Brooklyn Park’s New Approach to Mental Health Calls: How It’s Working
In an average day, the Brooklyn Park Alternative Response Team responds to three or four calls for service.
The team, which consists of Hennepin County social workers and North Memorial Health community paramedics, uses the same radios as the police officers working in Brooklyn Park.
However, the team takes a different approach to responding to calls.
“Our priority is to respond to calls related to mental health, to substance abuse, homelessness, other social service needs,” said Nils Dybvig, the team’s main social worker. “Our goal is, as much as we can, go out and resolve somebody’s problem so that they don’t have to keep calling 911.”
A Busy Job
It’s a steady job for the team, which is stationed in the Brooklyn Park Police Department.
“I heard that we took 800 calls in our first year,” Dybvig said. “We’ve been pretty busy.”
The team responds to calls in a white van rather than a police vehicle or a standard ambulance.
“We’ll go as a team get in the van and go try to make somebody’s bad day better,” said Maria Stevenson, North Memorial Health community paramedic supervisor. “We don’t want to look like somebody else, we don’t want to look like the police department, we don’t want to look like the ambulance, because we’re not.”
When they’re in the community, they’ve got medical supplies like naloxone to hand out. They’re also equipped with less conventional supplies, like fresh socks and gun locks for families concerned about firearm access.
“A lot of times we recognize that people are calling 911 for reasons that aren’t necessarily an emergency, but they don’t have anybody else to call,” Dybvig said. “We look at success as, can we reduce the amount of times that people are calling 911 or the times that they feel like they need to call 911? The other thing we’re really looking at is … how can we reduce visits to the emergency room? … If we can figure out ways to keep people safe in the community, that’s a much better outcome.”
Nils Dybvig is a social worker with Hennepin County and the Brooklyn Park Alternative Response Team. He says the team’s goal is to “go out and resolve somebody’s problem so that they don’t have to keep calling 911.”
Reduction in Mental Health Calls
Brooklyn Park Police Inspector Elliot Faust says the team is helping police officers focus on investigating crime.
“They can move on to other things that are more in the wheelhouse for the officer’s skill set,” he said.
The department is increasingly leaning on the team for help.
“It did not take long for the officers to realize the benefit of having these folks to assist them or to take over the call in certain circumstances,” Faust said. “They’re just better equipped to deal with these type of things.”
According to Faust, for the first time in years, the department has seen a drop in mental health calls.
In 2022, Brooklyn Park police received 1,291 mental health calls, an all-time high.
In 2023, mental health calls decreased to 1,096.
“It makes total sense why there would be a decrease — it’s because things are getting resolved where they weren’t ever getting resolved before,” he said. “That’s a huge win, I mean that’s a huge success and we’re seeing it early on.”
