PROVINCETOWN — Last February, a 30-member SWAT team responded in full protective gear when a Provincetown man expressed suicidal intentions and barricaded himself and his roommate inside their home with a BB gun. After a seven-hour standoff, Jonathan Bridges was arrested and held for four months in Bridgewater State Hospital on pretrial detention before being released to his family at the end of June.

There was another first responder on standby that day, one without a gun. According to the police report of the Feb. 28 incident, a mental health professional from Bay Cove Human Services was on call for emergency response over the phone. The report does not indicate that Bay Cove’s clinician was ever able to speak to Bridges during that standoff, however.

Bay Cove, a behavioral health nonprofit that opened a brick-and-mortar clinic in Hyannis last February, has a mobile emergency response team with 30 clinicians who respond to calls from Bourne to Provincetown. A crisis hotline, 1-888-BAY-COVE, connects callers with clinicians who travel up and down the Cape.

“Sometimes, just having a third person who’s not a cop lowers the stress threshold,” said Stephanie Rubel, a jail diversion clinician for Bay Cove who works full-time with the Barnstable Police Dept. “The second I’m like, ‘I’m not a police officer, I’m a clinician; I don’t have a gun or anything like that,’ they can hopefully understand me a little better.”

According to Stephanie Daugherty, Bay Cove’s director of Cape Cod emergency services, co-response “tends to be in person.” But because the team is based in Hyannis, in-person service for a crisis in Provincetown means at least an hour’s delay.

Though she wouldn’t comment on the Bridges case, Daugherty said that often, when a client is far away, Bay Cove attempts to make contact by telephone.

“If we can get on the phone and work that way, rather than them having to wait an hour for a clinician to get down there, we’ll try that first,” she said. But if telehealth is not working for someone, “We absolutely send someone in person,” Daugherty said.

“Cape Cod is an underserved area,” she added. “We don’t have the same access to services as other areas of the state. There is a mental health crisis overall on the Cape that is continuing to grow.”

Outer Cape Co-Response

Between 2019 and 2020 the number of suicides in Barnstable County increased by 48 percent, by far the largest increase in the state, according to Mass. Dept. of Public Health data.

“The majority of calls I’ve seen police respond to on a regular basis, there is some form of mental health issue,” Rubel said.

Currently, Barnstable’s is the only police dept. on the Cape with a full-time Bay Cove clinician. Bourne is currently looking to fill a part-time position. Other departments on the Cape can call on Bay Cove to dispatch a mobile clinician for co-response with their officers.

Daugherty said that Bay Cove’s mobile crisis response program “doesn’t get a ton of calls from the Outer Cape.”

Outer Cape police departments do not all track mental health calls the same way. But an investigation by the Independent revealed a general trend: the farther from Hyannis a town is, the fewer calls are made to Bay Cove.

According to Eastham Police Chief Adam Bohannon, since 2020, the Eastham Police Dept. “has collaborated with Bay Cove approximately 102 times for mental health-related calls.”

Of those 102 co-responses, none ended in an arrest, he said.

Wellfleet’s Deputy Chief Kevin LaRocco estimated that Bay Cove co-responded to calls “as much as 24 to 36 times” over the last three years.

Truro Police Chief Jamie Calise said that 18 calls in 2022 were marked as mental health-related, but he did not provide any information on requests to Bay Cove for co-response.

In Provincetown, there were seven cases in the past two years in which Bay Cove was present, according to police records officer Barbara Peters, but she added that “there were no calls in which Bay Cove physically responded to any call.”

Peters also said that 26 calls to Provincetown police from July 2022 to July 2023 had been marked as “crisis intervention.” Twenty-one were mental health-related, two were designated as substance abuse issues, and three were combined, she said.

According to LaRocco and Bohannon, Wellfleet and Eastham do not track mental health-related calls. “There is no specific identifier to label each call as relating to mental health or substance abuse,” said Bohannon.

LaRocco and Bohannon also said their departments do not have a high enough call volume to justify a full-time jail diversion clinician like Barnstable has.

Outer Cape Health Services has a Community Resource Navigator Program, which works with police departments in the four towns to reach community members with behavioral and mental health struggles before — and after — a crisis occurs.

“We really like to bookend a crisis response,” said Brianne Smith, the program coordinator. If Bay Cove is called, Smith said, the navigators might conduct a follow-up assessment to look for stabilizing “wraparound services.”

Smith has also held weekly office hours at the Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham police depts. since 2017. Provincetown’s department opted into the Navigator Program this year; the details of Smith’s office hours are still being worked out.

Earlier this year, the four Outer Cape health departments collaborated to obtain a $381,375 ARPA grant from Barnstable County to hire a new regional behavioral health clinician and a public nurse. According to Eastham Health Director Hillary Greenberg-Lemos, the towns are now drawing up contracts for those roles.

The state is also investing more money in co-response. Rubel, the Barnstable clinician, said she is confident that clinical co-response is the future of community policing.

For the time being, however, the Outer Cape’s access to such services is mostly a phone call away.