How Rochester and Duluth Respond to Mental Health and Substance Use Calls

Captain Jennifer Hodgman. Photo Sarah Whiting

In Rochester last year, law enforcement officers responded to more than 700 calls with the help of social workers who specialize in mental health and substance use. Those social workers handled 1,400 calls without law enforcement, freeing up officers for other duties.

“Ultimately the goal for us is to not have police officers involved with every single psych event or mental health crisis that goes on here in the city,” says Captain Jennifer Hodgman of the Community Services Division in the Rochester Police Department (RPD). Other goals include keeping people in mental health crises out of jail and connecting them to services.

Hodgman grew up in southeast Minnesota and started her career as a probation officer. She was drawn to community-based work and rose through the ranks at the RPD over 21 years, becoming the first woman promoted to captain in the department earlier this year.

Co-responder programs pair law enforcement officers with mental health practitioners to respond to mental health crisis calls. They emerged in the U.S. in the 1990s. Olmsted County’s program started in 2017, making it one of the oldest in the state.

“The biggest success out of our program is the fact that our community outreach specialists are offering mental health expertise,” Hodgman says. “Those interactions result directly in improved outcomes.”

De-escalation can reduce the risk of self-harm and homicide as well as police-involved shootings. Some calls bypass the police entirely. Law enforcement gets involved when there are weapons or threats of violence and if mental health providers aren’t available.

“Most of the time, they are showing up in an unmarked vehicle, and they’re not wearing the standard uniform that law enforcement comes with, because we know that can exacerbate some symptoms people are having or put fear in people,” says Bethany Oberg, coordinator for the CommUNITY Adult Mental Health Initiative, which covers Benton, Stearns, Sherburne, and Wright counties.

Hodgman says co-response is becoming a best practice — 85 percent of the roughly 2,200 calls involving outreach specialists were resolved on site last year. Last fall, Minnesota awarded eight grants of up to $200,000 to co-responder programs in the state as part of its Crisis Response Grant Program.

Mobile crisis teams can be an alternative to law enforcement and are made up of mental health or behavioral health professionals. Alternatively, co-response programs pair law enforcement with mental health professionals.

Duluth has the CORE Program for co-response. The Duluth Police Department budget covers two sworn officers in the unit. Two embedded social workers are St. Louis County employees, and one social worker is funded for 10 years by an opioid grant.

Olmsted County funds its co-responder program; social workers are county employees. The RPD provides office space to the social workers.

Due to funding limitations, co-responder programs don’t all operate 24 hours a day, every day. During gaps, law enforcement responds on its own, or mobile crisis teams step in to help. Other mental health supports, like crisis hot lines, are always open.

The RPD tries to staff its social workers during the busiest times: weekends and into Monday. Hodgman says, “If it was a perfect world, and we had all the funding we could, we’d have our outreach specialists staffed 24/7.”

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