Last week, the Healdsburg Police Department introduced its new Community Oriented and Equity (CORE) Policing Team, composed of a sworn officer and a licensed marriage family therapist who will respond to homeless, mental health, parking and neighbor dispute related calls. Healdsburg Officer Kristin Dean and newly-hired marriage family therapist Jeff McGee make up the CORE team.
The goal of the program is to improve community outreach, specifically within marginalized communities, and mental health and homeless call response, and to create a police culture centered around equity and fairness.
The concept for this model was first introduced in June 2020 by former police chief Kevin Burke.
In June of that year, with unanimous support from the Healdsburg City Council, the Healdsburg Police Department set out to pursue a major police department reorganization and reallocation of funds in order to create the community equity team.
“This is changing the basic, fundamental mindset of how we do our job,” Burke said at the time.
Burke said the change would start with a two-year pilot program and would be made possible by leaving a few vacant police officer positions empty in order to free up funds for the new position.
“It is not normal for a police chief to come in and say, ‘Cut away these two positions and do something different with them,’ but that is exactly what I am proposing,” Burke said when discussing his proposal at a June 2020 Healdsburg City Council meeting.
Burke envisioned a team that has the appropriate expertise to respond to calls on homelessness, mental health and other calls where a licensed family therapist response would be a more effective and equitable approach.
Now Burke’s vision has come to fruition, and Healdsburg Police Chief Matt Jenkins and Healdsburg City Manager Jeff Kay are excited to see the program finally get up and running.
Jenkins said the community will start to see the CORE team in action and responding to calls next week.
“The CORE Policing Team will be responsible for handling matters that are not traditional police functions,” Jenkins said.
For instance, if a resident called the department with concerns about their child’s mental health, the CORE team could respond and provide proactive mental health aid, or if there was a call about an unlicensed vendor selling fruit on the street, the team could offer aid and connect them with helpful resources.
As Dean explained in an interview with SoCoNews, they won’t always be dealing with a lot of the criminal matters, rather they’ll be working with the community to try to help out when people are in need.
“The CORE team may also respond to calls involving intoxicated persons, particularly habitually intoxicated persons, and they will conduct follow-up on calls for service that have been identified as needing social service assistance,” Jenkins said.
He said the team will also be conducting significant public outreach in underserved areas of Healdsburg, and will be reviewing policies and ordinances “for any inequities that might exist within them.”
“Any way that we can help to facilitate bettering the community, that’s what our main goal is,” Dean said.
Dean has been an officer with the police department for over five years. She attended Sonoma State University and studied criminal justice. While she then initially got into waitressing, she later decided that she wanted to pursue the family business of police work.
She put herself through the public safety training academy and was hired out of the training center by the Healdsburg Police Department.
“I’ve been with the department for about a week, but I’ve been in mental health for about the last 10 years,” McGee said. “I went to UC Davis for my undergrad and went to Fresno State for my masters in counseling.”
As a licensed marriage family therapist with the state of California, McGee has worked for various agencies in the area from Seneca Family of Agencies to treatment centers and most recently, North Bay Regional Centers.
After McGee was introduced at the Nov. 1 meeting, Vice Mayor Ozzy Jimenez asked what drew McGee to the role and why he wanted the position.
“For me it was really just the immediacy and the need for it and the ability to address problems directly and quickly,” McGee said. He said he’s been a supervisor for the last few years, spending much of his time sitting behind a desk, and the prospect of once again interacting with people directly drew him to the role.
“I missed the face-to-face work, so I’m really excited to get back to that,” he said.
Dean said as a police officer, they’re often interacting with people who are at the hardest point in their lives or may be dealing with a crisis that they can’t always help them with, so having a licensed family therapist on the team will be a great benefit.
“We can give them the best information that we have, but we don’t always have the best (information). Sometimes it is hard to get that follow up information for them, so I think this is going to be a really good way for us to be out within the community and really helping (people) to get through these tough times,” Dean said.
Moving forward, Jenkins said the police department will be working with Sonoma State for program evaluation. The university’s evaluation will help drive the discussion on program modifications or additions that might be needed down the line.
Jenkins said of CORE, “We recognize in policing that there are communities and members of the community that inherently, the laws are not written in a way that they might be treated the same. So we’re looking at it from the sense that how can we police certain matters to make everyone as whole as possible, both on the offender’s side, the victim’s side and the community’s side.”
