Little Rock police social worker focused on helping people avoid further encounters with officers

Little Rock Police Department social worker Mallory Visser brings a box of donated food and clothing Friday to an unhoused Little Rock resident who she's helped get a room at a motel during some of the hottest days of the summer..(Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Grant Lancaster)
Little Rock Police Department social worker Mallory Visser brings a box of donated food and clothing Friday to an unhoused Little Rock resident who she's helped get a room at a motel during some of the hottest days of the summer..(Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Grant Lancaster)


It's Friday afternoon, July 22, with the temperature simmering around 100 degrees, when a woman with a badge pulls up to a motel in North Little Rock. She speaks with the front desk clerk, looking for Evan.

Evan is a convicted felon who recently got out of prison on a breaking-and-entering conviction, but still says he could never have done that and thinks he was railroaded. He doesn't want to talk to anyone with a badge.

Mallory Visser gets it. "No one wants to see a cop," she said.

But Visser's got more in common with a grad student than a beat cop. She doesn't carry a gun, or even own one. She has a badge, but it's a simple laminated ID card. Her lanyard has sea turtles on it.

Visser's on police payroll, but in a way she's being paid not to be a cop. As a social worker, her goal is to keep the people she works with -- who are mostly homeless, mentally ill, ex-cons or some combination of the three, like Evan -- from ever having a run-in with police.

Still, some people have been wary of Visser, just because of her association with the city's police. The type of people Visser is trying to help tend to have bad blood with law enforcement, feelings of anger, resentment, fear.

That's totally understandable, Visser said, but usually when they realize she's not going to arrest them, the suspicion starts to fade.

It's a different dynamic, Visser said. She once pulled up to give out food at a camp where some people were living, and a man she had been working closely with proudly declared "that's my social worker!"

None of the people Visser tries to help are ever going to see an officer walk up and say "that's my cop!"

For a year now, Visser has been the full-time social worker at the Little Rock Police Department, after previously serving with the department since 2019 as a civilian victim services specialist and a specialist in working with elderly and LGBTQ people.

In that time, Visser has worked with a number of people in the city who have had frequent low-level contacts with police, leading to multiple arrests for minor offenses. Most, if not all, are mentally ill, or homeless, or both, and she's had great success reducing the number of times those people have gotten arrested by getting them the help they need.

Most of what she does is corral the resources in the city to help people get off the streets and avoid having to interact with police at all.

For example, when Visser turns up looking for Evan, she's got two boxes full of donated food and clothing. She knew just where to find him, because she's the one who helped him get the hotel stay -- 10 days out of the Arkansas heat.

Evan has no memory of the incident that landed him in jail, and can't fathom why he would ever do something like that. He has seizures, and by most accounts he was in some sort of fugue state when he broke into that home, with no real memory of the event.

He's a soft-spoken man with a bushy red beard and thick-lensed glasses. His memory is sharp -- he rattles off statutes and legal jargon that flies over most people's heads. Most of all, it's clear he's at ease around Visser, despite her connection to the police.

Visser's current priority is making sure Evan gets registered for his disability checks, which hopefully will help him get back on his feet and find a place to stay before he has to leave the motel.

It's slow going, even though Visser and Evan have told the disability office he's in danger of landing back on the streets if he doesn't get that check.

Finding shelter for the people she works with is one of the biggest struggles, Visser said. Little Rock doesn't have much to offer on that front.

"We have resources galore -- we can clothe people, feed people, bathe people, give them medication, doctors' visits, mental health stuff," Visser said. "But what it really boils down to is there's no beds."

That's what she worries about most with Evan, whose last day at the motel would have been Friday. The clean clothes and food can only get him so far.

"In seven days, he's still going to be homeless," Visser said.

TOUGH CROWD

It took the officers that work around Visser some time to get used to what she's doing, because her work has very little in common with what they learned in rookie school, and their work has very little in common with her education in social work.

"Our functions are completely different," Visser said.

Police officers can be a tough crowd when it comes to accepting new social programs and initiatives, acknowledged Maj. Casey Clark, who was head of the department's 21st Century Policing unit, which the social workers fall under, until recently. He now leads the department's Northwest Patrol Division, where Jackie Cole, the department's second full-time social worker, is stationed.

"Like anything, to get the buy-in of the men and women, they have to see the value of it," Clark said.

But social workers like Visser and Cole have rapidly proven that they can offer an insight many officers don't have, Clark said. They're experts at leveraging the social services available in a community to help people in need, and they have the time to focus on improving quality of life in the way a patrol officer might not.

"So many times, our officers don't have time to extend the type of social services help a social worker can, and in that they've been truly invaluable," Clark said.

Usually, the first time an officer sees the value of what she's doing, it's for purely pragmatic reasons, Visser said. They learn she can work with mentally ill or addicted people police aren't trained to handle, outside of making sure they don't hurt other people.

"As soon as they were able to pass off someone, I think they understood," Visser said.

It also helped that when she started her work, there was immediately a reduction in calls about most of her clients.

Officers have come to realize that the social workers can effectively deal with people suffering from mental illness or homelessness, long-term struggles that "[police] don't really have the solution to," Clark said.

