ALBUQUERQUE, NM (AP) — Quinn Mulhern and Leigh White are driving Central one morning in early December when they spot an elderly woman lying on a pile of blankets on a sidewalk. She is surrounded by personal effects, including a wheelchair and a walker.
Mulhern turns sharply right down the side street, parks a city-owned white Ford Escape with the “Community Responder” written on the side, and he and White jump off.
The pair wear jeans and jackets over their long-sleeved “Community Safety Department” t-shirts. The radios hang from cords around their necks. They crouch down next to the woman and hand her water bottles, a blanket and a pair of socks, ask her if she needs anything and encourage her to use a bus pass to get to at the West Side homeless shelter.
In the end, that’s about all they can do.
Mulhern – who was a mixed martial arts fighter before returning to school to earn a master’s degree in social work – and White – a former correctional officer who cites her personal experiences navigating the system as a single mother – are behavioral health workers scouring the streets as part of the city’s newest department.
Albuquerque Community Safety launched in late August and received widespread national media attention. Articles have praised the city’s focus on solving societal problems with social workers rather than law enforcement.
Local residents were also intrigued, although some were far more skeptical, including a woman who White said kept asking if they were “willing to die for the town”.
“The hardest part of the job has sometimes been balancing the citizens making the calls,” White told the Albuquerque Journal. “We cannot always meet their expectations. There are limits to our work and to what we are capable of achieving.
Often, callers expect responders to arrest people camping on public property, which Mulhern said they — or police for that matter — don’t do. He said when they approach someone on the street they ask for a first name to make a report, but they don’t check criminal backgrounds or see if someone is wanted on a warrant. . While there are plenty of naysayers, Mulhern said he’s also spoken to people who seem to think the department is a solution to the complex problem of police brutality.
“It’s an attempt to replace a certain set of jobs that the police normally do. …,” Mulhern said. “There’s this idea that we’re going to erase the board of conflict and homelessness, and it’s like, no…I think we’re doing good work and important work and we’re doing it well, but it’s is like a piece of a bigger puzzle.”
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ODA in full reform effort
In June 2020, as the nation was gripped by protests over the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and calls to “scroll police defunding,” Mayor Tim Keller announced the city would create a new public safety service that would respond to calls involving behavioral health, homelessness, substance abuse, and other issues.
The Albuquerque Police Department has been criticized in the past for its handling of the homeless and those experiencing mental health crises and is in the midst of a years-long reform effort.
Eleven days before the mayor’s press conference, an APD agent shot and killed a man who was suffering from a mental health crisis at his parents’ home. Officer Jose Ruiz shot Max Mitnik as the 26-year-old walked towards him holding a paring knife and demanded to be shot. Although Mitnik survived the shooting, his mother told the Journal he would never be the same again.
An internal investigation revealed that the officer used appropriate force. But, he found that he had failed to control the scene, which escalated the situation before the shooting.
ACS director Mariela Ruiz-Angel said she watched the video of the encounter multiple times and wondered how her responders might have handled it differently. On the one hand, Mitnik wanted to be taken to the hospital but didn’t want to be handcuffed.
“There was a moment where he was like, ‘OK, I’m going,'” Ruiz-Angel said in an interview.
But, she recalled, officers said they had to handcuff Mitnik to transport him.
“If we had put him in the car and let his mother get in the car with him, would that have been a different outcome?” Ruiz-Angel asked.
Ruiz-Angel said dispatchers generally don’t send calls to ACS if someone is reported to have a weapon; however, when responders arrive on the scene, they often find that people are armed. She said the responders have not been threatened by anyone, but if they are, they are told to remove themselves from the situation and call for help.
Ruiz-Angel grew up in El Paso, Texas. When she was in her twenties, she worked in customer relations for a large corporation before returning to school to earn a master’s degree in social work and business administration. She worked for the Albuquerque Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs before being hired to start ACS in 2020. In April, she was hired as a director.
