Gaining Trust

Trust is a delicate part of building and running a crisis response team. For instance, in traditional crisis response, people feel a different sense of trust about police than they do about EMTs and firefighters. Alternative crisis response teams are a relatively new concept to most Seattleites and Americans in general. Trust has yet to be built, established, or violated.

Teams think about trust in different ways across different contexts. Teams want to establish trust with potential and existing clients, outside agencies, government officials, funding providers, and a variety of other groups. Some of the ways that teams strive to gain the trust of other teams is by creating and implementing training programs, developing direct and indirect relationships with individuals at outside agencies, sharing relevant success stories and data, implementing confidentiality best practices, and other ways.

Some teams gain trust with clients by hiring and bringing peers with lived experience of being in crisis onto their calls. SOUND, YMCA, and SFD all incorporate lived experience peers into their teams in an official capacity. SOUND implements a certification process to train peers. YMCA has parent partners who are certified peer support specialists with experience having a child who was system-involved. They also have youth peers who have been system-involved themselves.

Job and hiring requirements make it more challenging for SPD and CARE to specifically hire people with lived experience. City of Seattle background check requirements are one such barrier. One way around this for SFD has been funding from the Washington State opioid settlement, which is able to fund the hiring of people with lived experience, whether or not they are formally certified peers.

Team leaders attempt to establish trust across agencies in a variety of ways. Some teams believe that training programs help their teams gain the trust of other agencies, providing them with the validation they may need to be accepted as “legitimate” first responders. Some create informal, direct lines of communication with other agency leads in the form of group chats or direct text message threads. This allows for casual relationship building outside of the client provider context as well as faster, more direct communication about clients outside of the bureaucratic context.

The CARE Team establishes trust formally and informally with their largest operating partner, the Seattle Police, by operating within existing police precincts. This contrasts with the experience of the MRRCT covering King County, who believe that they must proactively attend gatherings with police to continue building trust.

Fast response times are a key factor in maintaining trust with police. As mentioned by Chief Amy Barden of CARE, when police refer an individual to alternative crisis responders but those responders don’t show up quickly, it makes police less likely to refer out in the future. The opposite is also true: fast response times increase the chances that police will refer an individual out in the future. She noted that before the city had fast crisis teams, officers would say, “‘We know it’s going to be three or four hours and what’s the point?’ And if you’re an officer, it’s like, ‘I can’t stay here and babysit.’ That’s how they think about it. So they lost trust in the resource a long time ago.”

Quotations

Dianne, YMCA:

“I think having peers, particularly parent partners, our key piece of our model that is super effective because when you just have a young clinician talking to a parent and telling them about how to parent their kid, you often get the response of, well, do you have kids yourself? No. Well then how do you know? And our parent partners actually have lived through challenges with their own kids, and so they can talk and support around, I get it, I know how hard this is, and here’s some of the things that helped me. And there is hope and light at the end of the tunnel type of thing.”

Joe, SOUND:

“…I do agree that with the healthcare authority coming and saying, Hey, we really need to have, if you’re going to be supervising peers, we would like for you to get this training… There’s more validation or trustworthiness about that person because they’re going through these specialized trainings, just like a clinician, we have to have X amount of hours, we got to go take a test. They’re kind of moving in that direction. So it just makes it, and anytime you do something like that, you just enhancing your team’s ability to respond to the crisis.”

“My experience have been that if you don’t message your program correctly, the effectiveness is not going to be there. So because we want them to call, so to respond, we’re not going to be able to respond unless they call. If they’re not comfortable or don’t understand that process, then there’s a problem. And that’s the initiative that we have taken, let’s say sound and myself, that we’re going to go out. In fact, we met with the Redmond police, chief, deputy police chief, a chief yesterday or day before. He was unaware of Meerkat. So it’s important for me to say that to you because that’s very critical. The messaging. It’s a new program. How do you expect people, you got to get out. I know it’s a lot of work, but you have to make that effort.”

Zee, SPD:

“I do do a lot of training with providers about you should be checking with yourselves and making sure that you’re making direct phone call that is appropriate. If you’re making an inappropriate phone call, we’re still going to respond, but it’s kind of on you if things are not good in the future, because that person’s going to remember that you called police on them and it just perpetuates trauma. So yeah, I have a whole conversation with ’em about that.”

“One of the barriers that we face specifically is that because we are a partnership between law enforcement and social workers or behavioral health workers, we definitely get people who have a lot of thoughts and feelings about police, but also have a lot of thoughts and feelings about social workers because we send people to the hospital. So I have literally been on calls where a person’s refused to talk to me and said, I’ll talk to the officer if we go down the block away from the social worker so that they can’t hear me because they’re afraid I’m going to send to the hospital.”

Jon, SFD:

“We’re a voluntary service, so people have to be willing to work with us. So if they also specifically say that they will not meet with us, then we’re probably not going to go since we’re not in the habit of forcing people. “

Amy, CARE:

“The strategy is to really be anchored in crisis data. Where are purely crisis calls coming from and can we be there proactively or at a minimum have stronger relationships with the community-based organizations, with the police who may be working in the area, medical providers, community leaders so that we really know the folks who are repeatedly in the cycles of crime or crisis. We know we’ll have more success, we know them and have trusting relationships and knowledge of who they are and what they might be experiencing.”

“The existential threat right now is this sort of scarcity thinking that if we grow care it’s going to diminish police. And so I’m always railing against that. No, we need more of everyone. And sadly there’s not a lack of police work. There’s not, and there’s not in the foreseeable future, that’s not going to be the case”