It's also far easier to have someone within the department who officers can contact instead of having to work with an outside social worker, Clark said.

As it stands, a Little Rock officer's ability to deal with someone having a mental health crisis is hit-or-miss, Visser said.

It has a lot more to do with their temperament than the basic training they get, she said.

Some officers take the 40-hour voluntary crisis intervention training, but Visser thinks it should be mandatory.

A lot of officers end up clicking with the course's lessons, Visser said. They learn new approaches to dealing with people who, more often than not, would be better served by showing empathy and kindness than by being arrested for a minor offense like trespassing or public intoxication.

Still, Visser knows that those small crimes will land her clients in jail, and so she tries to be realistic with them. She described her conversation with one man, who was frequently picked up for public intoxication, sometimes multiple times in a week.

"I know you're not gonna stop getting drunk and no one has that authority to tell you to stop drinking, so go inside so you're not getting arrested," Visser said.

That man was at a low, Visser said, having lost a good-paying job during the pandemic and spiraling into substance abuse and poor mental health. It took about seven months to get him stable, she said, but now he's been able to come to grips with his addiction and get sober.

"Since then, he hasn't been arrested, there haven't been calls, he's not running amok in the streets," Visser said. "He's healthy, for the first time in a while."

That's the best part of her job, Visser said, when an officer comes in to ask her if she's seen someone who used to tangle with police frequently, and she gets to tell the officer that the person has found a place to live and they're making progress in their life again.

Visser has a degree of independence because her salary is paid by the annual Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.

In the past, Visser's had the backing of former Chief Keith Humphrey, who intended to hire three full-time social workers, one to work at each of the city's police substations, she said.

They've hired one, Cole, who works at the Northwest Patrol Division headquarters, but filling the third position has been more tricky, Visser said. A handful of intern and part-time social workers have helped out at different times, all paid for by the federal grant.

Visser has no illusions that her position is permanent, though. She freely acknowledged that a new mayor or police chief that didn't see the benefits of her work might put an end to the program.

It worries her, but it doesn't stop her from going out every day, doing what she can.

RENDERING AID

Some days are better than others in this job, and sometimes there's only so much one person can do.

That Friday afternoon, before meeting with Evan, Visser spent some time trying to track down two people who came to the Main Library downtown to get out of the heat and try and get some help from the Central Arkansas Library System's social worker, Rebecca Beadle.

Beadle called Visser, thinking she might have more resources to help the two -- Jack and Cheyenne -- than the library did.

"All the agencies in the city call me when they don't know what to do," Visser said.

But the two left, and despite scouring the library to find them, Visser and Beadle couldn't spot them.

On foot, they couldn't have gotten far. So, with little more than names and a picture taken from a security camera video, Visser drove around downtown, seeing if she could get in touch and see what they needed most.

Behind the wheel of her car -- a decommissioned police cruiser that still has emergency lights in the windows -- Visser recalls her fear on May 17, when a homeless man was shot and killed on Broadway, and she immediately worried it was one of her clients.

Visser called him again and again, but when she got no answer, she took off across town to a camp she knew he frequented. As she pulled up, he greeted her, unsure why she was so worried about him.

"That is honestly part of my job, worrying about people who may be dead," Visser said.

Most of Visser's clients have no stability, no home address, often no phone, she said.

Some groups offering aid seem to miss that reality, even if they mean well, Visser said. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture offers free food boxes, but they require an address. They won't accept "homeless" on the form, Visser said.

The result is that when Visser helps her clients fill out the applications, a lot of people end up 'living' at the police station, at least on paper. That tends to work, she said.

"At the end of the day, a lot of places are out of touch with the true need," Visser said.

A lot of Arkansans probably don't recognize the true need, either, Visser said.

In 2020, a group reported about 2,300 homeless people in the state during what's called a point-in-time count, where volunteers go out and tally every homeless person they can find in one day to get an idea of the scale of the crisis. It's not expected to be an exact total.

"That's low," Visser said.

Because of that, a lot of people probably don't see the housing problem as a pressing threat needing a solution, Visser said. It's not going to motivate them to do anything, especially with all the other concerns people are bombarded with day after day in the country.

Even when people do step up and try to help, even with government backing, Visser thinks it often results in a lot of money put toward small fixes and supplies instead of a coordinated effort to address homelessness, poverty, mental illness and substance abuse in the nation's communities.

It's easy to get overwhelmed, especially when the problems of mental illness and substance abuse combine, but as long as she's helping a few people, Visser can keep hopeful.

Visser tells "the starfish story," a type of parable that circulated among social workers when she was in school.

A young boy sees an old man on a beach covered with starfish who have washed up and can't get back into the ocean. Among the hundreds of stranded creatures, the old man tosses a few back.

The boy asks the old man what he's doing, because he'll never get all the starfish into the sea. But that's not the point, the old man tells him. It's about helping as many as he can to safety.

Visser didn't find Jack or Cheyenne, the two that came into the library that Friday, but there's no question that she'll keep trying.

Most people who work for the police department put people in jail, but Visser spends a lot of her time getting people out, or visiting her people when they've landed there again. It doesn't really matter how many times they lose progress, or end up back there, she said.

"They know I'm not going to give up on them," Visser said.


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