137 - What is a Police Social Worker: Caroline Ban

Police Social Workers are not a new concept but until now there's not been a nationwide standard for how they are trained or how they are employed alongside police officers.  Caroline Ban teaches at Valparaiso University and she has started the first public safety social work certificate program in the nation for people who have their masters in social work or are getting their MSW.  Caroline talks about the how social workers can add something valuable to the police team that I know you'll appreciate.

Music is by Chris Haugen

Hey Chaplain Podcast Episode 137

Tags:

Social Workers, Co-responders, Education, Embedding, Mental Health, Officer Wellness, Police, Professor, Training, University, St. Louis, Valparaiso, Indiana, Missouri 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:03

Welcome to Hey Chaplin. My name is Jared Altic, and I'm a chaplain with the police department. The Hey Chaplin podcast is about talking to police officers and other professionals in law enforcement who say, Hey Chaplin, I've got a story to tell and some hard-earned wisdom to share. The guests on Hey Chaplin come from across the world, from the LAPD to Scotland Yard, and from small towns across rural America. They are sharing their wisdom so that you don't have to learn the hard way. And as a patrol chaplain, I think you deserve something positive and encouraging for once. Police social workers are not a new concept. But until now, there's not been a nationwide standard for how they are trained or how they are employed alongside police officers. Caroline Bann teaches at Valparaiso University, and she has started the first public safety social work certificate program in the nation for people who have their masters in social work or are getting their MSW. Caroline talks about how the social workers in the police department can add something valuable to the police team that I know that you're gonna appreciate. Here's Caroline Bann. Hello, Caroline. How are you?

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Hi, good thanks. How are you?

SPEAKER_02 1:37

I'm doing pretty well. I'm glad to get you on the phone. You came highly recommended.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Oh, thank you so much. We'll see by the end of the interview, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:48

So tell me a little bit about yourself. Uh, what do you do for a living?

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Yeah, I'm an associate professor of social work at Valparaiso University in Indiana. Um, I I see myself as an accidental professor because it was never something that I even knew was a real job when I was growing up. That's not kind of my family of origin. Um, and I'm really a practitioner at heart. So I got into the field. I was working in affordable housing in um Minneapolis and St. Paul. And I remember leaning over to the person who worked down the hall, and I was like, what is your job? Because that's the job that I want when I grow up. She goes, Oh, I'm the social worker. And I was like, Great, I better learn what that is. That sounds fun. And really, what I was interested in, the reason I went back is I wanted to become a juvenile probation officer.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

So I moved to St. Louis and I started working in the juvenile probation office on the south side of the city uh and had uh mostly females on my caseload, teenagers. And that's where I had learned um that I did not want to be a juvenile probation officer. So, you know, uh life is funny that way. But long story short, I ended up working with uh a lot of mayors in the Normandy School District, which is an interring suburb of St. Louis, and there were 24 mayors and there were 12 police chiefs. When I started working there, this was back in like 2010, you know, everybody knew that policing was challenging, but nobody wanted to talk about it. So after years and years, they finally said, okay, let's talk a little bit about policing. And that's how I kind of got the bug. And that's kind of all I want to do now is study policing, study police social work, um, and the the interdisciplinary collaboration there. A police social worker, in my mind, is an embedded police social worker. That means they're hired by the police department and or hired by another agency and they work within the police department. So they are actually someone who is working directly with police, whether it's in a wellness capacity with officers or more focused on the community.

SPEAKER_02 3:57

Like victim services, yeah, something like that. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Dating back to the 1900s, there were police social workers. The first police social workers were called the police women. They were all women, and they were hired to work in police departments, embedded social workers, and they worked on women's issues, children's issues, like runaway youth, and a lot of social hygiene, which is um the preventing the spread of venereal diseases, which is over there. So social workers have existed for over a hundred years, and yet we are still dealing with the same issues they dealt with. And I know this because I went back and did a historical research analysis looking at the voices of policewomen. And when I saw they were talking about lack of training, lack of standardization. So what we know from back then is first of all, they talked a lot about how the field was not at all standardized, but they also couldn't really figure out who they were. And so, fast forward to today, I think that the reason I developed this certificate, and it is only open to folks that have their MSW degree or they're currently getting their MSW degree. And I'm doing that to help standardize the field. The MSW degree is a is a specialized social work degree.

