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Lancaster County police will have mental health professionals on-call this weekend

Intelligencer Journal - 3/25/2021

Brian Wiczkowski and Christopher Dreisbach found themselves in an unusual position this past weekend.

Wiczkowski, the police chief for West Lampeter Township, and Dreisbach, who runs an addiction treatment center, were both hoping that a mental health crisis would spur a 911 call for help. In other words, they were hoping for the worst, which isn’t something any law enforcement or social services provider likes to do.

But responding to such a call was the whole reason they were together. The two men were participating in a pilot program in which mental health therapists from Dreisbach’s addiction treatment program were made available to 16 county police departments.

To see how it would go, they needed things to happen.

Things did.

Between Friday evening and Monday morning, seven incidents in five different jurisdictions resulted in officers calling on therapists for assistance with a person in distress.

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In the trenches

For part of the weekend, Dreisbach rode along with a West Lampeter officer.

“I don’t do anything without getting down in the trenches,” said Dreisbach, CEO of East Lampeter Township-based Blueprints for Addiction Recovery.

On Saturday, the officer Dreisbach was accompanying was dispatched for a report of a suicidal man who was considering jumping from a bridge.

“The man’s dog died. He was fighting with his family. He just really didn’t want to live anymore,” Dreisbach said.

“The officer was able to build a rapport within seconds,” Dreisbach said. He told the man help was available and talked the man away from the bridge.

The officer called for a therapist, who arrived within several minutes. The therapist connected the man to appropriate mental health services, quickly.

Over the course of the weekend, five other people were connected to appropriate mental health services — Dreisbach’s company does not provide the mental health treatment, he said, and some of the people were already connected with treatment providers.

The seventh person, a woman in her 60s who had been drinking heavily, was first taken to Lancaster General Hospital, Dreisbach said.

Another situation involved a woman who had been forced out of a car by her significant other, he said.

“She could have been hit by a car. Who even knows. She could have been robbed or who knows. Anything could have happened to her,” he said.

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Next steps

Dreisbach called the weekend-long test a success.

“The way the officers responded with care and compassion was beyond anything I could have imagined. … Just that man alone told me right away that this is a value that the county needs,” Dreisbach said Monday, referring to the man who was contemplating jumping from a bridge.

With other departments expressing interest, he said he plans to offer it again this weekend.

As of Tuesday afternoon, 16 of the county’s 24 municipal departments have signed on, but more are expected —and welcome, Dreisbach said.

As it happened, three of the seven incidents were in West Lampeter, where Wiczkowski is chief. He had helped jump-start the idea of such a program during a recent conversation with Dreisbach.

According to various mental health and law enforcement estimates, about 10% of police interactions involve a person with mental health issues. Most police officers aren’t adequately trained on how to respond, even though they’re often the first on scene, whether or not a crime is involved.

“We’re the only ones available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. They’re going to call us,” Wiczkowski said.

Wiczkowski said the crisis intervention training that police officers get through the county’s Adult Probation and Parole Department is valuable and helps officers understand how to deal with mental health crises. But it can only go so far.

“Our ability to speak to someone, to calm someone down is one thing. We’re trained for that. But just because we calm them down … it’s not over,” he said. “We can’t diagnose somebody. We can’t treat them.”

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Solution for all sizes

And while larger departments may have social workers on staff, smaller departments don’t have the call volume to justify the cost of hiring trained mental health professionals, according to Elizabethtown police Chief Ed Cunningham.

Lancaster city, budgeted for 135 officers, just hired a second social worker in January after bringing its first on board in September 2019. By contrast, West Lampeter has 17 officers, Elizabethtown is budgeted at 18 officers and Quarryville has five officers.

Wiczkowski stressed that what’s being tested is intended to complement existing mental health services.

So far, the pilot program is just that, a test. Dreisbach is funding the pilot program at no cost to police. He and some area police chiefs have been in discussion with District Attorney Heather Adams and others to line up additional support should the program proceed.

Adams said the numbers from this past weekend “truly show a need for this type of program.”

As to what a permanent program might cost, Dreisbach said Blueprints for Addiction Recovery was awarded a $266,476 federal grant through the county last year, which enabled him to support and expand its Second Chance PA program.

The program is a pre-arrest diversion program where police officers have the discretion not to charge people for minor drug offenses such as possession of paraphernalia if they go into treatment. It went from being in 14 to 21 departments.

“Who knows how it’s going to look when we get further down the road,” Wiczkowski said. “The benefit of the pilot program is we can tweak it as we go along.”

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Crédito: DAN NEPHIN | Staff Writer