Westbrook police hope to add a full-time mental health liaison’s position to the department to handle mental health calls, which have increased during the pandemic, according to Chief Sean Lally.

The department got the go-ahead to move forward on the position Monday, when Mayor Mike Foley announced the city will fund it with federal COVID-19 relief money. Now it awaits federal and City Council approval.

The position would be filled by a licensed clinician who is not a police officer. The liaison would work directly with officers, however, and would co-respond to or even take over certain mental health response calls and make follow-up calls. The liaison’s focus would be on jail diversion and helping people recover from mental health crises.

Lally

The position would be life-saving, advocates and police say.

In 2020, out of a total of about 32,500 calls, the Westbrook Police Department responded to 107 mental health calls, 38 more than 2019; 144 suicide threats or attempts, 37 more than 2019; and 87 overdose calls with five fatal, 38 more overdoses and two more fatal overdoses than 2019, Lally said.

Opportunity Alliance Crisis Police Liaison Missy Esty said the closure of organizations and social isolation because of the pandemic may have played a role in the increased number of mental health calls.

“People were afraid to have contact or find help,” Esty said. “Schools, outpatient services and a lot of others closed, too, so needs went unaddressed.” 

Esty co-responds with Westbrook police or visits Westbrook residents on her own up to 10 times a month at the request of the department, often working with Recovery Liaison Danielle Rideout or Frenchtown Community Policing Coordinator Megan Perry.

The full-time position “would be huge for the team they have there,” Esty said.

Perry agreed, saying she actively works on over 100 mental health cases over a year, usually two to three a week.

“Having a mental health responder would allow us to parcel out who’s best fit for what situation,” Perry said. “It’d allow for more individualized and specialized work.”

Keith Arvanitis, a peer support mentor at Amistad, a Portland nonprofit that assists people with mental illness, substance misuse disorder, homelessness and other problems, said a trained liaison working with police would have “been a godsend” when he was struggling with mental health and addiction.

“If there was a tie-in to that support system that would be connected to me and made sure I was doing OK and taking medications, that would have been a benefit to me,” Arvanitis said.

A specialist could have helped Arvantis when he was arrested in 2013, he said.

His bipolar disorder paired with an addiction to drugs he used to self-medicate led him to stealing items from cars to support his drug use, and he also stole guns, he said. He was manic and “running rampant,” he said, and one day woke up in his Waterville home surrounded by Maine DEA agents and Waterville and Augusta police.

The police found his prescription medications and assumed he intended to sell them even though were not narcotics and lacked street value, which Arvantis said a liaison would have recognized. A liaison also would have known by seeing those prescriptions that he was bipolar and should be handled carefully.

In the midst of a mental health crisis, Arvanitis tried but failed to explain he had been prescribed those drugs.

“It changed the whole atmosphere. If a liaison was there who recognized these medications it could have gone different,” he said.

Arvantis was traumatized by the arrest, he said, and he’s thankful that during his arrest he didn’t pick up “something like a remote controller” that could be confused for a gun that could have gotten him shot.

According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, people with mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement than other civilians.

Arvanvitis said if there were police mental health liaisons throughout the country, the number of fatal shootings by police would drop.

Police officers also are “clamoring for this position,” Lally and Perry said.

Westbrook police are crisis and de-escalation trained, Lally said, but they do not have the mental health training and expertise that a mental health liaison would have. Yet, they have become the catch-all for mental health calls in an overburdened system.

“Officers often get blamed for the result of a broken system,” he said. “That’s where it taxes someone, seeing how it can end where an officer has to take a life to save one when it’s the system that has failed. They are at the end of the line,” Lally said.

“A mental health practitioner will have a better understanding of this situation, build a better rapport and know in-depth the situation, that’s their craft,” Lally said. 

The position could cost around $100,000 with salary and benefits based on the experience of the candidate. Lally hopes to eventually form a mental health unit in the department, he said.

“I think you’ll get a better outcome if you use a mental health practitioner at a crisis,” Lally said. “If you have someone with that skill set, training and experience, why wouldn’t you want to send them to that call?”