Ames police hiring new mental health advocate

Jan. 01--After the retirement of its current mental health advocate, the Ames Police Department is searching for a new person to fill the position, which specializes in responding to mental health-related calls and sharing data with local service providers.

The part-time position was created in July 2012 and has been held since then by Jerry Spencer, a former police detective.

Spencer worked for the Ames Police Department for 27 years before retiring in summer 2012. He had spent about half his time with Ames police as a detective, and was already doing some of the follow up work on mental health-related calls when he had free time.

About a week after retiring, he came back to work as the department's new part-time mental health advocate.

Spencer was a "natural fit" for the position, said Ames Police Cmdr. Jason Tuttle.

"We know that the right thing is not to arrest everybody that has a mental illness and put them in jail, because that's not where they need to be," Tuttle said. "They really need to have those services, they really need to have some follow up and sometimes our patrol officers are busy enough they can't do the follow up because of call volume and so that's where Jerry would come in and look at those calls."

Now, after spending two and a half years in the advocate's position, Spencer has retired again. His last day on the job was Dec. 24.

Spencer was out of town and unable to be reached for this story.

Tuttle said the mental health advocate is a "problem-solving position."

"It's kind of like a detective," Tuttle said. "He goes out and does that follow up after the fact to make sure that hopefully we can get them the services that they need."

A large part of the position involves working with organizations such as the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Story County mental health provider Eyerly Ball, Story County Community Life, Heartland Senior Services and Story County Veteran's Affairs.

"(Spencer) really reached out to a lot of our local providers and other types of community programs here in town and built that relationship with them so they felt comfortable coming to him when they wanted to have a client checked on," Tuttle said.

Spencer also went through every call for service each morning to see if there were some that had mental health aspects.

"He would forward those calls out to the providers on the mental health task force so they would know that some of their consumers were having contact with law enforcement," Tuttle said. "A lot of those people may not self-report that to their providers, and so it helped in the end, I think it really helped them get the services that they needed and it helped just provide more information to some of those providers in town on maybe what was going on after hours."

Spencer also spent a lot of time visiting people in their homes, talking about problems they may be having and helping find solutions.

"He could delve into some of those problems a little bit more to make sure they're getting the right services that they needed," Tuttle said.

Sometimes Spencer was able to detect patterns with certain people.

"We may have three or four consumers that call us multiple, multiple times, sometimes a day, sometimes a month," Tuttle said. "Jerry would see that and sometimes he would go to their house and talk to them and say, 'Hey, what are your issues, what's going on right now?' They would talk it through with him and then he would work with their provider and then we may not get phone calls from that person for several months."

While decreased calls for service may be one way the department has seen success with the mental health advocate position, Tuttle said the relationships Spencer has built have been just as valuable.

"Hopefully (providers) are more comfortable knowing that if they have a patient that's maybe a threat to themselves or someone else, they could let us know at that point and we can go check on them and determine if they need to go to the hospital or not," he said.

Tuttle said Spencer has been able to help train officers in dealing with mental health consumers, and before his last day, he helped coordinate a half-day department-wide mental health training session that is scheduled for later this month.

"Most of our officers have had some type of base-level mental health training, but as we go through this training in January we hope that just better equips our staff to either know when to take somebody to the hospital or even to know when that mental health advocate really needs to get involved in that person's situation that they're having," Tuttle said.

Until a new advocate has been hired, one of the department's supervisors is monitoring mental health calls and sending out information to providers. Tuttle said the department hopes to have a new mental health advocate in place soon.

"That really was an important position, so hopefully we can find somebody as good as (Spencer)," Tuttle said.

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