Will new Paterson program have cops and mental health pros 'Arrive Together'?

PATERSON — By the end of this year, city police officers will be working with mental health professionals when handling calls involving people going through emotional or mental crises, according to the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office.

But with the launch less than 100 days away, officials said they are still developing the details of how the Arrive Together program — which is already happening in various versions in 42 other New Jersey municipalities — will work in Paterson.

How will Arrive Together work in Paterson?

In many places — including Newark — Arrive Together sends teams of mental health workers with cops to the scene of someone going through an emotional disturbance.

But in the aftermath of the fatal police shooting of Najee Seabrooks last March, social justice activists in Paterson have spoken out against the standard Arrive Together model, asserting they want a program that leaves the police on the sidelines during the initial response.

If the situation poses a risk for the mental health responders, then the police should be called in as backup, said Paterson Black Lives Matter leader Zellie Thomas.

“We don’t want Najee’s death to be in vain,” Thomas said. “If they create a program that can still lead to people’s death, then that’s not the program we want.”

The Attorney General’s Office recently hinted that it may be considering a modification of the standard Arrive Together strategy.

“We have heard from members of the Paterson community who made clear that they were not ready to embrace a co-responder model,” said state spokesman Mike Symons, “and we have learned through our successful launches across the state that it is important to meet communities where they are.”

In some places, Arrive Together provides the mental health screeners with access to the crisis scene through a web call, officials said. In Atlantic County, the mental health workers speak to the person in crisis afterward, not during the emergency as it unfolds.

There is no indication that any place in New Jersey sends mental health workers to handle 911 crisis calls without a law enforcement presence. But Thomas said that approach has been taken in other states and worked well, without any mental health workers becoming victims.

Mayor Andre Sayegh did not respond to messages seeking his input for this story.

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Connect and Protect also launching in Paterson

In Paterson, Arrive Together is being rolled out simultaneously with a similar but separate program called Connect and Protect. St. Joseph’s University Medical Center is partnering with the Police Department on both programs.

Arrive Together is being funded with $10 million in state money shared among programs throughout New Jersey. The Attorney General’s Office started the initiative as a pilot program in 2022 in Cumberland and Union counties. Paterson wasn’t added to the Arrive Together list until after Seabrooks was killed, even though the city had three police shootings of people going though emotional crises during the previous decade and the high-profile, controversial death of Jameek Lowery in police custody.

Paterson got a $550,000 federal Justice Department grant for Connect and Protect in 2022 and was in the early planning stages when police officers shot and killed Seabrooks in March 2023.

Pam Garretson, a spokesperson for St. Joseph’s, said Connect and Protect is expected to begin before the end of this year.

“As the planning for the program is anticipated to becompleted in the month ahead, the next steps include the recruitment of two full-time behavioral health counselors to work in conjunction with local law enforcement officers in the field,” Garretson said.

“Counselors will be deployed with police, to assist in situations requiring greater support for individuals experiencing a serious mental health issue or crisis,” the hospital spokesperson added. “Once the counselors are recruited, the program is projected to launch before the end of the year.”

St. Joseph’s has a stake in preventing deaths like Seabrooks’. He had been employed as a violence intervention specialist for the Paterson Healing Collective, an organization that worked in partnership with the hospital in a program designed to help violent crime victims as a way of preventing retaliatory violence. Seabrooks had participated in various events with high-ranking St. Joseph’s staff members.

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Aftermath of Seabrooks case

Seabrooks was shot by two Paterson cops on March 2 after an almost five-hour standoff at a family member's apartment. Seabrooks himself was the one who called police to the scene, saying someone was out to get him.

The first officers who arrived largely kept their guns holstered and walked casually around the apartment, allowing Seabrooks’ mother to speak to him through the door of the bathroom where he had barricaded himself, as shown on videos released of the scene. One resident in the apartment told the patrol officers Seabrooks was on bad “stuff,” seemingly implying he had taken drugs.

But eventually, members of the Police Department’s emergency response team wearing riot helmets and equipped with shields took over the scene, engaging in a lengthy negotiation with Seabrooks through a crack in the partially open bathroom door. At one point, Seabrooks started a fire in the bathroom, and the officers’ body-camera video recordings made it clear they could see he was wielding knives.

Seabrooks was fatally shot when he rushed from the bathroom toward the officers, holding a knife pointed at them.

After the shooting, St. Joseph’s president, Kevin Slavin, issued a statement bemoaning the fact that the hospital’s crisis intervention team was not called to the Seabrooks standoff.

“We must ask the question — why were we not called?” he said. “And, we demand that this valuable community resource be used in the future for other individuals in psychiatric crises.”

Paterson cops took that demand to heart. In the months after the Seabrooks shooting, city police officers alerted Paterson Press to a series of mental health crisis incidents in which officers contacted the hospital crisis team but were told it could not or would not respond.

Among the reasons that police officers’ written reports attributed to the crisis team was that the staff was busy with another case, that the person going through a disturbance didn’t need an in-person visit from a mental health professional, and that the team wasn’t going to a scene because the person in crisis was armed.

Joe Malinconico is editor of Paterson Press. Email: editor@patersonpress.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Paterson NJ: Arrive Together program will launch, state says