SPEAKER_02 5:12

Master's in social work.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Master's in social work, yeah. Master's in social work. So it's a specialized degree, and I think this is probably one of the most highly specialized positions in social work I can think of. Somebody told me that they went from a barricade negotiation to a dementia client to an individual who was running away from home and was LGBTQ. I mean, the the story, you know, the range of populations that you're working with is so diverse. Plus, try working in a host setting. I'm sure you have no idea what this is like, Chaplin. Were you the only representative of your profession? Yeah. Right? You're the only one. You're supposed to have all the answers. You're supposed to explain yourself. You're supposed to be articulate, you're supposed to stay in your lane. So navigating all of that, plus your own professional ethics and values and confidentiality, I mean, it's a lot.

SPEAKER_02 6:05

Is it hard to study policing as an outsider?

SPEAKER_00 6:08

I'm sure it is. I mean, yes, because it's a different culture, you know? And I don't say that in a, you know, a negative way. I say that in just like it's a different hierarchy. It's a different structure and a different system. And I think until you've lived what it's like to put your life on the line every day or to know what it's like to have other people do that, I how could you fully understand that? You know, so as social workers, we try to meet people where they're at. Um, but I can't do that if I don't really fully understand what someone's going through or what their experience is. You know, social workers come in with a couple of things, a systems mindset. So this idea that like, what else is going on in this person's life right now that is kind of creating the crisis moment or the situation that we see at hand. And then two, good with kind of the follow-up, right? And being able to take the time. One of the things that I learned about with my experience with police officers is just there isn't a luxury of time. I mean, you might be going from one call to the next call to the next call. And the one call, it's uh, you know, an 80-year-old individual who has dementia. And the next call, it's, you know, someone who's experiencing suicidal ideation.

SPEAKER_02 7:20

And then there's another call waiting.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Another call waiting. And so the idea of a social worker, and I think what social work can bring to a police agency is maybe a little bit more time. I know in the field, I like to refer to them as high needs clients, but I know some of my police colleagues will say frequent flyers.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

So that person that's calling 911 100 times a week, the social worker can take that off the police officer's plate by helping them figure out what's really going on here. Is there a way to reduce the call volume to free up the officer? Or sometimes if a social worker is kind of in a co-responding role, maybe they're embedded in that police agency. And once the scene is deemed safe, that social worker is kind of on scene and assisting with the case. You know, in that case, there might be a moment where the officer says, you know, looks like this case is good. Do you need any backup? Are you good? Do you feel safe? Can you take time with this client? And they're kind of handing it off to the social worker. But that requires a lot of kind of trust and relationship, I think, um, between the officers and the social worker to really understand their lanes, understand their roles and what they can bring to the table. But what I've heard, and I do research with police social workers to try to understand those roles, is I've heard that one, they spend a lot of time explaining themselves and what they do. But after they get through that and start to build some trust, there's some pretty amazing things that can happen where the officers are sort of freed up to do what they're meant to do and the time that they have, and the social worker can focus on those things like referrals and getting services to folks that need it. And and frankly, decriminalizing kind of those social issues, you know, and not putting someone in jail just because that's the only option. You know what I mean? And I know officers don't like to do that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 9:02

No, but but sometimes that does happen.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Right.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:05

There was a woman who kept calling the officers because oh, her neighbors were doing all kinds of things to her driveway, like putting nails on her driveway. But of course, this wasn't actually happening because there was like some hallucinations that were happening. And so, you know, she keeps calling the police department and finally she starts calling the social worker. She's like, they're not doing anything about it. They're not doing anything about it. And she's like, Well, um, you know, what do they keep telling you? And they're like, Well, they say that the nails aren't actually there. And they're like, Yeah, the nails aren't actually there. You want me to come out and meet with you? And so they're, you know, meeting with the person and talking about the, you know, actually going and like looking at the driveway and be like, there aren't nails there, huh? I wonder what happened. Like, where did those nails go? That's so interesting. Because you saw them do that. Yes, I saw them do that. You know, like, so some of it again is just like you're you're listening with that person, you're you're holding up the mirror, like, okay, you're asking the questions, like, okay, so this is what you say, and this is what I'm seeing. And I just want to make sure I got the story right. And you're not being snarky, but you know, after you've been doing it for an hour, right? You start to be like, okay, we're gonna have to wrap this up now. Um, you know, call me again. But hopefully, after that call, that individual is calling the social worker and not 911 every time there's a few, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:26

