After teaming up with UCHealth, the City of Aurora announced Wednesday it has nearly staffed up its crisis intervention programs that pair mental health clinicians with first responders to address calls that involve a behavioral health crisis.
The partnership began in January and has since brought on a combined six clinicians to work for the Aurora Mobile Response Team (AMRT) and the Crisis Response Team (CRT). The programs launched during the last five years, though they were down to one clinician in September.
Now back up and running, the teams respond to a wide array of behavioral health calls — from welfare checks to family disputes to mental health crises.
“CRT and AMRT are an invaluable resource for the community we serve,” Aurora Police Chief Art Acevedo said in a news release. “We look forward to a continued partnership with both programs to ensure the most appropriate resources are available for our neighbors experiencing difficulties due to mental health crises.”
AMRT personnel are not armed and respond to situations that do not pose an immediate threat, involve violence or suspected crimes. The program, which pairs a mental health clinician with a paramedic or EMT, can assist someone experiencing depression, homelessness, poverty, substance use issues or a mental-health crisis. The team operates seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Last year, the team handled 500 calls. It first launched in 2021 as an alternative way to respond to behavioral health calls.
The CRT pairs an Aurora Police Department officer who has received crisis-intervention training with a clinician to handle calls with a behavioral health component. The CRT launched in 2018 and has responded to more than 8,000 calls since then, including 1,000 last year.
Jennifer Fierberg is the UCHealth clinical supervisor who oversees the UCHealth staff on the teams.
Today the CRT unit has five clinicians who work alongside officers. One clinician is currently working in the AMRT. Fierberg is in the process of hiring a second clinician for the AMRT. She also supervises two case managers. Once the final AMRT clinician is hired, both units will be fully staffed, Fierberg said.
All of the new team members were on staff by the end of January and hit the road by the end of February. The plan is also to double the teams’ size incrementally during the next three to five years. People apply to work on the teams through UCHealth.
APD officers will call on the co-responder teams if they think a call is better suited for the CRT or AMRT, and community members have been requesting the teams’ services as more people become aware of the resource, she said.
“We’re getting a lot more requests now that we are up and running,” she said.
Fierberg also believes the pandemic’s ramifications on behavioral health has contributed to an increase in demand for co-responder team services.
“People are reaching out for help,” she said.
Ariel Solomon, the senior clinical supervisor for UCHealth, works as a liaison between the clinical staff and the hospital system. Aurora is UCHealth’s sixth co-responder partnership in the state, and it’s the largest in terms of staffing, she said. UCHealth began working with co-responder teams in 2018.
Hiring for Aurora has gone well, she said, something she credited to UCHealth’s reputation as an employer with competitive pay and signing bonuses.
It’s also likely thanks to a bigger awareness in recent years about the co-responder model, she said.
“I think co-responder work has gotten kind of national attention,” she said.
Some of the clinician staff in Aurora are new to working alongside first responders while others have several years experience being on a co-responder team, Solomon said.
Aurora Police Officer David Campbell is in his second year working on the city’s CRT team. The officer became interested in joining the co-responder team after noticing the public make “a big push” for the model.
“This is something they’ve been calling for, for years and years,” he said.
He considers working in a co-responder capacity one of the most important ways an officer can serve the community, he said. The CRT helps alleviate pressures on patrol officers as well, he said.
CRT officers approach a scene differently, he said. Their role is not confined to assessing whether or not a crime has occurred, like a patrol officer’s can be, and instead the CRT is empowered to provide a wide range of service.
The goal is to deescalate a situation and avoid sending a person in crisis to jail or the emergency room. The CRT can call a person’s therapist, connect a family with mental health professionals, take someone to a crisis center, or hand out little items to help someone navigate their day. Socks. Weather protection. Bus passes. Teddy bears.
The team is allowed to stay at a scene for as long as needed, which could be one hour or several, Campbell said. Families can keep in touch with the CRT, too, and often reach back out when they know they need the unit’s help, Campbell said.
“They know we are going to solve the situation on scene,” he said.
The job has showed Campbell the different sides of his fellow community members and “what they are going through” — including the stresses, and sometimes anguish, of people who experience a behavioral health crisis.
He hopes more members of the community can learn about the resource and know it’s available to them, he said. It’s “very needed” in society and in more law enforcement agencies across the country, he said.
The police members of the team “learn from the clinicians every day,” he said. The most important lesson clinicians have taught him is “patience. A lot more patience,” he said, along with knowing the key signs that someone is in a behavioral health crisis.
“It’s going to make me a better officer.”
