Centennial State News

Aurora city officials are now taking steps to hire a new crisis response team staff after the co-responder program went more than a month without any full-time clinicians assigned to the program.

"If we don’t have clinicians, we’re not running a co-responder program,” Aurora Deputy City Manager Jason Batchelor told Local Today. “We're running a crisis intervention team [CIT]. While CIT-trained officers are a valuable resource, we really want that co-responder model fully staffed."

As part of the changes, city leaders earlier this month openly discussed the co-responder program, which pairs mental health clinicians and police officers, and decided to implement changes that include partnering with UCHealth (University of Colorado Health) to hire mental health counselors and moving away from Aurora Mental Health Center, which it has partnered with in the past.

For years, the program worked by sending police officer and a psychiatrist to certain 911 calls. An audit found that Aurora “lacks formal procedures for handling calls for individuals in crisis,” Aurora 911 “does not have protocols to determine if a mental health crisis is occurring,” and the crisis response team “lacks policies and procedures for its operations.”

Crisis Intervention Program Manager Courtney Tassin added that pay level makes it difficult to retain clinicians in the job.  

“I’ve already been speaking with UCHealth’s leadership devising a strategic plan of how we will be implementing both a training program for the clinicians coming in to make sure they are adequate and very well-trained when they do hit the road, but also making sure that we can hit full staffing quickly,” Tassin ABC Denver 7 during a public safety, courts and civil service policy committee meeting.