Meet the crisis liaison supporting mental health with Cedar Rapids police

CEDAR RAPIDS — Samantha Shannon has worked as a mental health liaison with the Cedar Rapids Police Department for over three years, and she has yet to experience two days where the job feels the same.

“Day to day, it ebbs and flows. Some days I’m out on calls all day long, and other days I am in the office responding to emails,” Shannon said. “That’s the part of the job that is more intriguing to me — that I don't know what the day's going to look like until I get into the office again. Some days after 10 hours I haven't left my chair and I haven't stopped making phone calls, and other days I'm not in the office at all.”

Shannon is employed by Foundation 2 Crisis Services, a nonprofit organization in Cedar Rapids that focuses on mental health and crisis response. The nonprofit partners with many local police departments to provide mental health liaisons, like Shannon, who can support police in responding to mental health crises.

“I am called out by officers that are on the street going to these calls for service, whatever they might be. If there’s a capacity where I can help in any instance, with any types of resources or services, that’s what I do,” Shannon said.

The Cedar Rapids Police Department has a mental health team that consists of Shannon and two officers who focus on mental health-related calls. The team is working on hiring a second liaison, to create two teams of one officer and one liaison, to cover different shifts.

“We go on calls together,” said Chelsea Gienger, one of the officers on the mental health team. “I bring the safety and legal aspect of it, to help people through those areas and give them some advice when we can, and then Sam is there to help us give these families and individuals some extra resources.”

  Buy Photo

The mental health team’s main job is to help keep people who are experiencing mental health crisis from ending up in jail or in a hospital bed because the police don’t have anywhere else to take them. Sometimes that means just listening to people explain what they’re going through. Other times it means connecting them with services available in the city and following up to check on their progress.

“We kind of share the conversation with the individual. She'll sometimes ask questions that I don't think of, and vice versa, and we usually come to the same conclusion of options. Sam just has a little bit more tools in her toolbox when it comes to resources on the social worker aspect of it,” Gienger said.

Shannon always has enjoyed working with people, but she didn’t always intend to work in mental health. She graduated from the University of Iowa with bachelor’s degrees in social work and gender, women’s and sexuality studies. She had an inpatient role at Tanager Place for several years, working with children living in a residential capacity.

Before being hired as the Cedar Rapids police liaison, Shannon worked part-time at Foundation 2 on the 24-hour crisis counselor team. She also was working part-time at the Abbe Center for Community Mental Health during that time.

“For about 10 years, I've been in social work in a mental health capacity, in some sense. So, it felt natural when I did transition over to being with the police department,” Shannon said. “When people don’t know what to do, or they’re at a loss, or don’t know where to turn, they call law enforcement for help and to figure it out. Really, I’m just a problem solver.”

Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com