That takes a lot, that takes a lot of love to deal with people who are not being very lovable, you know, because they're having they're having a mental health episode, they're hallucinating, they're paranoid, they're whatever, whatever it is. But but that takes a that takes a lot of love for your fellow man to to be to say, I I will lay down on this barbed wire, and I will I will take this so the cops don't have to.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, it's it's remembering often that like it's the worst days of people's lives, right? That that officers see them on or that those 911 calls, and it doesn't mean that people don't have better moments, but um people are allowed to have bad days and bad periods of time in their life. I mean, just kind of a more personal story for me. I've I've had a loved one who was in a mental health crisis and was picked up by police because a friend called out of concern and was taken to a hospital setting. And and I remember actually getting a call from the police social worker and and the lieutenant just saying, like, hey, we just want to let you know this is where this person is. And, you know, that was a beautiful thing, right? To have that kind of follow-up and care. But also it was terrifying for me as an individual, right? To know that, you know, I know the stats on when people encounter police um and they're having a mental health crisis, right? That that sometimes those suspicious behaviors really they they look like fight or flight, right? And if you're in fight or you're in flight, like that looks suspicious and that doesn't always work out well. I mean, we know the data on uh, you know, people with experiencing a mental health crisis are 16 times more likely to be fatally shot by police. And I don't think anybody wants that outcome, right? It's just that those are things you think about, uh, I think on the other side of that. And so I think I think social work working with police is a hopeful thing. Um, because like you said, the it's not always if if you carry a hammer, you expect things to look like a nail because that's how you're trained, right? Um, and if you carry a different tool set, and social workers are just another tool in the tool belt, really.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

What is the number one myth or misunderstanding when it comes to police thinking about social workers?

SPEAKER_00 12:48

I'm laughing because this is something that social workers told me through the research, and it was hug-a-thug. Uh, and I thought that was like you're probably not laughing because you're like, oh yeah, duh, we knew that. Um, but I found that just that was a new new phrase for me. And and what I think it meant is like I actually had a social worker tell me that the officer was afraid that she was gonna make him touch or hug the person that they were trying to arrest. And she's like, I don't even know what you're talking about. Like, what, what? Uh no, and like it I think that is a misperception of like, oh, social workers just want to keep people out of jail at all costs, or we we don't ever want to hold people accountable for anything because everything, you know, could be based on, you know, fueled by the environment or a negative situation that's created another situation. And I think the reality is like, no, social workers also work with, you know, victims of crimes, right? Like we we we want safe communities, right? And um yeah, we have a different perspective, you know. We we we're not all out there just to put someone, you know, in jail. That's not what we want, right? But like we we approach things maybe from a different perspective. And I think that's the value, again, of having a social worker and an officer working on an interdisciplinary team is I probably need an officer because safety is probably not going to be my number one come from, right? Yeah, and that probably scares the out of some officers, like yeah, making, you know, and I think to me, that's how I got into kind of training because I think that when we prepare social workers a little bit better to understand the come from of officers and vice versa, you know, that's where I think the magic can happen because we sort of understand the different perspectives. Or at the same time, if social workers come into the situation of, as opposed to this person being annoying or they're calling 911 again or they look disheveled, like, what's going on? Well, it's sort of like approaching that from a very humanizing way of like, hey, how's it going? How do I, how do I kind of de-escalate this situation, or how do I talk to this person in a way that, you know, I'm thinking about validating their humanity as opposed to seeing them as a threat. And I think you need not to say that officers don't um think about humanity. I mean, I pretty much every officer I've ever met, they get into the work because they want to help people.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

Officers also have to manage threat assessment. And so it's not that they all see everyone as a threat. They they don't, but they are looking for threats. And and they are looking for how do I put this delicately, tactical liabilities where where somebody is is very vulnerable, they're not protecting themselves, and the officer is thinking not only how do I protect myself, but also how do I protect this other person, the social worker, the chaplain, you know, the bystander, you know, how how do I protect them? Because if somebody is irrational or if somebody is evil, they may just decide to take another human life. And so that officer's like, well, how can I prevent that from happening? And and that's a a big concern that they they often have. And so when a co-responder, when another people from another, you know, uh government agency are on scene trying to help like a social worker, they they're often thinking, how many vulnerable people do I have to protect here if something goes south? And they don't want it to go south, they hope it doesn't, but they are looking and watching people's hands and watching people's body language and looking to say, okay, if this gets bad, can I jump in and protect that social worker? Um, do you have any suggestions to social workers about how to make themselves less of a of a vulnerable? What's a word I want to use? I I hate the word liability. I I think that's how a cop would probably phrase it. I think they would say you're you're a tactical liability. You you are out there with your soft underside, totally exposed to all the dangers in the world, and you're making no effort to make my job easier.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:00

What would you say to a social worker?

