Brighton's Police and Court Center on East Bromley Lane.

Scott Taylor

Brighton Police Department logo

Courtesy

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Brighton Police would like to work with local mental health trauma counseling center Reaching HOPE to provide mental health counselors that would respond to police calls, replacing Community Reach Center.

Police Commander Ponce Portillo told councilors that Community Reach was unable to hire mental health professionals and the department wants to end a contract with them that began in March.

"During that time, we worked with them to create training for the police department and kick that program off," he said.

Brighton Police received a $525,703 grant to provide mental health co-responders in October 2022. The department signed a contract in March with Community Reach Center, the 66-year-old mental health crisis counseling agency that serves much of Adams County and Broomfield to create the city's co-responder program.

"They have been unable to meet their part of the contract in hiring a clinician," Portillo said. "So last month we decided to end their contract. They have been supportive in this transition and have helped us to act on this project and understand the evolution of this."

Community Reach Center representatives could not be reached for comment.

Portillo said the city is now prepared to work with Reaching HOPE.

"It's an agency that our department already has a relationship with," Portillo said. "They are partners and stakeholders  and we have been partners with time for five years.

Reaching HOPE is a bilingual mental health trauma counseling service based out of Thornton, although 25% of its clients live in Brighton.  Portillo said that half of the agency's clients are Hispanic.

Dr. Ambra Born, the executive director of Reaching HOPE, said the agency has worked with local police in Brighton and Commerce City on sexual assaults.

"What we bring to the table is we are a doctoral training program, so we have students that are also really interested in being engaged in this program and we have a nice hiring pool to pull from among our alumni and connections with universities," Born said. "So we feel pretty sure that we will be able to hire for this position. And, in addition, we have a post-doctoral therapist who, in a previous life was a police officer  and he is really excited to take at least one of these shifts. So we have this partially hired already and we anticipate some good luck in getting the rest of the position."

City Councilor Peter Padilla said he was on board with the change.

"I have been hearing from Community Reach about a number of different projects that are trying to reach out and they are just having a hard time getting the staffing and doing what they want to do in the community," he said.