Jon Thomsen stood in the doorway of a Fremont home, offering calming words and open ears. Moments earlier, the man inside the home had threatened to kill his family and himself. 

Thomsen had rushed to the scene to ensure that wouldn’t happen.

Thomsen isn’t a cop, and he’s not a licensed therapist. He is a peer support specialist.

In recent years, police departments across Nebraska and beyond have increasingly turned to mental health professionals to better serve people in crisis and minimize interactions with law enforcement. But those efforts have stalled in some instances due to a lack of practitioners, especially outside the larger metro areas. 

That’s a problem the Fremont mental health co-responder program set out to address. Rather than rely on a therapist, Thomsen fills the role of co-responder, using his lived experience and training in crisis response to help people in distress.

Fremont, which struggled to staff a previous co-responder position, seemed ripe for the collaboration, said Brad Negrete of Lutheran Family Services, which oversees the program.

“The trend is having police embedded with therapists,” Negrete said. But not all therapists have “that ability to say, ‘I, too, have a mental health diagnosis or previous substance use, and this is what I did to make my way through it.’ They (the Fremont Police Department) thought that was an interesting idea. So I said, ‘Well, let's pilot it.’”

Thomsen, who has struggled with addiction and mental illness, is embedded with Fremont police and the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office. He has been an invaluable resource, said Fremont Police Chief Jeff Elliott.

Annually, Fremont sees 400-450 emergency calls related to mental health crises, Elliott said. Thomsen gets people help without involving the police.

That’s the whole goal, Elliott said, “because bad things can happen when police and these people interact sometimes. So if Jon can find ways to steer them to other services … rather than us just throwing them in jail or in the hospital, that is what we want to do.”

For Thomsen, it's an opportunity to provide the assistance he didn't get early on. He traces his challenges back to childhood and growing up with parents who struggled with mental illness, but kept it quiet. 

"So, what I learned early on is that mental health issues were not something that you can talk about,” he said.

Thomsen said he started smoking marijuana in high school, to medicate his own mental health struggles. 

When he entered college at the University of Iowa, he started drinking and using other drugs. By his senior year, he had a child. He barely graduated. Afterward, he moved back home and managed the night shift at a fast food restaurant, where his substance use continued to escalate until one night when he fell off a porch and cracked some ribs.

His family visited every day during the two weeks he was in the hospital, awakening the guilt and shame he had tried to escape. One day while watching TV, another patient remarked that Thomsen had a lot of visitors. 

“I was so deep in that darkness and hopelessness, I said, ‘I wish they’d just leave me alone.’ He said, ‘You should rethink that, because I’d give anything to have one person visit me one time.’”

The comment struck Thomsen. Sober, he realized his mental health struggles were legitimate illnesses. 

But then he left the hospital and returned to the same life he’d briefly left. It started a cycle of brief periods of sobriety, punctured by a relapse.

Eventually, his brother, a psychiatrist, introduced the family to a clinical therapist, Dr. Jai Sookram. 

Thomsen committed to taking medication, and gradually regained autonomy. 

“I found hope for myself,” he said.

He also knew, though, that he couldn’t continue working in the food service industry. With Sookram’s help, he became a trained peer support specialist in 2015.

“Everything I went through, every second that I spent in that darkness, means something today,” he said. “I get to use that today to walk into the darkness of another person's life and help them find their way out.”

Mental health peer specialists are filling a hole for law enforcement, as well as other mental health outlets, said Dr. Jennifer Sparrock, manager of the Adult Psychiatric Emergency Services program at Nebraska Medicine in Omaha.

Since 2009, there has been a 44% increase across the state in mental health-related careers, according to a 2023 report by the Behavioral Health Education Center of Nebraska. But huge disparities remain, with several counties not having availability of mental health specialists, Sparrock said. 

“I think certain folks are drawn to that kind of community-based work,” she said. “There is an overall shortage of mental health care providers in the state of Nebraska, and that goes from psychiatrist to therapists, psychologists, drug and alcohol counselors.”

While Fremont and Dodge County rely on Thomsen, other police departments use in-house staff or consult therapy services. 

The Lincoln Police Department engages CenterPointe’s crisis helpline or requests that therapists be dispatched. Omaha uses trained staff or therapists for assistance. Smaller police departments, including Kearney and Grand Island, consult with licensed therapists to respond to emergencies involving mental health crises.

While law enforcement officials and mental health providers have touted the benefits of increased collaboration, the value is debatable, said Justin Nix, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He attributes the increase in using social workers or mental health professionals to the 2014 fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

“The reason we got here, as is often the case, is that a high-profile incident captures our attention nationally,” Nix said. “And so when that happens, we sometimes forget the fact that, like those are, statistically speaking, in the grand scheme of things, rare outcomes.”

Most Nebraska police departments that use mental health responders rely on licensed therapists, either on staff or on a contractor basis. After losing its licensed therapist, the Fremont Police Department couldn’t find a replacement, Elliott said. Lutheran Family Services suggested using a peer support specialist.

It was a perfect fit, Elliott said.

The program started as a pilot and has since become a standing part of the department, thanks to funding from the Fremont Family Coalition and Nebraska Crime Commission.

Thomsen is often the difference between someone receiving help and possibly ending up in a 72-hour mental health commitment — or jail. He alternates responding to mental health emergencies with follow-up phone calls.

Officers receive training for de-escalating mental health-related situations, but not every officer is comfortable in those situations, said Fremont Police Sgt. John Brady. Fremont has about 40 officers in the department.

They have made a concerted effort to scale back their responses, particularly for calls involving children, Brady said.

“Because we don't want to create additional trauma on a child,” he said, “and we also want to be able to give the parents referrals to the Nebraska family helpline, things like that.”

Thomsen offers firsthand experience in these types of situations. Brady said he has a talent for relating to people in crisis.

Leaders in the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office agree. Covering a county where it can take nearly an hour for a deputy to respond to an emergency, Thomsen is vital to the agency’s success when it comes to mental health crises, said Dodge County Sheriff’s Sgt. Brie Frank.

“The biggest thing that I've seen that I didn't realize is the sheriff's office had a gap,” she said. “The family's calling us for some type of disturbance, for help for this person, and we come in, we deescalate the situation. They don't meet criteria to go to the hospital, and we kind of leave. And, unfortunately, that's kind of our role as law enforcement, if it's not a crime.”

The success in Fremont has spurred conversations with other area law enforcement agencies, said Negrete of Lutheran Family Services.

Thomsen appreciates Fremont’s attitude toward handling mental health crises. He hopes other departments follow suit.

“I've had a ton of buy-in, which is great, because I didn't know if that was going to happen,” he said. “One of my favorite officers to go on calls with is somebody who hasn't even gone through (crisis intervention training). He just gets it.”

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