COMMUNITY POLICING Social work on the streets Mental health worker aids Community Impact Unit

Combining social work with police work is the ideal work scenario for Charlene Poliquin, a licensed clinical social worker who is part of the Barnstable Police Department’s Community Impact Unit.

“Crisis intervention is in my blood,” said Poliquin, who was with the state Department of Mental Health before joining the Barnstable team more than a year ago.

The state grant that funded her part-time position was recently renewed, ensuring the CIU will have her help for 19 hours a week for the next year. She helps the unit, which was formed two years ago to deal with the homeless and others in downtown Hyannis, in assessing and addressing situations involving mental health and drug addiction, two conditions that often co-occur.

“Not everybody that struggles with mental health issues is homeless, but many are,” she said. And many people with mental illness, she said, tend to “self-medicate” with alcohol.

One aspect of her work with the police department she especially appreciates is the preventive aspect: Because she and other members of the CIU see the same people on a regular basis, they are able to monitor their condition and get them help before it becomes a problem.

“What I notice now is that before somebody becomes so out of control with their own symptoms of mental illness, people will approach us,” she said. “So people are trusting us.”

Officer Jason Sturgis, who is part of the Community Impact Unit, said gaining that trust is something the unit works to accomplish. “People will reach out to us now,” he said. “Three years ago, that was not going to happen.”

As part of developing and strengthening the Community Impact Unit, Barnstable Police Chief Paul MacDonald secured grants from the state Department of Mental Health to train officers in mental health assessment and response, and to fund the part-time clinician position. Poliquin, who was already familiar with Barnstable’s CIU through her work with the Department of Mental Health, knew helping the impact unit was something she would like to do.

In her role with the Department, Poliquin worked with multiple police departments on Cape Cod, including Yarmouth, Dennis, Provincetown and Barnstable. “I liked when the police were trying to get it right,” she said. “These were the people dealing with it on the front line.”

Poliquin, who has lived on the Cape for more than two decades, first got a taste of police work in her native Maine, where she trained in a police reserve academy. But, sensing the profession was at that time less than friendly to women, she instead pursued an interest in social work. After two years at the University of Maine at Augusta, she transferred to UMass Dartmouth to earn her undergraduate degree and then went to Boston University for her master’s degree.

Before joining the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, she worked for a hospice organization, several nonprofits that serve people with disabilities and volunteered for the Red Cross.

She now divides her time between the Community Impact Unit in Hyannis and Falmouth Hospital, where she works 30 hours a week as a mental health clinician in the emergency room.

Her work with the police differs from her previous work with the state, she said, in that it is more direct. “With the police, there are no barriers in between you,” she said. “With police its usually a direct response. It’s a chance really to offer assistance.”

On a typical day, Poliquin makes the rounds with Sturgis and with Sgt. Jennifer Ellis, who heads up the Community Impact Unit. They visit “hot spots” in town to check in on homeless and street people they know, and also visit people at their homes. Often people will come into the Hyannis substation on Main Street to talk or ask for help, and many times a call will come in from police or social service agencies asking for Poliquin’s help with a particular case.

Her expertise, Sturgis said, often proves invaluable. One recent call, for example, involved a woman who was lying in a back yard screaming, and onlookers thought she had been attacked. But in responding with the impact unit, Poliquin noticed the woman was covering her ears and suspected she might be hearing voices. She was eventually able to figure out that the woman was reacting to a past crisis and not a current assault.

In another case, she visited a home and found a whole cabinet full of medications that were outdated: “The man had antipsychotic medications he hadn’t taken in five years,” she said.

One challenge she finds difficult is the shortage of psychiatric and drug treatment beds on the Cape. “There are not enough resources for drugs and alcohol. We absolutely struggle with those beds,” she said. “People can wait for days.”

Poliquin has a great deal of respect for her colleagues on the police force, noting, “These guys are highly trained.” Sturgis, for his part, said Poliquin goes above and beyond. “We’ve had I don’t know how many different situations where our unit has reached out and Charlene has bent over backwards on her time off to lend her expertise so we had a positive resolution,” he said.

The Community Impact Unit sees some wrenching situations, but Poliquin said team members help one another cope. “We use humor when we can. We’re supportive of one another. We have the safety of each other’s company when we need to vent,” she said.

“You’re in it together. These are the most supportive people I could imagine.”