By Rachel Crumpler
NC Health News
Chris Hatton oversees a 15-officer police force in a small western North Carolina town in Jackson County — a place where he says many calls to 911 aren’t really police matters at all.
A “suspicious” person loitering. Someone yelling in the street. A person rummaging through a dumpster. Someone in a mental health crisis threatening self-harm.
“So many of our police calls every single day are not crime-related,” said Hatton, chief of the Sylva Police Department since August 2019. He’s been in law enforcement for nearly 30 years. “That’s not just here, that’s everywhere. It’s social issues.”
Across the state and nation, law enforcement officers are stretched thinner and thinner responding to situations rooted in homelessness, poverty, substance use and mental health challenges — problems they aren’t trained to address and can’t arrest their way out of.
Hatton said officers respond, stabilize someone as best as they can and then move on — often only to encounter the same person later because the underlying problem remains untouched.
“Police officers really have one tool, and that’s jail,” Hatton said. “That’s part of our system, but there are a lot of people that we interact with that do not need to go to jail.”
Data shows that close to half of people in jails have a mental illness, and nearly two-thirds have a substance use disorder.
Since October 2021, officers at the Sylva Police Department have had another tool: a department social worker who brings a different skill set and can respond with officers to situations when that’s what’s needed. The social worker follows up afterward to connect people to needed community resources and services, with the goal of addressing the root issues driving the police calls. Since the Community Care program launched in partnership with Western Carolina University, Hatton says it has reshaped how his department functions and how the community is served.
“Whether we like it or not, social issues are a police issue,” Hatton said. “It’s not our job, but it’s nobody else’s job either. This is a gap — a gap that controls my whole day. I’m going to get those calls. They’re going to happen every day, and if that’s going to be 50 percent of our calls in a day, I can’t ignore that. None of us can.”
That realization is leading more police departments to explore alternative response programs, including models like the Community Care program, which is run by two Western Carolina University professors who had the vision to bring social workers to rural, smaller agencies. Since starting in Sylva, the program has now partnered with seven more police departments across western North Carolina.
Adding a social worker who can spend time with community members and help address root causes behind frequent police calls has been a “game-changer,” Hatton said.
Hatton now considers the position essential; he said he wouldn’t do police work without a social worker again.
“It gives the police that prevention piece we’ve never had,” Hatton said. “My career has been heavy on the enforcement side of law enforcement, but this is the coolest thing I’ve done in my career, and this is also the most impactful. It works.”
Embedding social workers
Social workers working alongside police officers isn’t a new idea, but interest in these partnerships grew after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 and the subsequent widespread calls for police reform.
As agencies nationwide reconsidered their approach, professors Cyndy Caravelis from the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Katy Allen from the Department of Social Work at Western Carolina University began thinking specifically about what could work in small, rural departments with limited resources.
Caravelis said most of the established police social worker programs operated in large urban cities, but many police departments in North Carolina are in rural areas. They needed something different.
Their idea: embed graduate-level social work interns in rural police departments. The model would allow students to earn their required field hours, and officers would gain a new tool at no initial cost. The social workers would spend time delving into the issues that drive police encounters and connecting people to resources and support that might prevent the next 911 call — work officers rarely have time for.
“One thing that we feel really strongly about is we are not in the business of replacing officers with social workers,” Caravelis said. “This is a tool we’re adding to law enforcement.”
Caravelis said that crime is often a symptom of unmet needs. “There is something going on beneath the surface, and if we can kind of help with what that thing is, then the crime goes away.”
When Caravelis and Allen approached Hatton with their idea, he welcomed the new approach. He was already watching social needs consume his officers’ time and seeing gaps as people just cycled through the system.
Hatton initially envisioned using a social worker primarily for follow-up connections to resources after a police encounter. But his thinking changed when he saw his new social worker in action, responding with police officers. He witnessed the social worker’s way of engaging with people in crisis to improve outcomes.
“It absolutely increases efficiency because we spend hours and hours with some of these folks, and I’ve seen Galadriel do her magic — that’s what we call it — and next thing you know, we’re not dealing with someone at all anymore,” Hatton said.
For this “innovative approach to alternative responder protocols,” the Sylva Police Department was named the 2023 North Carolina Law Enforcement Agency of the Year by the North Carolina Police Executives Association.
The model has since spread. Hendersonville Police Chief Blair Myhand has embedded a social worker in his department of 47 sworn officers through the Community Care program. An increasing number of complex encounters, especially mental health crises, pushed Myhand, a veteran in law enforcement who’s spent 32 years on the beat and has served as chief since February 2021, to seek out new tools for his officers.
He said the tipping point came after a department homicide review showed that a woman shot at a McDonald’s by a restaurant employee in October 2023 had multiple interactions with Hendersonville police officers in the days before her death — encounters marked by erratic behavior later linked to schizophrenia.
“People would call, we would interact and we have very limited tools available to us as a police department,” Myhand said. “Of course, no one foresaw that she would be shot and killed, but I quickly realized that we just didn’t have the tools that we needed to be able to effectively help her out.”
After starting with a part-time social work intern from Western Carolina University in August 2024, the department hired its first full-time social worker last month.
“[Police officers are] the first ones to respond because we’re always out and about, but we’re not always the right tool for the job,” Myhand said. “Sometimes we can be sort of a square peg into a round hole.”
A social worker, he said, brings a different skill set — knowledge of resources, relationships with providers and a different way to connect with people in crisis.
