COMMUNITY PROFILE A STAR TOUCHES DOWN LIGHTLY IN DENVER BY PAULA BARD Prior to STAR, the Denver 911 system, with its one million calls for service in the City and County of Denver, routed calls to either the criminal justice system or the health/hospital system. STAR now offers a third path to the de-escalation of crises and can provide an entry into services that may be available for people in crises. Carefully directed calls now go to STAR and its social workers and paramedics instead of an emergency department visit or law enforcement. For the city, this third path also increases efficiency. It offers costsaving while allowing traditional police, fire, and emergency medical services to be directed toward calls requiring their training and experience. Carleigh Sailon and Chris Richardson, the two clinical social workers who ride with the van, offer blankets, water, food, warmth, rides to safety, and a healthy dose of kindness. Sailon and Richardson have solid backgrounds in accessing resources for folks in crises and de-escalating public health emergencies. They see the STAR van as a perfect resource for Denver, as does Lateef Hodge, the Montbello paramedic who rides with STAR. The STAR van can be assigned to a call for service in three ways: 1. 911 call takers flag incoming calls and directly dispatch STAR. This accounted for 313 calls or 41.8% of the call load. 2. Police requests STAR to respond on-scene. This accounted for 260 calls or 34.8% of the call load. 3. STAR initiates a response in the field. This accounted for 175 or 23.4% of the call load. CREDIT: PAULA BARD 911 CALLS “Someone called 911 because the woman was sitting on a curb, crying and drinking a beer,” recalled Carleigh Sailon, a social worker with the STAR program. “They were concerned about her well-being and wanted to see if they could get her some help. STAR was dispatched, and I approached her, it was the middle of July. It was really hot. “She was sitting there, and we said, ‘We’re here to help you today. What’s going on?’ She basically just said that she’d gotten stranded in that part of town that she wasn’t familiar with and didn’t have any way to get anywhere else. No transportation and no fare for the bus, and it was really hot. She didn’t have any water. It was a retail area. She was just having a bad day. But she was crying, you know, and they were concerned about her, so they called 911. We carry water and snacks on the STAR van. So, I offered her some of that pretty quickly because of the heat. Asked her where she was trying to go, you know. We told her, ‘We’d be happy to give you a ride,’ and she said, ‘You know, I’d really just like to get somewhere inside, and, you know, sleep inside tonight.’ “I said ‘We’d be happy to give you a ride where you’d like to go?’ And she was really kind of pleasantly surprised that we were able to transport her. And we were happy to do that. “She was able to seek shelter and get some air conditioning and, you know, access to food and all those things at the shelter. And she was really grateful and gave us really positive feedback that felt really supportive. She couldn’t believe that people in a van would just kind of roll up and give her water and give her a ride!” HOW DID WE GET HERE? STAR, or the Support Team Assisted Response, was up and running by June 2020. This innovative program was launching about the same time that Denver’s streets were exploding with police brutality protests, and the program provides one remedy which could help to reduce conflict. The two-person STAR team consists of an experienced social worker and a paramedic who drive around in a nondescript blue and white van. STAR is called on for nonviolent public health crises when there are no weapons. Much of their interface with the community revolves around Denver’s unhoused community, amounting to a huge 68% of their calls. From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., five days a week, they patrol the central business district and along the South Broadway corridor. Many of the issues they are called to address involve trespassing. In its first six-month pilot program, the STAR van responded to 748 calls for service. During the same period in the Denver Police Department, District 6 responded to 92,482 incidents. STAR was able to respond to 2.8% of the overall call load. STAR is made possible through collaboration between the Caring for Denver Foundation, Denver Police Department, Mental Health Center of Denver (MHCD), Denver Health Paramedic Division, Denver 911, and community support and resources. It provides mobile crisis response to community members experiencing mental health problems, poverty, homelessness, or trespassing. These public health issues are not often easily or appropriately addressed and are often exacerbated, in fact, by a police presence. 8 DENVER VOICE April 2021 DENVER POLICE PERSPECTIVE Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen, one of STAR’s founders, is now a strong advocate. STAR has been at least three years in the making. “My involvement in this goes back to a lunch at a restaurant in north Denver, where four of us sat down and asked if there could be an alternative response to the 911 calls that did not involve violence or weapons,” Pazen explains. The group began exploring organizations like Cahoots in Eugene, Ore., which had an innovative track record of 31 years of providing a nonpolice response for crises involving mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. “We did a lot of research on this, and then we shared that,” says Pazen. “We learned with other stakeholders, including Denver Homeless Out Loud and Denver Justice Project, folks from our 911 call center, and Caring Denver. We had numerous conversations with the folks from up there and the police chief.” The group sent a team up to learn about their program first-hand, and they came back very impressed and ready to implement it in Denver. “We want better outcomes for individuals that are in crisis,” says Pazen. “We believe that STAR is a critical component when people are in crisis or in need, where there’s not a weapon or where the individual is not demonstrating violence.” The 911 Call Center uses a decision tree; asking multiple questions to determine which calls go to the police and which would instead be a low-level, nonviolent crisis and appropriate for the STAR van. Often, the police determine that a call does not require police presence, and they call the STAR van themselves. Pazen believes that STAR’s impact on the unsheltered community is overwhelmingly positive. “And for the police,” Pazen says, “we see the value in having a medical professional
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