimes in place of them.

On Thursday afternoon, the Independent joined COMPASS for a shift in the city-roving van to get an idea of how the crisis response team is working during its earliest stages of operations and as it prepares for expansion.

Call #1: Response Nixed, Follow-up Required

The first call COMPASS received while this reporter was in the car was from a cop in the East Shore who had been phoned in to deal with a woman experiencing a psychotic episode. The cop dialed COMPASS from the scene looking for help from social workers — and then called back requesting that COMPASS not come to the scene, but perform a follow-up.

That’s because the woman would need to be forcibly hospitalized. When inpatient papers and hospital admission screenings are required, the Connecticut Mental Health Center’s mobile crisis intervention and evaluation unit is called in.

COMPASS does not have the right to sign emergency certificates committing individuals to hospitals. Rather, COMPASS was assigned to visit the affected person in the hospital after the fact and help them determine next steps in receiving mental treatments and any other needed support.

“There’s benefits and there’s negatives,” Labieniec said of that limitation. ​“The mobile crisis unit services one function and one function only. COMPASS serves a multitude of functions. Mobile crisis wouldn’t go out on 90 percent of the calls that we go on.”

Forcible hospitalization, Labieniec said, frequently triggers anger in those getting sent to the hospital. ​“By not allowing us to do that, it’s actually helping us build relationships with people,” he said. 

“Whatever you can do to build trust, do it,” he said. ​“Sometimes it’s just listening and validating. We always offer someone a cup of coffee and something to eat. Sometimes it’s just about patiently waiting.” 

“Your best training,” he said, ​“is always going to be the relationship you’ve built with a person.”

After that call, COMPASS drove to one of Continuum of Care’s 50-odd properties around Connecticut, a supervised community living space on Legion Avenue for individuals in recovery, to introduce this reporter to one of the first clients COMPASS took on last fall.

Checking In With Michael

Michael Damiani was in the living room toying with a cigarette pinned behind his ear when the crew arrived.

Damiani has been living in a bed provided by Continuum of Care for the past five months. Before that, he had been camping out in Edgewood Park, becoming increasingly sick while off of the medication he takes to manage his schizoaffective bipolar disorder. 

Damiani, who is in his 30s and is originally from Westville, said he began struggling more seriously with mental health issues upon graduating from Albertus Magnus College 14 years back. Over the next decade, he lost his father to a stroke; his mother to pancreatic cancer; his brother to a heart attack. He had been living with his parents while trying to manage his own mental health, experiencing extreme bouts of depression during which he could not work or feed himself. 

For a while, he was staying in an apartment downtown with limited funds he’d inherited from his parents. Soon enough, however, that money ran out while he was unable to sustain employment, and he found himself evicted and living in his car with his pitbull, Sophia, whom he had adopted more than a decade earlier as a source of non-judgmental companionship while his mental health hardships surged. 

“I was in severe pain. My dog didn’t like car rides. Just getting gasoline would stress me out. Everything about the experience was freaking me out,” he said. He ditched the car, reluctantly took his dog to a shelter, and moved into the park. 

Damiani’s sister, meanwhile, had been regularly calling the cops in attempts to find her brother, who had seemingly gone missing in action. One day, she finally received word from her brother — and subsequently reached out to COMPASS in hopes of getting him direct crisis support.

“Nanette and John showed up,” Damiani remembered. ​“I was so sick. I was terrified of being around people.” But the two kept it simple and straightforward, offering to drive him to a shelter where he could take a shower and sleep in a bed. ​“It’ll be a place to stay until you know what the next step is,” he recalled Labieniec telling him.

“As soon as I walked in the door there was this man named Manny making hamburgers. It somehow made me feel better to just see someone cooking food. Everyone was friendly.”

Adjusting to the new environment wasn’t and hasn’t been easy, Damiani said. But he was able to get stable access to a nurse at the Hill Health Center who has overseen his transition back onto stable medication. He meets with a Continuum of Care clinician — who also works as a COMPASS outreach worker — twice a week for therapeutic care. He goes to group therapy and gets fed regular meals.

Now, he is on two waiting lists for subsidized housing in Stratford and Naugatuck. A COMPASS worker’s friend has been fostering his dog, who he hopes to readopt once he’s in his own apartment.

“I planned on living a very independent life,” he said. He hasn’t lost hope that he can become independent again.

"I Can Be On My Way To You Right Now"

Back in the passenger seat during the typical crisis call slump that takes place in the early afternoon, Campbell started catching up on outreach work.

“Hello there, how are you, it’s Nanette!” she said to one client. ​“Is your nose stuffy? It’s raining out and I know you’re not good with the rain.

“When can I come to see you? I can be on my way to you right now.”

Labieniec started steering towards Amity. A few minutes later, Campbell was at the doorstep of a septuagenarian in need of senior housing.

Twenty minutes later, Campbell emerged from the home. ​“Did it go okay?” Labieniec inquired, initiating a standard debrief. 

“We met her through a fire department referral,” Campbell told this reporter. ​“She’s had a lot of falls.” The city’s emergency medical technicians had responded to find the woman, who relies on a wheelchair and a walker to get around her home, on the floor. They asked COMPASS to help the woman make the emotionally turbulent transition into assisted living.

“She’s older. She’s lonely,” Campbell said. On Thursday, she found out the woman was on Medicare and then took down her Social Security information. ​“We’ll come back tomorrow and see you,” Campbell told the woman. ​“We’ll bring a laptop.”

In the meantime, Campbell said she’d check out whether the woman was eligible for home care assistance. The next day, she would present her with a slate of housing options and price ranges, then help the client fill out any applications she was interested in.

