In the three months since Angela Cecys started coordinating the city's crisis care response, she said her focus has been on establishing the building blocks of a program meant to help police respond when encountering a crisis involving people living with mental illness or addiction.
That effort begins with building relationships, she said.
"One of the umbrella situations or areas that I'm focusing on is just overall being a bridge builder and a convener, a translator, if that makes sense," she told Ideastream Public Media. "It's trying to get everybody in the community, all the stakeholders to understand that we all really are saying the same things and want the same things."
Cecys is also assessing best practices from similar programs across the nation and in the initial stages for implementing a pilot project in partnership with the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services (ADAMHS) Board of Cuyahoga County, she said. The proposed pilot is meant to develop the most effective plans to respond to crisis situations involving individuals with mental illness or addiction, according to Cecys.
Part of the pilot development includes assessing data with the help of an epidemiologist and a data analyst to determine the most common types of mental health calls, what hospitals people are going to, whether they're being admitted or released and what locations have the most nonviolent mental health-related calls, Cecys said.
Doing so will allow the city to "make a pilot model as successful as possible and then scale it from there," she said.
One area of focus will be to optimize the initial contact first responders make when dealing with a crisis.
"A lot of the work is going to be focused on dispatch and 911 call taking and re-triaging calls and retraining dispatch," Cecys said. "When you call 911, you get police, EMS, fire. Now, there will be also a mental health response approach."
Cecys said the Cleveland Department of Health is in the last stages of contracting with an outside entity to continue and expand the current program using funds provided under The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and approved by the Cleveland City Council last fall. This includes adding another five clinicians, which would double the number of licensed professionals available to respond to mental health and addiction-related crisis in Cleveland, she said.
"Definitely we're hoping (to add additional clinicians) before the end of the year, definitely that that's our goal," Cecys said. "We want to get this going."
During these first few months, she has worked with Cleveland's Police Accountability Team and its Executive Director Leigh Anderson, to ensure any response plan is in compliance with a settlement agreement entered into in 2015 by the city and the U.S. Department of Justice, which called for police to receive crisis intervention training.
Finally, Cecys said she is in the process of convening a crisis co-response work group made up of police departments that function within the city and each department's respective co-responder teams.
"We're going to start bringing them to the table to start discussing their challenges, their strengths, sharing ideas, sharing information," she said. "That will have clinicians from the teams, supervisors and the police at the table that will allow for more robust conversation and problem solving to happen."