“If we don’t start employing some different tactics, nothing’s going to change. We’re going to continue to do the same thing over and over again,” Myhand said. “And I think that’s by definition what insanity is. That’s not how we’re going to make our community safer.”
A different approach
A recent call in Hendersonville illustrates the difference a social worker can make. Officers responded to a request for a welfare check after a woman sent her neighbor alarming text messages about wanting to end her life. The officers tried to talk with her, but she wouldn’t engage. At a loss for what else to do, an officer called the new police social worker Cammy Holt to come to the scene.
Holt said when she arrived, she was met with the same initial reluctance from the woman, who was suicidal and just kept uttering, “You can’t help me.”
Eventually, as Holt kept talking, the woman shared the real issues weighing on her: She had a traumatic brain injury, hadn’t eaten in days and felt overwhelmed by a conflict with a family member. Holt de-escalated the situation, provided her with food and immediate support, and in the following days shared additional longer-term resources, such as a meal-delivery program, in-home care and the names of therapists specializing in traumatic brain injuries.
The situation stabilized without an involuntary commitment, arrest or repeated police calls.
Similar work happens daily in Sylva, where Galadriel LaVere serves as the police department’s full-time social worker, a role she initially took on as an intern starting in the summer of 2022. She responds when officers request her assistance and spends the rest of her time tracking down resources, troubleshooting crises and following up with people wherever they are — even if it’s under a bridge or on a curb.
Many of the people LaVere works with face overlapping challenges: mental illness, substance use and homelessness. Connections to resources aren’t necessarily easy in Jackson County either. There isn’t a homeless shelter, mental health facility or domestic violence shelter. But LaVere has spent time building a patchwork of partnerships so she can point people to appropriate support.
In 2024, Sylva’s Community Care program received 105 referrals — nearly half involving homelessness. Referrals average about 10 a month — coming from officers, community members and even people requesting assistance for themselves. There is no formal eligibility requirement to receive help from a Community Care social worker; it’s as simple as someone saying they need assistance.
Some people need one or two connections. Others need a lot more, compelling LaVere to work for months to help them achieve stability and get their needs addressed. For example, one man with intellectual disabilities, mental health challenges and medical issues became homeless. He started sleeping outside the police station; he told officers that’s where he felt safest. LaVere has met with him regularly and helped him get identification documents, housing and other support.
“When people know somebody cares, and to be honest, this translates a lot of times to not just me caring, but like, ‘Oh, the police department actually cares what happens to me. They’re not just wanting to forget about me or lock me up,’” LaVere said. “I think when people see that dynamic at work, then they are more likely to want to do good too.”
Officers notice the impact. People who once generated repeated 911 calls often stop appearing on their radar after working with LaVere. That reduction grew buy-in on the program quickly. Officers who were once skeptical are now some of the quickest to request her presence at a scene or make a referral.
On days LaVere isn’t working, Hatton said, officers feel her absence.
The Hendersonville Police Department is earlier in its rollout, but Chief Myhand said Holt, the department’s social worker, is already filling a critical gap.
“My job is to be a sponge of resources, so that when I come across clients, I know where to send them or to take them to get them the support that they need,” Holt said. “If I can help that person and it’s successful, chances are the police officers might not ever get a call on them again.”
One recent case involved a man, homeless and struggling with a meth addiction who had multiple previous police encounters, walking into the police department lobby seeking help. He said he was ready to go to rehab, and Holt spent hours with him working out the logistics.
By the end of the day, Holt said, “He was like, ‘I am so thankful I met you. I’m glad we did this.’”
Overall, Caravelis said the Community Care program has approximately a 70 percent success rate of people agreeing to receive assistance after contact with the social worker. She noted that social workers are not a “magic bullet solution” but an important bridge between “folks that come to the attention of law enforcement and the agencies that already exist to support them.”
‘Why weren’t we doing this all along?’
As more police departments look into alternative response programs like embedded social workers, Caravelis said it’s crucial to gain police department and local government buy-in for successful implementation.
A July 2023 report by the UNC Criminal Justice Innovation Lab in partnership with the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police conducted a survey of police departments to assess the scope of alternative responder programs in North Carolina.
Sixty-eight percent of the state’s departments — 142 of 208 — responded. Of that group, 83 percent reported having at least one alternative responder program either housed in the department or at a community organization — with more programs under consideration.
The report notes growing interest in these programs “to better promote public safety, more effectively connect people with needed services and reduce reliance on the justice system to address social issues like homelessness and mental health and substance use crises.”
In Caravelis’ experience, embedding social workers has garnered bipartisan support.
“Folks who are on the more liberal side want to make sure that we’re helping vulnerable people in communities, and this program does that,” Caravelis said. “And folks on the more conservative side want to make sure that we’re helping support law enforcement, and this program does that.”
The Community Care program is a model that’s attracting statewide — and even national — attention from agencies who recognize the need to operate differently. Last month, Caravelis and Hatton presented the model in Colorado at the International Association of Chiefs of Police annual conference, the largest gathering of law enforcement in the world. They also regularly field calls from departments wanting to learn more.
For Hatton and Myhand, social workers complement rather than replace police — and it can be a more cost-effective solution than people cycling through expensive institutions such as jails, prisons and hospital emergency rooms.
“A lot of times you look back and you go, ‘Why weren’t we doing this all along?’ This makes so much good sense,” Myhand said. “It’s doing such great work helping people and allowing officers to get back to their other duties. This is like one of those no-brainer type of positions that we should have been doing for a long time.”
