The tablet was so infrequently used by the sergeant that she didn’t bother to grab it from her squad car as she ran into the house, where a suicidal man was screaming at the floor and slamming against the ground.
She sent an officer to retrieve her tablet after she realized that the man could harm himself, his family, or her officers with the knives he was threatening. She switched it on and handed it to him. The man instantly calmed down, and she watched.
“When I saw this tool calm him, I was like holy smokes! This is amazing!” said Cook County Sheriff’s Police Sergeant. Bonnie Busching.
This was the first time that the department had taken the Zoom call idea, which has been so prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic, and made it part of one of the most dangerous tasks a police officer can perform: answering a domestic disturbances call.
As violent crime continues to rise, law enforcement agencies across the country are under pressure. There is a growing demand for changes in how police interact with citizens with mental health issues. Police are still most often the first called to the scene, and the sheriff’s department’s Treatment Response Team is a novel approach to managing such calls.
The effort, which was started two years ago, was intended to assist the 300-member sheriff’s police force in dealing with an increasing number of drug overdoses during a national opioid crisis.
As the pandemic left more people in isolation at home, or unable to get to services, or unwilling to risk becoming sick, the department faced an explosion in 911 calls relating to suicide threats and other mental health crises.
He saw the same issues for his officers out on the streets as the sheriff who was in national spotlights for creating programs in his jail to deal with increasing numbers of mental health problems inmates.
“We were being asked more frequently to be the first responders to mental health cases and were being asked to perform things they don’t have training for, or minimal training for,” stated Tom Dart. His department is the nation’s second-largest sheriff’s station and patrols unincorporated areas of Cook County as well as many smaller communities. The department has seen an increase in 911 calls related to mental health by almost 60% this year.
Dart stated that there are many other programs in the country. However, most of them involved mental health professionals riding around in ambulances or with police officers. This is fine in smaller communities, but it wasn’t feasible for Cook County where moving from one end of the county to the other without traffic takes well over an hour.
Dart asked, “How many ambulances do we need to buy?” Dart replied.
Use the tablets.
Elli Petaque Montgomery, team director, stated that “we wanted a tool to allow the officers to get that mental healthcare expert on the scene instantly.”
The department currently has 70 tablets. 35 were purchased with grant money at the beginning of the program and 35 more when it became apparent that Zoom calls would continue to increase.
Zoom calls can sometimes be impossible due to poor service or other reasons. Nearly 20 times, officers established a call between people in crisis or mental health professionals.
Four clinicians and other mental healthcare professionals have been added to the call-handling team, along with four additional staff members. Dart stated that the cost of the tablets and clinicians — which are a few hundred dollars each — is only a fraction of the cost of sending out a small army mental health professionals to the streets.
Dart said that while we are not asking people to work 8-hour shifts, but they are asking them to be available. Dart’s office last week announced that Oak Lawn had joined the program. We hope that others will join us.
However, this program is not possible unless police officers, especially those who have been around for some time and have a certain way to do things, accept the idea of giving at least some control over situations to someone else.
Busching stated that she doesn’t like video games, and was not raised in an age where FaceTime and text were more popular than dealing face-to-face. She didn’t like the idea that someone was looking at her from a screen and telling her what she should do.
She quickly realized she had no other choice and, borrowing a line from a game, said to the man that she would “phone a friend” on December 12.
Busching stated, “I looked at him and said, ‘This lady will help you. She’s not the cop, she is a therapist.'”
Busching might not be comfortable with Zoom calls or text messages but she quickly learned that teenagers know what they do.
Petaque Montgomery, on the other end, said that people spend a lot time on electronic devices and feel more comfortable talking to someone face-to-face. She said that by giving the tablet to Busching, Busching indicated a level of trust.
This signaled something to officers.
Petaque Montgomery stated that they have seen that they can enter (situations) which historically required a lot of paperwork and force. She said she handed the tablet to the clinician so the clinician could complete theirs.
Dart said, “We can even slide under a door so that they don’t even need to see a cop.”
A mother of a 12-year-old boy with mental health issues was able to see a change in her son’s behavior after the officer gave him the tablet. The conversation with the clinician made it even more dramatic.
“My son could understand the way he (the clinician spoke) was talking,” stated the woman who spoke under anonymity because her son is not being identified. “He enjoys it because someone is talking to him, and seeing the human behind that voice helps,” she said.
Busching’s questions about the tablets and her worries about what would happen if she tried to control a man who threatened to kill herself vanished after what seemed like an easy situation to turn into a physical confrontation was over.
She said, “He held my hand and walked with me to the ambulance.”
