Inside look at partnership with Cape Girardeau police, Community Counseling Center

CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. (KBSI) – Observing Mental Health Awareness Month: An inside look at a unique program in Cape Girardeau – the Co-Responders Unit. It is a partnership between Cape Girardeau Police Department and the Community Counseling Center.

In just over a year the co-responders unit… has taken major strides to transform the way our community approaches mental health and they have the numbers to prove it.

“One thing we’ve realized, it doesn’t matter walk of life, or where you live out in the city mental health affects everybody,” said Corporal Will Rogers.

Corporal Rogers is the supervisor of the co-responders unit for Cape PD. He says they want everyone in the community to know, if you are experiencing any kind of mental health crisis help is available right now

“It is different than the police work I am used to,” he said.

Rogers was asked to create and lead the police side of the unit in 2023 with the goal of putting a team together to better respond to the mental health emergencies they encounter every single day.

“In the past we would go to some type of disturbance or domestic and you get there and you realize something is ‘off’ with somebody and could be substance abuse related, could be mental health related we don’t know and we used to have to deal with that on our own,” said Cpl. Rogers.

Rogers says with his co-reponders, a social worker and a clinical psychologist that has drastically changed.

“Now they call the unit. The officer on scene can ask for a co-responder to show up. I’ll go out with one of my co-responders and we get on the scene as soon as it safe. It allows that officer to go back on the street and connect them with mental health resources,” he said.

He says the numbers speak for themselves.

“In the past the average time on scene for an officer, was just over an hour 61 minutes. We’ve been able to drop that down to 12 minutes time on scene for our officers,” said Cpl. Rogers.

Kyle Schott supervises the community counseling centers side of the program.

“One of the unique things about the Cape Girardeau jurisdiction is that it is one of the smallest jurisdictions in the entire country to have a co-responder program,” said Schott.

Schott says what they originally envisioned, and with the program came out to be are different, saying they learned the urgency of police work needs the process on scene to move quickly. So they adapted work flow to look like more of a triage scenario, getting people the help they need – be it a hospital, or a specialized counselor as soon as possible.

“The numbers are just astounding,” said Schott. “The number of calls and the number of individuals we’ve been able to divert from either the ER or jail and the amount of money that actually saved our community and our state by not having to hospitalize somebody is incredible,” he said.

Rogers says they created a cloud based platform to easily track progress.

“In the past when we did a three-year study on our numbers for any officer involved in a mental health call about 53% of those calls were taken to jail or ER. Since we started that has dropped down to 16%,” said Cpl. Rogers.

“It’s kind of an odd collaboration when you talk about a community health center and a police department working as closely together as we are, but it works,” said Schott. “It works because we share a common goal, we share a goal of truly wanting to help these individuals.”

Now they are working to expand the unit, something that takes manpower and money.

“We paid for peoples dog food out of our own pockets. We’ve put people up in hotels we are doing a lot of it out of our own pocket and it’s not ideal. It’s not sustainable,” said Cpl. Rogers.

They say now it’s time to continue to raise awareness, letting people know it’s ok to not be ok — and they are not alone.

“As long as you’re asking for help, I’ll come help you,” said Cpl. Rogers. “We will keep coming out no matter how many times it takes, it is just looking for that window when they’re ready to accept help and once they are will try to get them where they need to go.”