Arkansas Democrat-Gazette | T Metthe
A $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice will enable Little Rock police to expand their use of mental health crisis response teams that pair social workers with specially trained officers, part of a partnership with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences…. The three social workers and four officers who make up the teams now have been working together since early October, said Mallory Visser-Pardee, a social worker with the police department. With the grant money, the goal is to hire two more social workers and have two more officers assigned to the teams by early 2024, Visser-Pardee said.