A program to place more social workers in police departments is gaining further momentum in Connecticut following the close of the 2025 legislative session.
A new provision in the state’s biennial budget establishes and funds the Social Work and Law Enforcement Project (SWLE) at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). The program, founded in 2020, places social workers and student interns within local police departments.
Further funding and state support will continue a necessary conversation about the importance of police departments and social workers collaborating, said Lt. Matt Solak, a police officer and co-founder of the SWLE.
“It's really such a new and emergent field,” Solak said. “It's really essential that a wide variety of stakeholders and practitioners have an impact in developing best practices, and that starts with students.”
The budget provision was originally part of H.B. 7202, a larger bill focused on law enforcement reform. That measure passed the state House of Representatives, but was not voted on by the state Senate before the session concluded in early June.
Lessons from embedded social work in Vermont
Connecticut is not the first state to provide funding to get more social workers in police departments. In nearby Vermont, an embedded social work program has been underway for the past four years.
Vermont’s program follows a slightly different structure than the one outlined in Connecticut’s budget. Vermont funds 10 community health centers, which contract out social workers to state police departments. These crisis specialists then accompany police officers to co-respond to calls.
Despite working with the police, these specialists are not directly employed by the state police departments. Mourning Fox, who runs the program with the Vermont Department of Public Safety (DPS), said this separation is important.
“It wouldn't be ethical for a law enforcement entity to have their own mental health professional and not be able to provide clinical supervision, not be able to ensure that they're up to date on their continuing education around their licensure,” Fox said.
Vermont has funded 18 of these positions across the state, a jump from the six that started four years ago. These individuals, however, are not always licensed social workers. This decision was made after meeting with community members and representatives from the DPS and the Department of Mental Health (DMH) to discuss the goals of the position, Fox said.
“The importance is not to come up with a clinical diagnosis, if you will. It's to go out to scenes that might be emotionally hot … where they're helping to de-escalate situations, and also working with folks who need connection to resources,” Fox said.
A growing field
The role in Vermont requires a minimum of an associate’s degree, which Fox said allows for a diverse body of mental health experts from pastoral counselors to clinical psychologists. This is also why he believes that SWLE’s student-centric approach in Connecticut is promising.
Solak said there is no one-size fits all model for police social work. However, he believes that student-led initiatives are important to informing the discipline’s future.
“I would imagine if you set this program up in Connecticut, and it's one of the few, if not only, police social work tracks of study, you will find that you will be getting candidates and applicants from across the country and across the globe,” Fox said.
As the field has developed throughout the years, Solak said the efficacy of the approach has become widely recognized. This wasn’t always the case though. Vermont state troopers initially pushed back against the embedded social work program, he said, fearing responsibility for the safety of another civilian on call.
However, Fox said the program was quick to catch on.
“Within two to three weeks, every trooper's response was, can we get two more of these? Because they quickly saw the benefit that having a co-responder brings to their response.”
The program has also helped Vermonters become more open to seeking mental health help, Fox said.
“The response I've received from family members who said we're sure that our son was going to die today at the hands of police because of X situation, but it was your mental health person who really was able to connect with them,” Fox explained.
While many support the inclusion of embedded social work students in Connecticut, some advocates emphasize the importance of professionals in these roles.
Social workers for the SWLE program cannot “write an emergency certificate so that the social worker can say that this person needs to be hospitalized,” said Louise Pyers, founder of The Connecticut Alliance to Benefit Law Enforcement.
However, Pyers still stressed the importance of these social work students for connecting individuals to resources and working toward reformed policing.
Solak, the co-founder of the SWLE, said the program will continue to tailor its model to meet the unique needs of Connecticut communities.
“Connecticut is really poised to be a leader in this field,” Solak said. “Our officers are held to a very high standard in both basic training and recertification training, and to allow that to carry over into some of this police social work training I think is incredibly promising for the future.”
