The mood of the nation was very different five years ago in the wake of several high-profile deaths of Black individuals at the hands of law enforcement officers in the preceding decade.
In addition to the second-degree murder of George Floyd in May 2020 by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Virginia public policy has been shaped by the May 14, 2018 killing of Marcus-David Peters while he was having a mental health crisis.
Peters’ death led to calls for new ways to respond to such situations with a less than lethal response. The General Assembly convened a special session in the late summer of 2020 to address both the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other issues. One bill that passed established a system to be known as Marcus Alerts.
Albemarle County launched a program called the Human Services Alternative Response Team in July 2023.
“HART’s purpose is to respond and follow up on emergency calls that are mental health and/or substance use related through a collaborative, trauma-informed, human-centered approach,” reads a section of the Albemarle website.
Charlottesville’s version of the team is called ANCHOR, which stands for Assisting with Navigation, Crisis Help, and Outreach Resources. Council got an update at their meeting on July 7, 2025 from Human Services Director Misty Graves.
“We just had our first birthday,” Graves said. “We hit the ground running on July 1st of last year. So last week we celebrated our first birthday and that’s given us an opportunity to look back on how we’ve grown and developed and built this year.”
Graves said ANCHOR activities have been divided into “live calls” and “follow-ups.”
“Follow-ups are folks that had a contact with ANCHOR and need some additional time to follow up, touch base, make resources available for long term support since ANCHOR is really just a crisis response team,” Graves said.
In the first year, there were 395 encounters serving 250 individuals. The cases are also sorted into whether they’re caused by a mental health issue, a substance abuse issue, or a combination.
“About 64 percent of our calls are related as primary to mental health,” Graves said. “Then we have 13 percent as substance use as the primary concern. We have 14 percent that are both simultaneous.”
The remaining nine percent are other calls where ANCHOR assists in providing a death notification, a trespassing call, or some other issue.
Graves said everyone is a human being with a real story and she invited the mental health navigator to share more information. Norman Dorise said one case involved a family where one of the individuals was in a mental health crisis.
“The individual ended up needing to be placed under emergency custody order that the spouse had gotten,” Dorise said. “And during that process, it was a very scary process for both the individual who was experiencing that crisis as well as the spouse herself having to deal with it. But through Anchor’s response, we were able to help get that individual to the hospital where he was evaluated and unfortunately had to be sent for further hospitalization.”
Dorise said ANCHOR kept in contact with the spouse during that hospitalization, and the response helped connect the family to mental health resources they might not know were available.
A goal for the second year is to get software up and running that will allow real-time information on what ANCHOR is doing. Another is to work with the Emergency Communications Center to become eligible to be dispatched to more cases.
With a team of six, the ANCHOR service only operates from 8 a.m to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Before you go: This is the second of four stories from Charlottesville City Council’s meeting on July 7, 2025 that were published in the July 8, 2025 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement. Both this website and the newsletter are examples of Town Crier Productions.
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