SPEAKER_00 17:02

Yeah. Well, I I think I would start with, and again, this is why I really study and I like the idea of an embedded social work model. And what embedded just means is that the social worker is actually working within the police department. And the reason for that is that I think if you are going to be in a kind of second responder role where you're you're responding with an officer to a scene, there needs to be a level of training. There needs to be a level of trust and understanding of each other's roles and each other's lanes for that to go well. So um, you know, and I I only really know this by interviewing other social workers that do this kind of work, but some of them talk about, you know, the importance of situational awareness training. Yeah. Right? How do I, and I'm not gonna change who I am, I'm not gonna now become a cop. That's not why I'm here, you know. But like, how do I become a little bit more situationally aware of me and my surroundings? Also, how do I become better, you know, versed in what a police officer thinks about so that I can be a more valuable member of that team because I'm I'm kind of aware of the other perspectives, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:14

Yep, yeah, that's excellent.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

I think that when you train together, so if it if if in the thing about police social work is it happens differently all across the country. And it really is shaped by the size of the agency, how many police social workers you have, um political priorities. I mean, there's so many different things that shape that role. But I think if you are trying to do sort of a second responder or a co-responder role, you really need to train together and you need to have that situational awareness training, and you need to be kind of clear on where the lanes are, what the protocol is for transferring things over. And so that's how I got really interested actually in training police social workers. I think it's a highly specialized field of social work. And this is why I developed it's the first public safety social work certificate in the country. Uh, and I did that not because I don't think an MSW degree itself is is, you know, sufficient in some ways, but what I heard in the field when I did interviews with police social workers is they want more training. They want more specialized exposure to the field, understanding of the field, and trying to figure out kind of how they fit into this work. And so that's what I'm really trying to do. I see that as my purpose is to try to equip social workers who want to do this kind of role. And again, there are many different ways to do it. Being sort of a co-responder or a second responder is is just one way to be a police social worker.

SPEAKER_02 19:44

What's the pros and cons of a social worker wearing a Kevlar vest?

SPEAKER_00 19:49

Oh man, that's a good question. So I think it depends on the role. I think it depends on how they're being used. I mean, so I talk to some social workers that do co-respond, but they only come to scene when they're called to scene, and they only come to scene when maybe they already know the client in some way, and that client has been previously referred by police to the social worker. So that's how the police know that the social worker has some contact with them, you know, and so um, you know, it it if it's a very limited kind of role like that, I could see the case for the social worker being the one to kind of drive that conversation with police and say, look, this is if this is gonna make me look bulky and and strange, um, and you know, even as maybe a case otherwise. If that social worker is, though, coming out as a regular co-responder, they're regularly assigned to an officer, you know, I could see the case for the vest as well. I mean, I think that that is a a conversation that needs to be navigated within the police agency with kind of understanding both perspectives at the table. Um, I have had social workers say to me, I feel bubble wrapped. You know, they don't let me do anything. No, I think that gender plays a role here. Most social workers are female, most officers are male, and so there's a gender dynamic there.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

There's also an age dynamic, right? If you have a young female police social worker who's petite, um, I can tell you that those are the ones that are telling me they feel bubble wrapped in the role. And so I think in those cases, you also have to have some conversations about how do you help make sure that that social worker has some additional training. But at the same time, the police officers need to also recognize that this is someone who's trained. And so, what are the ways that that person maybe can have a little bit more freedom to do kind of the professional work that they know how to do, whether it's in a library setting or a neutral setting that, you know, maybe does not require a police escort. I mean, those are the things that are are challenging and they really have to be discussed, I think, on a case by case basis.

SPEAKER_02 21:55

Yeah, my two concerns with co responders wearing a vest are one, looking too much like the police when it's sometimes really necessary for me to be a separate voice and for them to understand that I'm not an officer, I'm not that adversary that they imagine the officers to be. I so so sometimes there's there's a confusion in identity issue. Yeah. And then the second thing is I don't ever want issuing a Kevlar vest to be a substitute for more training.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:25

And so so that that's something I don't want to like, okay, well we don't have to, you know, here's our CIT co-responders, here's our chaplains, here's our other people, we'll just throw a vest at each of them and call that good. I would rather they come out and participate in training and kind of learn like what you were describing. I would I'd rather that happen. And then if the best is still applicable or not, that can maybe be even be like how I practice it where it's more of a case by case basis.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

