Kelly Pompilio, the social worker embedded with Alexandria’s Police Department, starts every morning going through stacks of reports from officers.
“Some of them will say, ‘Police social worker, please follow up,'” Pompilio said. “In some of them, I just kind of sift through and see what is social service in nature.”
Pompilio was the first embedded police social worker in Kentucky; she was hired on in 2016. Although some departments already had victim advocates, who performed helping services in with conjunction police departments, Pompilio was the first social worker to become attached to a department on a full-time basis.
Now, thanks to money received from Kentucky’s opioid abatement payouts, which proceed from a settlement between the Kentucky Attorney General and pharmaceutical companies in 2022, Northern Kentucky could be getting more police social workers.
“We’re seeing folks use many substances,” said Amanda Peters, director of the Northern Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy. “Northern Kentucky really has a poly-substance use issue, and that includes alcohol, as well. So with the opportunity of the opioid abatement money at the state level and the local level, we really have a one-time chance to really look at how are we going to change our region? How do we use system integration strategies? And how do we solve these complex problems?”
Police social work as a subspecialty can be traced back to the 1970s when social workers in police departments first appeared through grant-funded positions in several suburban communities in Illinois. Their popularity has grown nationwide since then.
The abatement money comes from a $26 billion settlement between multiple states and some of the United States’ largest pharmaceutical corporations, specifically, drug distributors — McKesson Corp., AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health — and manufacturer Johnson & Johnson. Kentucky received $478 million from the settlement; half of the money was distributed to the state, while the other half went to local governments.
Peters said the office’s goal was to advise counties and cities to roll out different initiatives to handle drug use and other problems that police departments encountered often but weren’t resourced to handle productively. These could take varying forms, Peters said, and the Office of Drug Police is aiming to create “an a la carte menu of options, whether that be the multi-jurisdictional police social worker or QRT, which is a quick response team. So the counties, the judges/executive, the police chiefs, sheriff can decide what best fits their community and constituents.”
This process has already begun. The Boone County Fiscal Court, for instance, approved the hiring of three police social workers in February using opioid abatement funds. The sheriff’s office confirmed with LINK nky that they hoped to deploy them starting in July. Covington’s Police Department has also expressed interest in a police social worker, although the funding mechanism for that position has not yet been established. Peters told LINK nky that she planned on meeting with different jurisdictions this month to continue planning and advising them on different options.
The Office of Drug Control Policy is the fulcrum for the Northern Kentucky Coordinating All Recovery Efforts, or CAREs, team, a collaboration of multiple institutions aimed at helping people get easier access to addiction services, reentry help after leaving jail, legal assistance and other services. Conceivably, Peters said, the social workers funded by the opioid abatement would partner with CAREs team agencies, many of which span jurisdictions, to help connect people to services.
“Oftentimes, from a law enforcement perspective, these are complicated issues that are not always criminogenic behavior,” said Life Learning Center’s President and CEO Alecia Webb Edgington. “However, because law enforcement continues to get calls, they are trying to create solutions.”
Webb Edgington has a background in law enforcement, and the Life Learning Center’s raft of services focuses heavily on helping former inmates reenter productive society after getting out of jail. The Life Learning Center is a CAREs team agency. Other participating agencies include Transitions, Inc., NorthKey Community Care, SUN Behavioral Health and St. Elizabeth Healthcare.
“Many times [police officers] don’t have the resources that they need,” Webb Edgington said. “And, so it takes a law enforcement officer out of service, dealing with things that might not necessarily be in their mission statement. Where[as] a social worker could better access resources and deal with the complexities of that call for service that perhaps a police officer just wouldn’t have.”
“Our department [in Alexandria] learned in 2016 that around 70% of the cases that officers were responding to were not crime-related but were more social service in nature,” Pompilio said.
She described her work with a local veteran suffering from PTSD who would frequently have nightmares and make calls to the police to get help. Although he wasn’t in any concrete danger, the frequency of his calls sucked up the time of normal police officers to the point it was arguably drawing them away from cases that were better suited to their training.
“In the first week that I was there, he had called six times or seven times in that week,” Pompilio said. “And [the officers] are like, ‘Kelly, do whatever you need to do. We’ve got to figure out how to help this gentleman.'”
Pompilio was able to get the man connected to mental health services through the VA, after which time “I think he went six months straight without contacting 911 one time,” Pompilio said. Instead, he would contact her directly, freeing up the officers to focus on things better suited to their roles.
When asked what Northern Kentucky could do to better provide services for its residents, she said, “Place social workers at every police department.”
LINK nky reporter Kenton Hornbeck also contributed reporting to this story.