In the past, policing the streets of a community meant finding individuals conducting criminal behavior, arresting them and locking them up depending on the severity of their crime.

Today, police departments recognize their role as an integral part of the communities they protect and serve, and are implementing more techniques to take policing on a case-by-case basis, with additional attention paid to members of the community who may have different needs than others.

The Warwick Police Department has taken this community-oriented policing concept a step farther, and has been engaged in an active partnership with the Providence Center, a community health center that provides counseling and mental health services to more than 18,000 Rhode Islanders annually, for about three years now.

Although the partnership has garnered high praise from the Warwick Police Department for its efficacy during that time, it is a program that is currently at risk due to a lack of funding. Proponents for the Warwick program are holding onto thin hopes that new funding sources can be secured before a temporary funding source runs dry in a matter of weeks.

A liaison of hope

Maureen Gouveia’s official title for the Warwick Police Department is a “mental health liaison,” but she is more accurately a Swiss army knife of mental health expertise.

She is a professional hybrid of criminal justice and psychology backgrounds who rides alongside officers to situations involving people with mental health issues or substance abuse problems and provides intervention techniques and then follows up on cases by providing resources and a consistent face for people to turn to in their darkest hours.

“For some people this is the very worst day of their life,” Gouveia said. “We’re really there to let them know that we’re there to help. Not even just myself, the police department works in collaboration to let the person know as well that we’re not there on a criminal level, we’re there to help you. We all care and we want you to get the services that you need.”

The mental health liaison program began with a partnership between the Providence Center and the Providence Police Department about five years ago, and has since extended into Warwick and West Warwick. According to Gouveia, she is managing more than a dozen cases at any given time, including new and repeat individuals.

According to Ralph Apici, Director of Acute Care Services at the Providence Center, the values of the program are making waves in Rhode Island, and the Coventry Police Department has made a recent inquiry into establishing their own partnership as well.

“I think it also takes away the stigma. Usually when the police responds it’s for something negative. It forms that good relationship with the community,” Apici said. “We’ve seen that in Providence and we’ve seen that here in Warwick that it’s more of a relationship instead of the police being on this side and the community on the other side.”

And the connection between those two sides, Apici said, is Gouveia.

“Maureen has really been that bridge to a lot of the people who are suffering,” he said. “She goes on scene with the officers. She’s there, she assists, she saves lives. She connects them to the treatment that they need and gets them off the street.”

Gouveia gave an example of a success story from early in her tenure with the Warwick police of a man who was a repeated shoplifter. However, the offender wasn’t stealing private property or merchandise, they were stealing food to survive.

“He was stealing because he was hungry,” Gouveia said. “He was forced to, and he didn’t know where to go. I ended up getting him connected to a mental health service and he’s in housing now with no further criminal record.”

Gouveia provides empathy, expertise and dedicated persistence to a population of people – low-income, homeless and those afflicted by mental illness and addiction – that may otherwise be forgotten or marginalized. These efforts can benefit both the police force and the taxpayers of communities, since resources are not being continuously dedicated to responding to certain “problem” individuals without actually solving their underlying issue.

“[The police] want to see the person do better so they’re not going back,” Gouveia said. “Most of the officers have the same beat so they’re seeing the same client over and over again. For them to have less calls there so they can get to other stuff going on and address the criminal population, versus the psychiatric population, it works amazingly.”

For afflicted individuals, Gouveia is a lifeline and a familiar face that they can trust. Even after the initial crisis is handled, Gouveia makes sure to follow up and check on her clients to see if additional attention is required. She said that the police officers, too, will ask her to follow up on specific cases that they have dealt with in the past.

“It’s not just about that one brief interaction that I might have with someone,” Gouveia said. “It is that formulation of relationships. That relationship is so important.”

Lack of funding threatens Warwick program

Despite the proven value of the program, it does not currently receive guaranteed funding through state or local budgets. It is funded entirely by the Providence Center, which can only bill Medicaid for certain “crisis services” that they render.

Gouveia’s position within the Warwick Police Department is currently in jeopardy of being phased out due to lack of funding. A single donation is keeping the position afloat for a temporary period of time.

“What makes this position difficult for the Providence Center is that we can never plan on when a crisis is going to happen,” Apici said. “The crisis has to come to us. For us to say, ‘We’re billing for a crisis,’ it’s so much more than a crisis. It’s the education piece, it’s the consulting piece...It’s the follow up that Maureen does.”

Warwick Police Chief Stephen McCartney called Gouveia “a tremendous asset to the community and to those Warwick constituents that she had come in contact with who were in need of mental health services” and expressed his remorse that her position within the department is at risk of being lost.

Mayor Scott Avedisian said in an email that he was “surprised” the Providence Center hadn’t reached out during budget presentations for the FY18 budget asking for financial assistance, as he had supported endeavors of theirs in the past. Apici said the Providence Center was scheduling a meeting with Avedisian for the immediate future.

According to McCartney and Avedisian, it would cost $80,000 to continue funding the mental health liaison position in Warwick.

“We’re going to continue looking under every rock we can to find funding,” Apici said, and that the Providence Center is looking for “some skin in the game” from the Warwick community to help keep the program afloat in the city.

Gouveia, meanwhile, has no control over the fate of her position. She said that, rather than become preoccupied about billable hours or what efforts of hers show results on paper, her focus is simply on helping as many people as possible.

“Statistics are statistics,” she said. “You can show numbers but really, the effectiveness of what I do is far beyond numbers. We’re saving peoples’ lives. We’re getting them into treatment. We’re letting them have a life that they didn’t think they could have.”