LAPD’s Mental Evaluation Unit a National Model, Oakland Policing Turnaround, Early Trauma-informed Healthcare…and More

LAPD’S MENTAL EVALUATION UNIT A MODEL TO BE REPLICATED IN LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES NATIONWIDE

The Los Angeles Police Department’s nationally celebrated Mental Evaluation Unit pairs police officers with mental health care professionals into “System-wide Mental Assessment Response Teams” (SMART) to respond to people in the midst of a mental health crisis. The goal is to cut down on police use-of-force incidents and to refer people suffering from mental illness to intervention programs and other services instead of just locking them up.

Altogether, there are 61 officers and detectives and 28 clinicians in the MEU.

The “Case Assessment Management Program,” (CAMP) division of the Mental Evaluation Unit takes on the most challenging cases and has likely saved the LA city and county millions of dollars by diverting the mentally ill from lock-up (with just six two-man teams), according to MEU detective Charles Dempsey.

KPCC’s Stephanie O’Neill has more on the program. Here’s a clip:

The unit, which is the largest and among the oldest mental health policing programs in the nation, is highly regarded by law enforcement and by mental health and civil rights advocates. A 2009 report by the LAPD’s independent federal monitor [who oversaw the consent decree] praised the operation, saying the department “now has the recognized best practice in law enforcement for this subject area,” and is “in the national forefront of this important policing issue.”

“They’re setting a great example for other departments to emulate,” says Jerry Murphy, a criminal justice mental health policy specialist at the Council of State Governments Justice Center. In 2010, that nonprofit organization designated the LAPD one of six national training sites for specialized mental health policing. Since then, the unit has shared its approach with nearly 60 law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. and with 10 agencies in five other countries.

The Burbank Police Department is among those that have sought training here.

“As it evolved, it got more and more comprehensive,” Michael Albanese, captain of Burbank PD’s patrol division, says of the LAPD’s Mental Evaluation Unit. Albanese says he considers the operation to be “on the leading edge as far as how to manage incidents and/or individuals with mental health disorders.”

Newly elected Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell says he, too, is open to considering the LAPD program as model for his department, which has a spotty record when it comes to dealing with the mentally ill. Last month, McDonnell told the 21st Century Policing Task Force in Washington D.C. that in 2013, nearly 40 percent of all use of force incidents “involved individuals suffering from mental illness and in too many cases we arrest our way out of these encounters rather than diverting individuals to the community treatment and care they need.”

For more on the how the program works, read the rest.

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THE OAKLAND POLICE DEPARTMENT’S INCREDIBLE (AND LENGTHY) REFORM JOURNEY

Scott Johnson has a not-to-be-missed essay in the March/April issue of Politico Magazine about the Oakland Police Department’s complete about-face from what many called one of the worst departments in the country, to a complete overhaul resulting in dramatic declines in use-of-force incidents and officer-involved shootings.

It has been a hard-won fight. The department officials and officers (including a group of corrupt officers called the Rough Riders) spent years digging their heels in as lawyers John Burris and James Chanin, costly lawsuits, and a consent decree dragged them slowly toward reform.

Very little progress was made for more than a decade until complete federal oversight was on the horizon. The police union settled with Chanin and Burris, allowing the city to appoint a compliance director with the ability to fire officers and officials, including the chief. The compliance director did just that.

Now, with the help of a new chief and steady pressure from Chanin and Burris and the compliance director4`, the OPD has implemented body cameras and taken up community policing. Officers garnered roughly 40% fewer complaints in 2014 over 2013, and greatly reduced their officer-involved shootings.

Here are some clips:

Before Ferguson, there was Oakland. In the fall of 2011, as the Occupy Wall Street movement spread across the country from New York’s Zuccotti Park, Occupy Oakland quickly became one of the biggest protest sites. By early October, demonstrators had set up an encampment in front of City Hall and named the site after Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old who in 2009 had been shot in the back and killed by an officer for BART, the local rail transit system.

