Guest column by Montgomery County Councilmember Dawn Luedtke.
On December 15, two mental health clinicians who work for the County responded to a call in which the subject threatened their lives, attacked the vehicle they were huddled in for protection, and assaulted a family member. All the clinicians could do is call the police and wait. This is now the subject of a grievance against the County. We have the tools to do better for our clinicians and for the clients we serve who may be in danger if a crisis situation turns violent.
The clinicians, part of the County’s Mobile Crisis Outreach Teams (MCOTs), were needlessly traumatized and put in harm’s way because they did not have access to information that law enforcement does and they were not co-responding with police to this call. At a time when we need more professionals willing to perform this frontline work, we must do everything we can to protect them so they can use their knowledge, training, and expertise to best serve our community.
UFCW Local 1994 MCGEO, the union representing the MCOTs and thousands of other County employees, has filed the aforementioned grievance on behalf of its members. I share MCGEO’s concerns about the safety of our clinicians. This is not the first time we have heard about the need to improve how we do this work. Situations involving behavioral health conditions with people in crisis may deteriorate rapidly. In 2023, I introduced a bill to create Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT) with a co-responder model pairing mental health clinicians with police officers. This would provide more flexibility in crisis response beyond the existing narrowly tailored policy that puts rules into place for when the MCOTs may request law enforcement assistance. The existing policy and rules set up silos between disciplines when we should be breaking them down.
This co-responsder model is used by jurisdictions around the country to put highly-trained professionals together to de-escalate potentially dangerous situations and so that clinicians and peer support specialists do not have to wait to call police for assistance after an engagement effort has already spiraled out of control. This is a teamwork approach that is proven to work. The goal is not to criminalize mental or behavioral health disorders – far from it. In January 2023, shortly after joining the Council, I helped organize a joint session of the Public Safety and Health and Human Services Committees in which we heard from leaders of Anne Arundel County’s nationally recognized co-responsder CIT program. They described how this positive partnership across disciplines maximizes safety of everyone involved, allowing clinicians and officers to work with clients, develop relationships, and ensure the clients are getting the direct support and care they need.
Importantly, my bill also creates an advisory body to apply an important analytical tool for this work known as the Sequential Intercept Model (SIM). One key purpose of viewing crisis response and the aftermath through a SIM lens is to meet the needs of individuals facing behavioral health conditions and substance use disorders by maximizing connection to treatment and stabilization while minimizing incarceration.
Since introduction of the bill, we have made progress toward greater collaboration. In 2024, Rep. Jamie Raskin secured $700,000 in federal funding to expand and improve the County Police Department’s existing and award-winning CIT Unit. The County’s Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the MCOTs, has been working on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Police for better information sharing and collaboration.
Yet, our bill never made it out of committee. Some opponents believe police should never be involved in responding to situations like the one on December 15. Even as we expand funding to hire additional clinicians, this difficult, sometimes dangerous work requires cross collaboration and flexibility to meet the needs of someone in crisis and those around them. More often than not, patrol officers are already tasked with handling this work on their own due to lack of available clinicians. Our officers have shown that they meet these moments compassionately and effectively.
We need the County to sign and implement the MOU between HHS and the Police Department. We also need to establish a strong SIM framework for this work via the SIM advisory board to ensure we are delivering the best results from each agency involved at each step of the process and to collectively advocate for system needs at the County, State and federal levels. Everyone tasked with responding to these challenging issues must know and understand one another’s roles and responsibilities.
We can prevent what happened in December by working together and putting aside monolithic notions of law enforcement. The clock is ticking – will Montgomery County do what is right and responsible in the best interest of residents and county employees?