Last year, the Beacon Police Department launched a new initiative called the “Let Us Know” program, spearheaded by Lieutenant Tom Figlia, encouraging people with delicate situations at home to call the police in advance with character information about a family member that could help police officers answering a call know the person they are about to encounter a bit better.

In an announcement made last year, the program works as follows: “As Police Officers, we know that mental health status is fluid. We also know that we may be called to respond to incidents involving your loved ones who are experiencing health or age-related changes to their mental health. We want to make sure that calls like this are handled as safely as possible for everyone involved. If you have a loved one experiencing these changes and you’re comfortable doing so, you can now contact us so we can discuss the situation and find out things like what tends to escalate or de-escalate the person, who their emergency contacts are, etc. before we get a call. We’ll put this information into our database and if an officer is called to respond to your loved one and we know who it is, we can update the officers on their way. There is no way to prevent every stressful situation, but as a department, we’ve learned that we see the safest, most positive outcomes when we know the backgrounds of the people we’re interacting with.”

Lt. Figlia gave an example to ALBB about how the program could work: “If someone was concerned that a loved one’s mental health was deteriorating to a point where there may be police involvement, it could be helpful for everyone for us to know some things before we get there. We often spend a lot of time talking to the people who we were called on, so it could make all the difference in the world for us to know if, for example, the person loves to talk about baseball but gets very upset if you mention their step son.”

De-escalation seems to be the main objective with this program. “We want to be able to de-escalate individuals who are escalated and keep calm individuals who already are. It is also very helpful for us to have emergency contact information for people who may find themselves in crisis or suffering from ailments like dementia.”

Having the information before arriving to a scene is the priority, said Lt. Figlia. “While there are unlimited factors which contribute to the outcome of a situation, we would prefer to have that information before we get called, so that no one is scrambling to figure it out when every second counts.”