WPD Takes Pledge:One of Only a Few Departments in the Country to Complete the Course Dealing with Mental Illness

The Winthrop Police Dept. is now a One-Mind Pledge compliant police department, meaning all officers are now trained in how to respond to calls that involve mental illness.

“This is an important program and we exceeded compliance. This means the police in Winthrop can do their job more effectively and understand people’s needs better. Mental health is a growing issue in Winthrop and it is also tied in to our opioid issues. Actually, I see it exceeding our opiate issues,” said  Police Chief Terrence Delehanty. “We need to be aware of the symptoms and signs of mental illness so we can get someone to services quickly and efficiently. Our goal is not having to deal with the same person over and over again, so we’re not deploying resources time and time again.”

The International Association of Police Chiefs put out a voluntary request to all the police departments across the nation to pledge to meet the requirement of the One-Mind Pledge which are to define and sustain a partnership with a community mental health organization; develop and implement policies addressing police response to persons affected by mental illness and substance use disorder; train and certify 100 percent of the police department’s sworn officers in mental health first aid; and provide crisis intervention team training to a minimum of 20 percent of the sworn officers.

“Before taking the pledge, and actually leading up to the pledge, we had almost every part of it covered when the Chief said we should sign on to this,” said Sarko Gergerian, the Winthrop Police Department One-Mind pledge trainer. “We have the Narcan policy, which is a very important lifesaving policy, and we have our recovery team deployment policy.”

“Through a partnership with Boston Medical Center (BMC) there is an assigned social worker for 20 hours a week on the Winthrop team as well as a recovery coach. Almost all members of the department are also crisis intervention trained in mental health related cases such as deescalating a situation, role playing and learning about mental health challenges. The program is a week-long training that takes 40 hours. Mental health first aid is an 8-hour training, “It’s like the mental health version of CPR first aid,” Gergerian said.

“Across the nation there are only a few hundred departments who have taken the pledge, and we’re one of them,” Gergerian said.

During the training, officers were given different education, training and skill sets related to mental health challenges. The training also reinforces the fact that they can refer these types of matters to the CLEAR team (Winthrop’s Community and Law Enforcement Assisted Recovery team) for non-policing out of the box help.

Gergerian offered an example, which led to a 911 call for assistance, flagged by Gergerian that there was a mental health component to the call. He then doses a further follow up and if Gergerian finds that this person is struggling with housing, mental health, doctor’s appointments, being meds compliant some help can be offered.

“Now, I ask if I can share the situation with the CLEAR team, if the person says ‘yes’ then the social worker and I pay a visit, and get them in the see a psychiatrist immediately. Then this person doesn’t have to go on missing their medications,” Gergerian said. “We just had our first community stakeholder meeting, where neighboring communities, organizations, mental health organization, domestic violence organizations all got together in the same room exchanging information.”