City and county officials are launching a new pilot program designed to assess the needs of mentally ill, addicted and unhoused individuals in the Lark Street neighborhood of Albany.
"Lark Street Treatment," running through the week of May 29, is an eight-week collaboration between Albany County’s Mental Health Department and the City of Albany Police Department. APD Spokesperson Steve Smith:
"It's no secret that, you know, police officers often have contact with individuals in our community, many who have some sort of mental health issue or are in crisis at the time there's police presence," Smith said. "So oftentimes, we're responding to these types of incidents. You know, it's sort of reactive in a sense, where an officer will get a call for a person in crisis, will respond, sometimes with mental health professionals, like mobile crisis from Albany County. But the treatment pilot program that we started on April 10th over on Lark Street is a little bit different. And it's a little more proactive, we're going to be teaming up with mental health professionals from Albany County, and actually walking the street two times a week, to try to assess the situation, to have interactions with people who might need services that they might not otherwise receive, unless we received that emergency call.”
County Legislator Matt Peter, a Democrat from the 5th district, says the program will go a long way toward determining what pre-existing events and conditions may be driving the needs of struggling people in the neighborhood.
"Are people coming from treatment centers? Are people coming from the surrounding areas? Are there service gaps that are missing? Do people need such things as help with getting medication, getting the benefits that they need, getting to appointments, things of that nature," asked Peter. "And the real idea of this is to start trying to deal with people in mental health crisis before it becomes a law enforcement matter. And not only is that going to allow for better outcomes for these individuals, but it's going to take pressure off, over-extended law enforcement allow them to focus on law enforcement matters, rather than mental health matters. And we're treating it before it becomes a larger issue."
6th ward Common Councilor Gabriella Romero emphasizes the program's concept of meeting people where they are and addressing their issues instead of criminalizing them.
"It's so exciting to see this finally come to fruition a program that addresses underlying issues, whether it's mental health, substance abuse, housing insecurity, and really aims to mainly collect data, on what's going on in the Lark Street corridor, and then report back on the best way to address it, how many people they were able to connect to services, and then create a plan going forward on how they can either implement this in a sustainable way in the corridor or implement this type of program throughout the city," said Romero.
Albany County Executive Dan McCoy says the alternative crisis response model is similar to other county programs such as ACCORD, the Albany County Crisis Officials Responding and Diverting program, and LEAD, the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion initiative.
"These are all useful tools that we use, and have developed to change with the different problematic issues going on in our community," McCoy said. "And we need to always evolve, and to find a way to answer a negative situation with a positive situation. So we're responding to these crisis, but we've now trained over 400 individuals since 2012, in this type of category, and if this program is successful, successful, then we'll expand it throughout the city of Albany and other parts of the county."
The "Lark Street Treatment" focus area consists of Lark Street between Madison and Washington Avenues and includes all contiguous cross streets.
