ALBANY COUNTY — In June, Albany County budgeted $170,000 to test out a new program, ACCORD, that dispatched trained mental-health professionals to handle calls in the Hilltowns. Six months later, the program has been deemed successful enough to warrant another $350,000 from the state legislature, which the county will use to expand that service to other municipalities.

Two teams, each with a social worker and a trained emergency-medical-services worker, have helped more than 100 people with around 240 incidents as of this month, the county said.

The Albany County Crisis Officials Responding and Diverting program is an enhancement of the county’s 35-year-old mobile-crisis response program, which handles upwards of 1,500 calls a year, Stephen Giordano, the county’s mental-health director, said in June.

The University at Albany, which had been analyzing the new program, will continue reviewing data it receives as the program expands. 

Albany County Legislator Matthew Peter, a Democrat representing part of Albany, laid out the county’s basic vision for the immediate future of the program at a press conference last week. 

“There will be a number of next steps, but the biggest ones are we will hire more social workers; we’ve already done initial outreach to most municipalities in the county, all of whom have interest; we have to create a training schedule, and then we’ll do a gradual deployment,” he said

He went on, “This is just a pilot program. We’re basically doing two key shifts in each locality that wants to join this program and evaluating how many calls are diverted and what those outcomes are.”

County officials seemed careful to distance the program from any notion of defunding the police, a slogan that became popular after the death of a Black man, George Floyd, last year at the hands of a white police officer who was later convicted of murder. Civil rights activists across the country were keen to see funding redirected from police departments toward other programs like ACCORD, essentially reducing the risk of violent police encounters, particularly when force is unwarranted in the first place, and increasing the quality of support given to those who need it.

Capitalizing on and feeding the term’s political valence, Albany County Legislator Chairman Andrew Joyce, a Democrat representing parts of Albany, Slingerlands, and Bethlehem, lauded the new social program as “nothing short of revolutionary.”

“We’re not going to defund the police in Albany County,” he said. “We committed to doing that very early on. But what we are going to do is re-examine and innovate, and keep the public safe.”

In June, Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple acknowledged that the county’s deputies were inadequately trained to handle mental-health incidents. “Officers today are wearing seven or eight different hats, and mental health is not their specialty,” said Apple, noting that cumulative individual training in that area falls between 16 to 24 hours in duration. 

He also acknowledged that an officer responding can “escalate matters.” He reiterated that point last week, saying, “Normally an officer showing up might set that person off.”

The Hilltowns were a prime location for an early test of the program, since the sheriff’s office already handles public safety for Berne, Knox, Westerlo, and Rensselaerville, which do not have their own police departments. Also, being rural, remote, and relatively low-income, the residents there are vulnerable to poor or diminishing mental health, along with drug addiction, since services related to those issues can be hard to access. 

An attempt to establish a drug and mental-health satellite office in the Berne senior center failed this year when the town board declined the county’s offer to pay for its installation because the senior citizens were apparently unhappy about the idea of sharing a space with people who “are mental,” as one senior representative put it in an interview with The Enterprise at the time.