"That Was The First Hot Meal I'd Had In Weeks"

By the time the pair completed a plan of action for that client, they were pulling back into Continuum of Care’s driveway.

There, Campbell was reunited with another client staying in one of the nonprofit’s crisis beds.

Lucia Lawlor, 41, embraced Campbell in a tight hug and invited her in to see the small bedroom where she is making a home in preparation for going to rehab in the next couple of months.

She pulled out a coloring book and pens the organization had given her as a coping strategy and presented Campbell with a signed, vibrant floral drawing.

A couple of weeks ago, Lawlor had been camping out in the woods by Ella Grasso Boulevard with her boyfriend, ​“going 100 miles per hour on crack all day, everyday,” when she met Campbell.

The cops had been called because Lawlor was jumping up and down on a public bus. COMPASS was also brought on scene; Campbell calmed Lawlor down by taking her for a diner breakfast of pancakes, home fries and a chocolate milkshake.

“She picked me up, asked me what I needed and paid out of her own pocket,” Lawlor said. Lawlor said she ordered a small shake, nervous to be a burden on Campbell, but Campbell corrected the waitress and had a large drink brought to the table.

“That was the first hot meal I’d had in weeks,” she said. Campbell then drove Lawlor to the APT Foundation’s methadone clinic on Congress Avenue. ​“I thought: Someone cares,” Lawlor said.

Once at the clinic, Lawlor learned she would have to be hospitalized due to an infection in her hand, the result of shooting up heroin in less than hygienic conditions.

Lawlor stayed at Yale New Haven Hospital for about a week, during which time she said she butted heads with nurses and staff who she felt judged her and invaded her privacy due to her drug habits. She was skeptical when they told her it was time for her to be discharged — until she realized she would be going to Continuum of Care, where she was reunited with Campbell.

Now, Lawlor said, she is grateful to have a place to sleep and structure to keep her in line. She’s been to rehab five times before, she said, noting that she began snorting and later smoking cocaine in her mid-20s following the death of her mother, and is afraid of returning to an institution — but plans to enter a rehab facility in Bridgeport at the end of May.

But just accessing a warm bed after a year of ​“sleeping on the sidewalk, in dirt,” she said, has made her reenergized to get her life back on track.

Each morning, she wakes up at 6 a.m. and makes coffee for the other people who live in her building, she said. Then Continuum of Care employees drive the COMPASS van over to the methadone clinic, where Lawlor and a few others get treatment. 

“The treatment really doesn’t work unless you want it,” Lawlor said. ​“This time I really, really want it. I can’t live another day on the street.”

She’s been separated from her 12-year-old son for nearly a decade, since she was incarcerated for robbing a bank to support her substance use. ​“When he finds me, he’s not gonna find me on drugs,” she asserted.

First Responders With First-Hand Knowledge

Campbell nodded along with pride as Lawlor spoke.

The 60-year-old COMPASS worker noted that she sought out rehabilitative services herself in her late 30’s after being separated from her children due to a heroin habit she acquired later in life. 

Six months after entering the rehab program, she was clean — and invigorated to start working with others whose lives had been stricken by substance abuse. She worked with the homeless shelter Columbus House for more than 10 years as a case manager and counselor before moving over to Continuum of Care and later joining the COMPASS team.

Labieniec, similarly, said that his own struggles with addiction and alcoholism catalyzed his career in social work.

As a teenager, he was interested in becoming a probation officer. While in college studying criminal justice, he said, ​“addiction eventually caught up with me.” 

He credited Alcoholics Anonymous with his success staying clean and sober for over 23 years. He also credits his own recovery process for propelling him into the social work field, causing him to think more critically about how to address the underlying needs of people who turn to drinking or drugs in response to personal traumas.

On To The Next Call ...

Over the past month, roughly two thirds of calls to COMPASS have been 911 referrals by police or fire. But an additional third of the work the team performs is the kind of outreach witnessed on Thursday; following up with individuals and urging them to not give up on finding the help they need.

“The window of opportunity is really narrow,” Labieniec said. Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, existing gaps in housing or shelter availability have widened while mental health troubles have surged.

“Everyone knows the system is broken,” he said. 

The recent dismantling of a homeless encampment on Ella Grasso Boulevard, for example, saw several individuals with substance disorders and nowhere to go vocalize mistrust of the city and nonprofit service providers.

COMPASS was on scene when the city sought to evict the group from public land, but most refused offers to relocate to shelters or supportive housing, with many instead opting to move to another encampment hosted in the backyard of the Amistad Catholic Worker House on Rosette Street run by activist Mark Colville.

Being on the scene in a moment of crisis, Labieniec said, is often key in successfully connecting individuals with the right resources. But other times, he said, it’s important in just establishing a connection that will carry forward and keep the window ajar, to build trust so that people do not lose hope in the system but feel compelled to keep searching for supports that might not be immediately reachable. 

In the aftermath of the encampment bulldozing, Labieniec noted that at least two more individuals of the 10 people who lived at the site have called COMPASS to seek housing help. He said COMPASS also brought donated goods to Amistad House, such as an air mattress for one displaced couple to sleep on.

In other words, crafting trust takes time. Growing COMPASS from the ground up, Labieniec said, is also slow moving — and that’s not a bad thing. 

This summer, COMPASS is set to transition out of a pilot phase and begin sending social workers to crisis scenes in place of cops, in line with the original intent of the program. COMPASS workers will also continue serving as supplemental supports for public safety officials and doing the kind of outreach work described in this article.

“I think they’re doing things in a smart way by taking things really slow,” Labieniec said. ​“We wanna do it all; but moving at a slow pace is beneficial when you’re building relationships.”