Jen Corbin and Steve Thomas drove into Washington on Tuesday. She got to see President Joe Biden deliver the State of the Union address and the unruly Republican response.

Thomas, an Anne Arundel County police lieutenant, checked in on U.S. Capitol Police officers as part of a peer support group.

Corbin, director of crisis response for Anne Arundel County, introduced herself to Maryland’s new governor, Wes Moore, also a guest in the gallery. She preached the value of the county’s collaborative approach to mental health, addiction and crisis response, which brings together judges, prosecutors, public defenders, police, firefighters, medical experts, hospitals and nonprofits.

She also talked about the 211 “warm phone line” that offers non-police resources, the Safe Stations program, the crisis teams made up of police and clinicians, as well as a network of stabilization and treatment programs. And Corbin discussed the resources and strategies built over more than 20 years in Anne Arundel County.

“The program they’ve created in Anne Arundel County is very much a leader,” said U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes, a Baltimore County Democrat who invited Corbin to attend the speech. “Others are, I think, beating a path to their door to learn more about how they do it.”

Other counties in Maryland could follow Anne Arundel’s example under a rule that the Maryland Department of Health is proposing. If adopted, it would allow cities and counties to bill Medicaid for crisis response units and crisis stabilization services starting July 1.

“We’re extremely excited to be rolling out an expansion,” said Marshall Henson, director of operations for the department’s Behavioral Health Administration.

The idea, he said, is to advance a basic concept: Someplace to call, someone to respond and somewhere to go. The General Assembly is expected to approve funding for a 988 warmline system. Medicaid, rather than grants, would cover the costs for 10 existing crisis response teams and 10 urgent care programs statewide. That will free up state grants to grow those numbers to 35 response programs and 20 centers by July 1, 2024.

Although all 23 counties in Maryland plus Baltimore City have some sort of crisis response program, none is like Anne Arundel County’s.

Adrienne Mickler, director of the Anne Arundel County Mental Health Agency, said the current program began to take shape more than 20 years ago when the police chief at the time came to the agency, frustrated by the number of calls for people diagnosed with mental illness.

“It was a buildup of frustration by the police,” she said. “Back in the day, when police responded and they observed behavior that didn’t seem exactly right, what were their options? Please stop, or I arrest you?”

The agency and other groups began looking for examples of what was working elsewhere. The first step was to establish a response team of clinicians — the first Mobile Crisis Team shared a donated Subaru wagon in 1999. It was adapted from a program in Berkeley, California.

Next came a jail diversion program that mimicked one in Dade County, Florida. It placed clinicians in jail intake centers and in court hearings to offer service options to judges hearing bail reviews for people demonstrating symptoms of mental illness or addiction.

That was followed by Safe Stations in 2017, an idea adopted from Rhode Island that set up fire stations as refuges for anyone dealing with addiction or an overdose. Then came the Crisis Intervention Team, an idea from Tennessee that pairs specially trained police officers with clinicians, and the 211 phone warmline for events that don’t require a response by police.

Adding response resources helped drive the establishment of a network of programs that offers help with solutions and somewhere for people in need to go. County hospitals expanded the number of emergency psychiatric beds. The Mental Health Agency partnered with Arundel Lodge, a nonprofit that provides residential programs for people with mental illness, to create the Behavioral Health Urgent Care Center in Edgewater.

“Jen always asks, ‘Why do we have to call it the crisis system? We prevent more crises than we go to because of all those calls coming into the warmline,” Mickler said. “Almost 80% of the people get what they need through our call center; 20% are the ones where we have to go out and really work to prevent those crises from becoming hospitalizations or incarcerations.”

“It’s our whole system because it’s a system that has so many pieces.”

Mickler and Corbin stress that what works in Anne Arundel may not work everywhere. Prince George’s County, with 27 municipalities compared to two in Anne Arundel, has jurisdictional hurdles. Counties with elected sheriffs face political obstacles to increased spending.

And plenty of jurisdictions want to take police out of the equation. The state’s Medicaid billing proposal won’t fund units that include police officers, such as the Crisis Intervention Team. Henson said Medicaid rules generally don’t fund police responses, but acknowledged there is opposition to the idea.

Police have killed people going through a mental health crisis because of poor training or just the circumstances.

In 2018, two county police officers responded to a home in Linthicum after a family got a judge to issue an emergency risk protection order, also called a red flag, because they were concerned about a relative’s threatening behavior. The man answered the door intoxicated and armed with a revolver. At first, he set the gun down. But when he grabbed for it, a struggle ensued with one officer and the other officer fatally shot the man.

Corbin isn’t convinced that separating police and crisis response is a good idea, despite the pressure to take mental health calls out of 911 centers. There are times, she said, that the danger in a situation requires police presence. She works closely with Thomas, the coordinator of the agency’s highly regarded Crisis Intervention Team.

“We are really paving the way on this,” she said.

The system is so far ahead, Mickler said, that it attracts people from parts of the state without sufficient programs. She’s not overly worried about funding once the Medicaid proposal is adopted, believing the county will continue to fund its police program.

Corbin, though, continues to talk about what works. She has spoken to agencies and nonprofits from Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore. Even a delegation from Georgia came to see how the programs were working.

In January, she and Thomas started a podcast on the collaborative model, “CIT Today.”

The first guest was Shem Spencer, who as administrative judge of the District Court in Anne Arundel, is a vocal advocate of the local model. He said he often promotes it to other courts officials around Maryland. He said he’s seen it work not only when people need help for the first time, but when they need it time and time again.

“I think it saves a lot of lives and keeps a lot of people out of jail, frankly,” he said.

Despite anecdotal evidence that the approach is working, no research has been done on the long-term outcomes. Some figures, however, show promise.

Use of the warmline has been consistently growing, with about 50,000 calls in the 12 months that ended June 30. Corbin suspects that success has led to a drop at Safe Stations, where numbers have fallen from a peak of 1,474 in 2019 to 1,008 last fiscal year.

But Thomas sees evidence of a direct impact on crime. There were 1,824 burglaries in the county the year before Safe Stations. Last year, there were 725.

“I tell people as a police officer, my job is to keep people out of jail,” Thomas said during the podcast. “And it’s really how we work as a team.”

rick.hutzell@thebaltimorebanner.com