Officer Joel Fay helps mentally ill homeless people get off the street and into care - Doc Cop - Interview - Statistical Data Included

Whole Earth, Spring, 2002 by Cherine Badawi

A few months ago, almost every day, we heard a girl moaning up on the hill behind our office (the hill has been an encampment for a wide variety of homeless people for years). One day the moans turned into screams. David, Devon, and I raced outside to find a distressed, incoherent woman crying and yelling and wandering around aimlessly. Eventually somebody went for help. The next day I walked back up the hill and came across a homeless man. "Is the girl who was screaming okay?" I asked. "Yeah, she's okay," he answered. "She has schizophrenia. If you ever hear her again, get Joel Fay. He's a cop. She'll listen to him."

Get Joel Fay--a cop? In a city where relations between the police and the homeless community have frequently been uneasy, at best? We wanted to know who Joel Fay was and what he was doing to help the people living up the hill. We sent intern Cherine Badawi to interview Joel. --EP

Joel Fay is a San Rafael city cop. But not a conventional cop. He drinks decaf and rarely indulges in doughnuts. He's also a psychologist who is the mastermind behind an exceptional effort called the Mental Health Liaison Program (MHLP). Since its inception in 1999, this countywide program has merged the work of mental health professionals, cops, and homeless advocacy groups to help members of the homeless community living with mental illness get off the streets. MHLP is the first and only program of its kind.

It's working. Homeless people who have been living rough around Marin County for decades have successfully been integrated into permanent housing. The folks on the street don't climb over walls, fearful of the warrants out on them, when this particular man in uniform approaches. To them, he's not just a cop. He's Joel, and he's a good guy.

CHERINE BADAWI: You're a cop, you're a doc ... a rare combination. What's the story?

JOEL FAY: I've been a police officer since 1975. I've found that police officers are much more psychologists than sharpshooters. In twenty-five years I've never fired my gun except at a range, but I do psychology every day. Whether you're trying to encourage someone to open up or you're going to a domestic violence scene to deal with a man that's furious and knows you're going to arrest him, you have to know how to talk to people, so I decided to go back to graduate school and study psychology.

CB: What do you do every day?

JF: It varies, but in general I work with people who are mentally ill and are having interactions with law enforcement. My job is to figure out how to get them out of the law enforcement interaction loop. Frequently people who are mentally ill get caught in a cycle. We arrest them, mostly for minor crimes. We put them in jail where they can't be mandated to take medication. They get their sentence. They're out. They go back to the same behavior, because they're still mentally ill, and we have to arrest them again. As someone in our program said, "You can't arrest a person enough times to stop them from being mentally ill."

CB: How was the Mental Health Liaison Program born?

JF: It was born in a conversation with San Rafael Chief Mike Cronin, who was a captain then. He had been assigned the task of dealing with the homeless population in downtown San Rafael. We have a foot beat that goes out and cites people for disruptive things they might do, but it wasn't working for the mentally ill folk. What I found was that nobody was working together. The mental health agencies were doing their thing, but they had limited authority to force help on people. The police department was throwing people in jail, but they couldn't offer treatment. By bringing together the tools of criminal justice and mental health, we're finding that we can get mentally ill people who break the law the help they need.

CB: How did you do it?

JF: As part of MHLP, we created the Forensic Multidisciplinary Team to deal with individuals on a case-by-case basis. The team consists of representatives from the ten police departments in Marin County, as well as representatives from about fifteen different agencies that advocate for the homeless or the mentally ill. We meet every month.

Here's how it works: Say I have a mentally ill guy on the corner who's creating a problem. I go to the team and say "Bill" is on the corner, I don't know what to do with him. Throwing him in jail doesn't do anything. Any ideas? Then everyone on the team tries to create a plan to engage Bill. Maybe he needs jail for a while, until he gets off of street drugs, and then we could try to convince him to take medication for his mental illness, or maybe we should do some outreach work, find him a social worker or an extended stay at detox.

We do what we can with each case, then meet the next month, evaluate the results and modify the plan to suit the individual we're trying to help. Our policy on the forensic team is that we never give up, so nobody is off the roster until they've been transferred out of criminal justice over to mental health. Ultimately our goal is to get them into treatment and make sure they're secure, then we move on.