But social workers also can work in wellness roles with officers. So you know mental health uh still has a lot of stigma and we talk more about it than we ever have, but come on, let's just think about what that's like, right? You're you've had a tough call. Do you really want to admit that you had a tough call to anyone? Do you want to admit other things? No, it's easier to laugh it off, right? It's easier to have some dark humor joke about something and kind of brush it off. But social workers are equipped to listen to officers, especially if it's an embedded social worker. They're not going to be a therapist in that embedded role, but they might be the first conversation that's helping someone process what just happened. Social workers are also good at setting up some systems to ensure that officers are taken care of. And I'll give you a story here. So I had a social worker tell me that you know there's different shifts right each shift has a different lieutenant or leader of that shift who decides kind of what happened. So what was happening is that there might be some serious calls, let's say a fatal car crash and um one supervisor is saying nah my guys are good. We don't we don't need to debrief that. And the other one is saying oh yeah we do need to debrief that. So the one you have what you have in that agency is that you had two different experiences for different officers just based on what the supervisor decided or thought in that moment. And so that could actually be really doing a disservice to those officers who don't want to speak up and say yeah actually I would like a debriefing like let's think about that. Nobody's gonna do that. But by putting some policies in place this police social worker actually came to leadership and it took a little bit of time but they finally decide okay on XYZ calls there's always going to be a debrief it's required. So that way nobody is put in that awkward situation of having to like either just suck it up and deal with it but it might or raise their hand and request it.

SPEAKER_02 24:47

Exactly exactly should someone wanting to be a civilian wellness coordinator at a police department or even a chaplain or something like that we're going to deal specifically with officer wellness is pursuing a degree in social work a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Absolutely pursuing a degree in social work is a great idea because it looks at not only the client in front of you, whether that's an officer, right? And making sure that that individual officer is doing okay, whether it's creating a program for families of officers we know divorce rates are very high for officers, whether it's suicide prevention, but doing that in a way that officers are like I can I I can hear what you're saying and you're not just kind of making me feel stigmatized. I mean all of those things can be done by a social worker and I think a highly trained social worker in this kind of field. Again I think because social work takes a multi-systemic approach to the work and that just means they think about the individual they think about the family they think about the the larger group and larger society the laws the organizations the hierarchical structure the community they think about all those things when they're working with someone so it's not just how do I help this person in front of me but how do I think of a better way that's going to support all the officers who are struggling with this kind of issue and how do I make a pathway for them that's going to be better for them or their family. So I I do think that it is a really wonderful degree for that. And it these issues are so much more complex than just the human being sitting in front of us.

SPEAKER_02 26:30

Caroline Bann, thank you so much for what you do and thank you for being on the show today.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

Thank you so much. I hope it was helpful. It was a lot of fun absolutely I gotta tell you I was nervous so nervous. I was like I don't know what I'm gonna say especially after I've been teaching and yakking at students all day so you know uh I'm like I don't know what's gonna come out I want to thank Caroline for coming on the show.

SPEAKER_02 26:55

I really appreciate her making time to talk about this in part because of the negative stigma that some social worker co-responders have had over the years. Then every so often a politician says that they're going to replace police officers with social workers and immediately the defenses are up and I believe that that causes friction between police officers and the social worker. But police social workers have been around for a very long time and in many places have been very successful. My hope is that Caroline Bann and others like her can help to standardize the profession so that every agency can have a really positive experience using police social workers alongside their officers. Backed by popular demand, Jake the International Security Specialist guy is on the next episode of Hey Chaplin.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

I learned this lesson because I went to Malaysia I went to Kuala Lumpur a couple days after Trump dropped a bomb on Salomani in Iraq if you remember all the way back then. Yep and we're walking I'm walking around with my family and all of a sudden I started getting it's been great I'm walking around no problems now I see a bunch of guys that are dressed differently they're standing on the street and they're giving me very hard eyes they're giving my family really hard eyes and it's like what what was that place? What was happening? Well that was I looked on the map that was the Pakistani embassy and I don't I don't know why all these guys were waiting outside but they were Pakistani and the sentiment was a lot of people were angry with Americans at that time and I thought man I should just drop that on the map somewhere I don't want to go and just avoid this altogether. So we took those lessons and we applied it like two years later to my boys going to India.

SPEAKER_02 29:02

So Americans killed an Iranian in Iraq and the Pakistani embassy in Kuala Lumpur was giving you side eye right you know the views expressed here are the personal views of the host and our guest and do not necessarily represent the views of any law enforcement agency its components or any educational institution if you like this episode please share it with a cop or someone who loves a cop thank you for listening to Hey Chaplin and as always let's pray for peace in our city let me ask you Colts or Bears oh man Vikings there's the Minnesota girl coming out I have to say the bears just had a banner season so what's not to love with the bears I mean and apparently apparently they're moving a little closer to you and so if they if they build a stadium in Indiana I don't know if that's gonna happen when we see it you know yeah yeah yeah that's awesome that's awesome what are you doing to push that forward yeah so can you ask that question again there might have been a question in there I'm not sure I think I got ADD brain got distracted in the first part of the question. Let's talk let's talk about I mean I can always go back and dub in another question. If you give me a great answer I'll find a question that fits it. Uh but