More than a year after Lancaster County received a $150,000 grant to analyze and enhance community policing efforts in and around Lincoln, local officials trekked to Maine to begin to plot the future of policing in Nebraska.
The grant funding —  — was specifically earmarked to fund an examination of local law enforcement's current response to "crisis response" 911 calls, often involving residents experiencing mental health emergencies or struggling with substance use issues.
The ultimate goal of that analysis is to develop a community-based crisis response system that, officials say, will ultimately see trained clinicians responding alongside Lincoln Police officers to mental health calls, rather than sending armed police to handle such calls without professional help.
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"The community is saying, 'We don't want officers doing this work,'" Police Chief Teresa Ewins told the Journal Star. "And we've been saying this for years in law enforcement. 'This is not our job.'"
So Ewins and a handful of city and county officials traveled to the East Coast in early December to study what the future of crisis response might look like in Lincoln.
In Portland, Maine, the police department first began using a cooperative response model — the same dispatch method Lincoln hopes to implement as soon as this year — in the 1990s, when the department created a mental health police liaison position, placing a trained clinician in the department to respond with police to crisis calls.
In the 30 years since, what was once a single position has evolved into a full-blown behavioral health unit for the Portland Police Department, staffed with three full-time liaisons and 15 interns available to respond with police to mental health or substance use disorder calls. The department also trains all of its officers in crisis intervention within their first year on the job.
And in 2021, the department created an alternative response liaison position, bringing aboard a clinician to respond to such calls instead of police, rather than alongside officers.
In Lincoln, officials are focused more on a cooperative response — one that will include a combination of police officers and city-employed coordinators or clinicians who work for local organizations such as CenterPointe, Lutheran Family Services or the Mental Health Association of Nebraska.
"We have to build to that," Ewins said of Portland's alternative response program. "They understand their landscape in Portland. We don't necessarily know that yet, and so I want to make sure it's about safety. So at some point I do envision that we'll be able to do (an alternative response method)."
In Portland, a city of about 68,000 people, both programs have proved to be effective tools for both the police department and the residents officers and clinicians contact, according to department data.
From May 2021 to May 2022, Portland's behavioral health unit made contact with residents 1,322 times — 22.6% of which were without any officer present at all.
Over the course of a year, the clinicians cleared officers from co-response calls 125 times, saving police 61 hours of patrol time. And clinicians took 88 individuals to a hospital for treatment, voluntarily in most cases.
Clinicians had to call for police back-up only twice in the 1,300 contacts. And only five of the contacts led to arrests.
"I think one of the things that was eye-opening to me is how — you never know how this type of position's going to be perceived in law enforcement," said Sara Hoyle, Lancaster County's Human Services director who visited Maine along with Ewins, County Commissioner Sean Flowerday and Jennifer Williams, the mayor's chief of staff.
"This position is not a commissioned officer. But the way that they had it (in Portland), the positions had respect from the officers. The officers relied on the positions. They wanted them there at the scene with them. They knew that it was asset to have them on board, that it saved them time."
The hope is to at least partially emulate Portland's model in Lincoln, where police fielded 3,838 mental health calls for service in 2021, 3,795 in 2020 and 3,474 in 2019, according to department data.Â
As of now, it's still up to armed police officers to respond to such calls, though once on scene, police can call for trained clinicians from local organizations when the situation calls for behavioral health care, said Tim Dolberg, a Lincoln Police investigator who has served as the department's mental health coordinator since 2020, when the position was created.
Dolberg has spent much of the last two years strengthening LPD's relationship with community partners, training new recruits in behavioral health threat assessment and identifying residents who generate upward of 100 mental health calls for service every year, an effort he said has been effective.
The creation of Dolberg's coordinator position marked an initial step toward such a program, and the department plans to hire a homeless coordinator and appoint a captain to oversee what will become LPD's Behavioral Health Unit.
Dolberg said the city's current model has served Lincoln well, but he wishes it was utilized more frequently — a drawback he hopes will be addressed as the department gets set to enter a new era of policing.
"I think in moving toward the future, co-response and really having that immediate response from both a clinician and officer together, working together, the officer can be there more as that safety piece just to ensure everything is going smooth," he said. "But then really just let that clinician do their thing."
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