Crisis-Response Team Ups Its Game

by Nora Grace-Flood, New Haven Independent (Photo by Nora Grace-Flood) │ Jul 19, 2023

The city’s non-cop crisis crew will now be on call for twice as many hours a day, remain reachable through the night, and respond directly to emergencies without police or fire intervening first.

Those are some the updates for how COMPASS — the crew of city funded social workers and peer counselors known as ​“Compassionate Allies Serving Our Streets” — will do its job as it moves from a pilot program and into a long-term strategy for dealing with mental health and substance abuse crises.

City officials, cops, firefighters, community members, social service workers, and PSAP (911 public safety answering point) workers all gathered Wednesday by Kimberly Triangle — the center of a one-mile radius within which more than a third of all COMPASS responses have taken place over the past year — to announce the formal expansion of the COMPASS initiative.