Chief Lucas Cooper has been with the Alexandria Police Department for 14 years and chief of the 17 officer police force since February of last year. Cooper says Alexandria is a residential community of just under ten thousand people. He said when someone is experiencing an emergency, chances are that person will contact the police.
“A lot of times when people are in crisis they don’t know who to call so they call 9-1-1. Because that’s what people have always been told when there’s an emergency you call 9-1-1. When someone’s in time of emergency they call the police because that’s often the only people they know to call,” said Cooper.
Cooper said the police were asked to respond time and time again to the same people for the same types of problems.
“What we were seeing was, is we were often putting a band-aid on a situation but not getting to the root of the problem,” reported Cooper.
Four years ago, a full-time social worker was hired to work with the officers in Alexandria’s police department. Mike Ward, who’d been working in law enforcement 40 years, was chief at the time. He’s since retired. Ward tells about the police getting repeat calls from a veteran with PTSD and a family dealing with domestic violence.
“When the social worker is working with them, I as the police officer are not getting called back to that home because they’re arguing and fighting again. So it reduces our recurring calls for service and that is the biggest thing. It frees the officer up to do the things he needs to do without responding to calls that he can’t solve,“ said Ward.
In 2016, Kelly Pompilio was hired as the department’s first full-time social worker. She said her first case was a gentleman with PTSD. He had made six calls to the police department the week before. Her job lends itself to finding resources when a person is in crisis and getting to the root of the problem.
“When people are in crisis they cannot advocate for themselves. So giving them a list or telling them to do something, it’s not feasible, because they’re in crisis. They’re in the moment. So what we do is, we come in and walk them through that crisis event. We break it down, step by step. We follow up with that individual to make sure they’ve made connection,” said Pompilio.
Now the department has two social workers. Kelly Pompilio and Cassie Chesney. They are not first responders. They frequently follow up the next day and sometimes ride together. When they respond to a home they have an unmarked car, they have a radio but they don’t carry handcuffs, guns, mace, or pepper spray.
Pompilio said the three most common issues the social workers tend to are related to mental health, substance abuse, and the elderly population. She said in 2017 the department started collecting data about the number of call responses or times the social workers made contact to help a resident.
“Two-thousand-eighteen when we hired our second social worker our numbers doubled, almost tripled with the case responses and that’s simply because there was two of us. So in 2020 we have learned that our numbers are already at call responses that we were in 2019 and we’re only in August and we still have the rest of the year left and our numbers are already where they were at the end of 2019,” said Pompilio.
Associate Professor of Social Work at Northern Kentucky University, Dr. Tara McLendon helped design the Police Social Worker Program in Alexandria. “At least 60 percent of all calls to law enforcement are related to social services and not related to criminal matters,” said McLendon.
She said now in Alexandria residents will call the police department, asking for the social worker when there’s an issue they know they need help with and don’t know who else to reach out to.“So instead of calling 9-1-1 they now know they can call the police department and request help from the social workers,” said McLendon.
Chief Cooper said the social workers are never hired to replace police officers but to work in collaboration with the police. He said police departments as far away as Utah and Texas have called him with questions about starting a similar program. Retired Chief Ward calls police social workers the best decision he ever made.? Meanwhile Kelly Pompilio and Cassie Chesney will continue assisting the police by calling on residents in need.
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