Alternate Response Unit Exposing City’s Safety Net Issues

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(TNS) – A report of a woman in distress one morning early this month prompted Katie Jaramillo and William Brunson to race out a back door of their midtown office and head to Candelario Street, where the woman was crying for help.

They found her pacing back and forth.

She was already surrounded by police and paramedics. As members of the city of Santa Fe’s Alternative Response Unit, Jaramillo and Brunson were there to help calm the woman, determine the source of her distress and ensure she got help — in this case, at a local hospital. The pair recognized the woman. They had encountered her several times before at a homeless shelter.

“I don’t know why she’s so agitated today,” Brunson said.

Hours after he and Jaramillo helped take the woman to Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, she was back out on the streets and arrested on suspicion of drinking alcohol in a Walgreens store without paying for it.

Brunson said that happens “pretty frequently — the broken system that we work in, you know.”

The city’s Alternative Response Unit was established in May 2021 by the Community Health and Safety Department in collaboration with the police department, fire department and Community Services Department. Its mission was to aid a growing number of people in need of shelter, behavioral health care and other services and to ease the pressure on traditional emergency responders, such as police and fire crews, by handling cases that didn’t require such a high-level answer.

The team of emergency medical professionals and case managers, which initially had one vehicle and operated four days a week, was expanded in September. It now operates from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. five days a week and has 13 members who help respond to 911 calls involving people in crisis — typically, those who are homeless, elderly, mentally ill or struggling with addictions.

While many city officials and advocates agree the program has had a positive effect in the community, ARU personnel often find themselves aiding repeat clients who have not found adequate care or resources or might be resisting help. They cite a need for a more fully developed safety net for people in need in Santa Fe.

Kyra Ochoa, director of the city’s Community Health and Safety Department, said the ARU is working “really well” by finding high numbers of people in need. But after they have been identified and given a case manager to help them through tough times, she added, the process of finding aid — whether it’s housing or behavioral health services — reveals gaps in the city’s resources.

“Part of what is happening is, we knew there were gaps in our system for elderly people, for homeless people, for all kinds of people with substance use disorder,” Ochoa said. “We’re getting a sense of the real difference between the need and the available resources.

“The case managers are bridging that gap, but they can’t house someone,” she said.

Previously, the Alternative Response Unit could distribute sleeping bags and tents to unsheltered people on excessively cold nights. That provision was added to the city’s so-called Code Blue policy during the coronavirus pandemic, when shelter beds were more limited.

The city no longer provides sleeping bags or tents and aims to discourage people from camping on public property. Instead, crews hand out food, gloves and warm clothes.

The policy change has raised concern among many advocates of the city’s homeless community this week as nighttime temperatures have fallen into the teens.

“I know it’s a tough one, but it’s a real mixed message to tell people they’re not allowed to camp and then give them a tent,” Ochoa said.

While some ARU members are out on the streets, offering bags of food and information about shelters and other resources to those they encounter, other workers monitor calls to the local 911 dispatch center and rush out to assist law enforcement when they feel an incident can be better resolved with their expertise.

Case managers also spend time connecting with clients and helping them reach their goals.

Jaramillo, who has been working with the ARU since February, said case managers handle between 19 and 30 clients at a time, based on their clients’ levels of need.

“A huge change that we have to make in our minds when we’re doing case management is how we define success,” Jaramillo said. “For some of them, just engaging with us could be a success, or engaging with recovery services one time is a success.”

Jaramillo said the response team’s work is limited by the services available in the community.

The expansion has allowed it to reach more people, she said, and the team’s efforts could benefit the community for more hours of the day. But, she noted, the help they could provide after business hours is contingent on available services and space at area shelters.

“I feel like so much of what I would change depends on outside systems changing,” Jaramillo said. “I could say I wish the ARU had 24/7 coverage, but then we don’t have anywhere to send people if it’s night … so what does that really help?”

Ochoa said the city does not want the ARU to grow “just to grow.”

“One of the most satisfying things for a case manager is to link their client to what they need. If we can’t do that with 90 percent of our clients, we’re going to burn our team out,” Ochoa said.

At the top of the ARU’s daily operations are Andres Mercado, the city fire department’s battalion chief, and Nicole Ault, a behavioral health director.

Mercado said the Santa Fe Police Department and other local agencies have become more accustomed to referring people to the ARU as they respond to emergency calls.

“It’s a little bit of a culture shift, but some police officers and some EMTs are awesome. Their radar is tuned into that frequency,” Mercado said.

Ault said merely having an alternative response team available for people in distress is valuable to the community and can give people a different way of engaging with the public safety system.

She said the team responds to multiple incidents involving the same people in crisis.

“My perspective on that is that each time that we encounter [the same person], there’s an opportunity for a different outcome,” Ault said. “Things change, little things shift in their lives, little things shift in our office, little things shift in the partners that we work with.

“So there’s always that possibility that it’s going to change a little bit. I believe in that.”

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