Ruiz-Angel said that as the ACS grows, she thinks the budget will have to double – but it will still be a much cheaper option than the police. The annual budget for ACS is $7.7 million and that for ODA is about 30 times larger.
“Even thinking logistically about the vehicles that (the police) buy and the weapons they buy, the shoes,” she said. “We’ll probably always stick to something very casual, although it may be in uniform.”
Since early September, behavioral health responders have responded to more than 1,500 calls for service and street responders have responded to 213 calls involving 753 individual contacts, according to a department spokesperson. At the start of December, nearly two-thirds of the calls were for someone homeless and 17% were for welfare checks. The remaining calls involved “downs and outs”, behavioral health issues, beggars, or suspicious or intoxicated people.
During the first week of December, ACS had hired or was in the process of hiring staff for 20 of 24 behavioral health worker positions and 29 of 45 of its overall field staff. The department also has a clinical supervisor, four mobile crisis team clinicians who accompany law enforcement on calls, two street responders and a community response support worker who assist those affected. by tragedy or violence. It has 10 vacancies for community responders, who respond to minor injuries, abandoned vehicles, non-injury accidents and needle pick-ups.
Ruiz-Angel said the department is expected to double its response units each year and eventually take up to 40,000 calls per year. She said it currently operates seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., but hopes to be closer to 24/7 by the end of January.
“In my perfect world, if we could put behavioral health workers in every neighborhood of the city, in every district, in every quadrant similar to the police, I think the results could be different because then you can … have relationships deeper with the community,” says Ruiz-Angel.
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Somewhat “worn” services at ABQ
On December 10, accompanied by a journalist and a photographer from the Journal, Mulhern and White toured the city answering calls and walking the streets.
As Mulhern drove, White sat in the passenger seat with an open computer in her lap, watching computer-aided dispatch records for calls being answered by firefighters and police around the city. Albuquerque Fire Rescue scanner traffic crackles over the radio.
The first two calls they’re sent to — a man between two vehicles in a mall parking lot and a man next to a bicycle outside a Wendy’s — result in no one being found. This happened in about 27% of calls answered by ACS in the first three months, while resources were offered in about 48% of calls and services were declined in about 17% of calls, according to data provided by the department.
When workers find someone who needs help, they say it’s often difficult trying to get them what they need. Workers offer basic necessities and, if the person is interested, try to provide housing or case management services.
“Best-case scenario, if the person is motivated and, you know, relatively mobile, they can get to where they need to go, they’re computer-savvy, they can handle a cellphone, if all those boxes are checked – even then, it’s quite difficult to get into services to get a housing voucher to get on the list of more permanent housing,” Mulhern said. “It’s not that easy. And that’s the thing we often come across…the services are, I would say, a bit worn out.
Other times, the only thing they can do is call for medical help.
Shortly before noon, Mulhern spots a man lying face down — his head covered in a straw hat — on the sidewalk of an exit ramp along Interstate 40. An extremely cold, strong wind threatens to blow a shopping cart containing all his belongings. in the street.
The rescuers park and Mulhern pulls the cart back onto the sidewalk. They crouch next to the man, asking him if he’s okay, and he doesn’t move but mumbles weakly. Eventually, after repeatedly asking how they could help, White calls the paramedics. While they wait, responders cover the man with a blanket to try to keep him warm.
Eventually an ambulance from Albuquerque arrives and loads the man into the back. Mulhern and White give the ambulance his backpack so he can take it with him to the hospital.
As they move away, the team thinks about how ACS can fit into the first responder system alongside APD and AFR.
“The duties of the job kind of determine the behavior of the people in the job, and it’s like we get the little extra superpower of not being able to quit. We don’t even touch all of those people,” Mulhern said. “I think people are hanging on to… ‘they’re going to replace the police with us.’ No… It’s complementary to this other necessary service where they have the power to stop – someone has to have it too – but dividing it up seems quite logical to me.
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