Setting Up The Teams
Across King County, crisis response teams have experienced varied successes and hardships during program setup, particularly around launching under tight timelines, recruiting qualified staff, and establishing effective training protocols. Many teams faced immediate pressure to operationalize services quickly, often within months, which limited their ability to conduct thorough hiring processes or build strong interagency communication channels from the outset. The speed of these rollouts sometimes meant working with minimal supplies and infrastructure, relying on adaptive learning over time rather than detailed implementation plans.
Hiring emerged as a persistent challenge, especially for roles requiring master’s level mental health professionals. The availability of qualified candidates, particularly those willing to work night shifts or in high-stress situations, has constrained some teams’ ability to operate at full capacity. In contrast, programs that incorporate bachelor’s-level case managers or peer specialists with lived experience have found more success with retention for those positions. The inclusion of peer staff varies across teams; while some programs made it a core design feature, others integrated lived experience more informally. Certification requirements, compensation levels, and the presence of background checks also affect how effectively peers are integrated and supported.
Implications for Smart Decarceration
These early-stage decisions around hiring, training, and peer integration carry long-term consequences for decarceration efforts. When crisis response teams can’t hire or retain qualifies MHPs, or fail to support or incorporate peer staff, they risk being unable to provide credible, community-based alternatives to police and incarceration. Conversely, programs that embed lived experience, minimize reliance on law enforcement, and offer adequate training for all roles are more likely to achieve meaningful diversion from the criminal legal system. Literature on incarceration emphasizes the importance of workforce preparedness and community trust (Pettus-Davis et al., 2020), suggesting that program design must prioritize not only clinical expertise but also authentic peer involvement and sustainable staffing models to truly promote decarceration.
Reference:
Pettus-Davis, C., Epperson, M. W., & Grier, A. (2020). Guideposts for the Era of Smart Decarceration. Center for Social Development, Washington University in St. Louis. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/csd_research/869/
Selected Quotations
On staffing challenges:
“It’s a challenge to hire people in night shift because it’s not typically a popular shift… One of the struggles have been mental health professionals throughout the state. There isn’t a whole lot of them.” – Joe Vela, SOUND
“We’re never adequately staffed, but we manage. So we have great staff who pick up additional shifts where it’s needed and work together to make sure things are covered.” – Dianne Boyd, YMCA
“We have the case managers bachelor level, and the peers tend to have pretty good retention. It’s the master’s level mental health professionals that we have the most turnover in, and they tend to be with us a year to two years.” – Dianne Boyd, YMCA
“But in order to be on the team, we go through an interview process. So it’s officers who really want to do crisis work as their specific profession, at least with us for the time period that they’re with us.” – Zee Andrignis, SPD
“So the way our current job description is written, you have to have a master’s degree in a relevant system, whether it be psychology or therapy or social work or whatever.” – Zee Andrignis, SPD
“No, the MOU with the police officer’s Guild is a barrier to expanding the team, but there was no trouble staffing.” – Amy Barden, CARE
On peer specialists:
“Peers have a better chance of connecting because they have lived experience. So when they go out into the field, they’re able to connect.” – Joe Vela, SOUND
“…peers can be either a parent partner who is a certified peer support specialist and has been a parent of a child that has been system involved. And the other peer is youth peer, who is a young person in our program, 21 or older, who has been system involved themselves.” – Dianne Boyd, 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?’ ” – Dianne Boyd, YMCA
“I would love at some point in time to have peers or people with lived experience doing some of our follow-up work or even maybe in the field depending on the situation. But the way our job description is currently written, it is specifically you have to be have a master’s degree.” – Zee Andrignis, SPD
“We have funding from the Washington State opioid settlement money, which is going to funding that. So right now I have hired one of those two positions. The first one of those that we hired is a person with lived experience but who is not a formally certified peer. For the second one … we haven’t hired them yet, but we may go a similar route and hire a person with lived experience or we might get a formally certified peer counselor.” – Jon Ehrenfeld, SFD
On training:
“We’re working with adults, but we also got to think about those vulnerable adults, intellectual people with disabilities. I am training my staff specific for that… I’m working with our IDD department with their director to create a training that can make us more aware.” – Joe Vela, SOUND
“Edge [verbal de-escalation] training is required for everybody.” – Joe Vela, SOUND
“Both online trainings, we have deescalation trainings and then before they ever are doing outreaches themselves with their team, they do a lot of shadowing of teams until they’re comfortable with doing it themselves … And that’s true both for the master’s level specialists and also the peer specialists” – Dianne Boyd, YMCA
“All of the officers who are on our team, they either have to have gone through the 40 hour crisis intervention training (CIT) that the state offers or go through it shortly after joining the team. That’s a requirement either way. They’re also required to do the FBI’s negotiation training level one … the specific training is just the CIT 40 hour and then we will send ’em to the FBI hush negotiation team.” – Zee Andrignis, SPD
“No, it has happened accidentally that some of my folks do have lived experience and I mean that by different definitions of past experience. But I am restricted in some ways because of that. See, just backgrounding, right? That’s a very stringent, well it’s basically the highest clearance in city government you’re going to have.” – Amy Barden, CARE
On launching the team:
“By the time I arrived it was like nothing. There was basically a term sheet, which was the thing that the city council, the prior council and the mayor’s office had come up with, which was just the basic theory … We had from April, we had the team in the field in October. That was, I mean when I arrived it was basically nothing.” – Amy Barden, CARE
“This has been a journey with this program. We just started back in, well I started for sound last year of September and then we were up and going by December 2nd. So I had a very short period of time to get the team up and going.” – Joe Vela, SOUND