Oakland, with a population of roughly 400,000, may sit just across the bay from increasingly glitzy San Francisco, but it can sometimes seem a world away in poverty and race relations. The city had long been known as a stomping ground for radical activists, matched in their aggression by one of the most brutal police forces in the country…

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Although the situation deteriorated steadily in the 1980s and 1990s, it wasn’t until early in this century that a series of disturbing allegations against the police shocked the system into action. The most serious legal troubles began in 2000, when a 21-year-old named Delphine Allen alleged that police brought him to a remote location and beat him while he was in handcuffs; he described being dragged under a freeway overpass and hit repeatedly on the soles of his feet with police batons. The Rough Riders case, as it came to be known, grew to include at least 119 plaintiffs—the vast majority of whom were people of color—all with similar complaints and stories of abuse.

The Riders case eventually resulted in two extensive trials during which four OPD officers were charged with kidnapping, planting evidence and beating witnesses. Of the four, three were acquitted. A fourth officer, Francisco Vasquez, fled the country and is now believed to be in hiding in Mexico; the FBI is searching for him. The more lasting impact of the Riders case, however, is a legal and judicial marathon now in its 12th year that has required the intervention of a district court judge, two outside monitoring teams, a compliance director, six police chiefs, four mayors and tens of millions of dollars in legal fees. The goal of it all has been to reinvent the police department—to prevent another Rough Riders case from ever happening again.

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Chanin and Burris had had enough. In October 2012, the two lawyers filed the necessary papers to put the police department into full federal receivership with Judge Henderson. But before he had a chance to rule, Chanin and Burris finally reached a compromise with the powerful police union, allowing stronger oversight powers. In the settlement, the lawyers agreed to limit their disciplinary action to the top brass of the police department, and in exchange, the union—which represented the rank and file—agreed not to oppose them. The city could now hire a compliance director with the power to fire the chief and his deputies.

Change finally arrived at the top of the Oakland police in the unexpected form of a baby-faced young internal affairs officer named Sean Whent. In May 2013, Chief Howard Jordan had taken early retirement, and all but one person on his command staff was demoted. Then, in early 2014, the judge overseeing the consent decree fired Thomas Frazier, the compliance director he had hired the year before, and gave monitor Robert Warshaw full control over the department. That set the stage for the new chief, 39-year-old Whent, who quickly made it clear that compliance with the consent decree was going to be a priority.

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The new leadership helped, but Chanin and Burris also finally started playing hardball. The department had owned lapel cameras for years but never used them much. Now Chanin said that unless cops began using them more, and more effectively, he would talk to Henderson about “creating a scenario where if you didn’t use a camera, the presumption was that you did what the complainant said you did.” In other words, the cops would be guilty until proven innocent.

Lapel camera usage quickly shot up—exactly the kind of critical reform that President Barack Obama would mention months later in the wake of the Ferguson shooting. There were other changes, too. New training procedures, both in the academy and on the job, stress de-escalation of potentially violent interactions. There are more frontline supervisors deployed in the field, and many officers have started attending a procedural justice course in which community members and police can interact. “It took a few years to adjust and get everybody doing the right thing,” Whent told me. “Now it’s more of an organizational philosophy, and we’ve made it one of the highest priorities.”

Chanin and Burris now say they’ve seen confidential data indicating that complaints against the police have fallen at least 40 percent in the past year. What’s more, the department went nearly two years without an officer-involved shooting from May 2013 until early in February this year. There were no shootings at all in 2014, whereas from 2000 to 2012, there was an average of eight such shootings a year. Two shootings occurred this February. In one, early on the morning of February 7, two Oakland officers responded to a call about a psychiatric crisis and encountered a man who tried to strike them with two golf clubs; the officers fired at him—but didn’t end up injuring the suspect. He was successfully restrained, the officers’ body cameras were on and functioning correctly, and police leaders quickly released detailed information to the public. It really did seem like a corner had been turned.

Despite major policing breakthroughs, the OPD is not quite out of the woods, yet, still turning up data that is indicative of persistent racial bias with regard to who cops stop and who they arrest:

The intersection of race and policing remains tense—even in a city focused closely on reform. On the long list of compliance tasks, only one now remains, and it concerns racial bias: “test 34,” which refers to the “stop data” that police gather after traffic stops, arrests and detentions. Late last year, a study revealed that African-Americans, who make up roughly 28 percent of Oakland’s population, account for about 62 percent of police stops. But the “yield” from those stops—the amount of contraband—was no higher for African-Americans than any other group. “It means a large number of African-Americans are being stopped and searched without any recovery,” Burris says. “We’re trying to get to the roots of that because the mandate is to reduce racial profiling.”

