If you call 911 in Belmont, it may be more than just police officers, EMTs, or firefighters who come to help.
Since November 2022, Emily Bartlett has served as Belmont’s full-time co-response clinician, a social worker who responds with police to all sorts of emergencies in an effort to de-escalate certain situations. Bartlett provides more tailored help to residents experiencing a crisis.
The idea is to help both people and police by helping find resolutions that avoid unnecessary arrests or hospitalizations. In 2024, that meant responding to 143 incidents, with 228 later follow-ups, according to data Bartlett provided.
According to Belmont Police Chief James MacIsaac, the co-response program offers a valuable resource to officers who otherwise could find themselves with few good choices. Previously, if a person was experiencing a mental health emergency and did not want to seek help at a local hospital, officers’ options were limited to arresting the person for causing a disturbance, or, under some conditions, bringing the person to the hospital involuntarily, MacIsaac said.
“Having Emily on board as a co-responder allows her to follow-up and build a rapport,” MacIsaac said. “She can work with the person, and with responding officers, to de-escalate a situation in the short-term, to follow up with them later, and help them get access to longer-term help.”
A licensed clinical social worker with a master’s degree in social work, Bartlett, who is not a law enforcement officer, joins Belmont police on patrol each day. She partners with an officer and responds to every mental health emergency or other situation where her services can be helpful. In between, she responds to other calls and often finds a way to help — for example, comforting kids while their parents complete an accident report following a car crash.
During mental health emergencies or other crises, Bartlett can assist by doing “full mental health evaluations on scene, decide what level of care [individuals] need, decide whether they need to go to the hospital, see if I can get them an outpatient resource urgently, or even just get them reconnected with their therapist if they missed an appointment,” Bartlett said. The officers, meanwhile, can help, and also make sure Bartlett — who does not wear a police uniform or carry a service weapon — stays safe.
The Belmont Voice first wrote about the co-response program in early 2024. Since then, Bartlett and MacIsaac said, the program has proven invaluable.
“People know about the program more now, so they’ll call and ask for the co-responder,” Bartlett said. “Seeing how the relationships have built and are going, there’s more of a connection there.”
MacIsaac agrees.
“I see it from a perspective of what things were like before Emily came and after, and it’s a lot better,” he said. “For the help that people get in the field, and the follow-up they get, it’s much better.”
Bartlett is employed by Advocates and assigned full-time to Belmont. An Advocates employee is on-call by phone to help Belmont officers manage crises when Bartlett is off-duty. Once she’s back on the clock, Bartlett will follow-up on anything that happened while she was away.
“When I come in I review reports and check in with dispatch, and see what’s going on,” Bartlett said. “I’ll follow up on anything I missed between shifts, whether it’s a mental health call, a family that needs assistance, or something else.”
Bartlett’s presence has also had a positive effect on Belmont officers, MacIsaac said, between helping officers handle personal situations, and encouraging an interest in mental healthcare among the department’s members: Several officers have sought additional optional training in crisis intervention or become more involved with the co-response program.
As well as things have been working, MacIsaac said he and his counterparts in other towns worry the state grant that funds the co-response program could eventually end, in which case the town would need to budget to hire a co-responder directly, something he said he included in the police department’s latest budgetary proposal
“It’s in the back of my mind all the time,” he said.
While the numbers alone would justify the position, MacIsaac said, the trackable data doesn’t show the whole story.
“There are probably people that she’s helped that we don’t even know about,” he said, like someone on the verge of crisis who ended up in a better situation because Bartlett was there. “Someone who ran into Emily. It’s a big help.”