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A PEDIATRICIAN AND A PRENATAL CARE PROGRAM TAKING THEIR PATIENTS’ ACES INTO CONSIDERATION TO PROVIDE TRAUMA-INFORMED CARE

As part of an NPR health series, Laura Starecheski tells of a pediatrician and a community clinic in Philadelphia that are successfully incorporating trauma-informed healthcare into their practices. (We pointed to Starecheski’s previous, related story as well as an ACEs test you can take, here.)

At Cobbs Creek Clinic in West Philly, Dr. Roy Wade measures his young patients’ Adverse Childhood Experiences to see the broader picture, trauma and toxic stress, at home and elsewhere, adversely affecting kids health and well-being.

And the Stephen and Sandra Sheller 11th Street Family Health Services Center in North Philly has expecting parents answer an ACE questionnaire to better help parents end the trauma cycle.

Here are some clips:

Wade is working on his own screening tool, a short list of questions that would give every young patient at the clinic an “adversity score.” The list will include indicators of abuse and neglect (which pediatricians already are on the lookout for) and also check for signs of poverty, racial discrimination or bullying.

Wade wants to take action because research suggests that the stress of a tough childhood can raise the risk for later disease, mental illness and addiction. The American Academy of Pediatrics put out a call in 2011 to doctors to address what the Academy characterizes as “toxic stress” among young patients.

Of course, not every kid with a rough childhood will suffer long-term effects. But asking every patient (or their parents) about adversity in their lives, Wade says, could help identify the kids who are at higher risk.

If a patient has a high adversity score, Wade says, he’s likely to track the child’s development more closely. “That’ll be the kid where I’ll say, ‘Come back to me in three months, or two months,’ ” he says. ” ‘Let’s see how you’re doing. Let’s check in.’ ”

Take 11-year-old Tavestsiar Fullard. When I met Tavestsiar at the Cobbs Creek Clinic last summer, he smiled with shy excitement about starting middle school, and told stories about his new puppy, Midnight. But just a few years ago, he was a very different kid.

“He wouldn’t talk,” says Tavestsiar’s dad, Silvester Fullard. “He didn’t want to be around other kids. If you’d just say something, he’d go into a little shell.”…

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It’s easy from that launching pad to start talking with the adults about their own smoking, or drinking, Wade says. “Instead of looking at the parent, you say, ‘Well, these are the impacts that [your smoking or drinking] could have on your kid.’ It helps you address an array of different problems within a family.”

So how early can you start? At Tavestsiar’s age? Or even earlier — age 5 or 6?

Across town, at a community clinic in North Philly — the Stephen and Sandra Sheller 11th Street Family Health Services Center — the staff is determined to start even earlier than that…

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SAN DIEGO #1 IN TEN BIGGEST CITIES FOR FEWEST MURDERS PER CAPITA

In 2014, San Diego had the lowest homicide rate—2.4 murders per 100,000 residents—out of the ten biggest cities in the United States. This is the fourth year San Diego has claimed the title.

(Los Angeles is number four with 6.7 homicides per 100,000, trailing after San Jose and New York with 3.2 and 4.0 respectively.)

The San Diego Police Department’s community policing efforts have been named as having the largest effect on the low murder rate, in addition to better medical care, advanced policing methods, and less gang violence.

U-T San Diego’s Lyndsay Winkley and Michelle Gilchrist have more on the numbers. Here’s a clip:

The department investigated 32 homicides, down from 39, giving San Diego, the eighth largest city in the nation, a murder rate of 2.4 killings per 100,000 residents, according to data compiled by U-T San Diego.

By comparison, Phoenix, which has a slightly larger population than San Diego, had a murder rate of 7.7 per 100,000, while San Antonio, another city of similar size, had a rate of 7.3. Philadelphia had the highest rate of the nation’s ten top cities, with 16 killings for every 100,000 residents.

Those closest to the department’s homicide investigations credit a continued drop in gang violence for fewer slayings, but no factor gets more credit than community policing.

San Diego police homicide Lt. Paul Rorrison said it is contributor No. 1 to the city’s low count.

“It’s directly related to the fact that homicides are down so low,” he said. “… It’s been huge.”

Community policing hinges on departments forging close relationships with the communities they serve. It took hold in San Diego in the early ’90s, around the time homicides across the nation started to decline…