SPOKANE, Wash. — A Spokane Police Officers is being recognized as a community hero for his work in some of the agency’s toughest cases.
Police Sergeant Richie Plunkett worked with the behavioral unity for three years, but he hopes his impact will last much longer.
“I don’t expect any type of award or anything like that,” Plunkett said. “I just do my job.”
Sgt. Plunkett is humble about the work he’s done with people in crisis. He started working with SPD’s behavioral health unit because of his background as a social worker and counselor.
“This gave me an opportunity to apply those skills on every call I went to,” said Plunkett. “It was something I was very much interested in and it showed police officers we have a different set of skills and we can do these things to make sure people are getting taken care of in the appropriate way.”
For Sgt. Plunkett, that’s happened in many forms including helping people get treatment at the Spokane Regional Stabilization Center.
It didn’t take long for the employees there to notice.
“On a normal day, it wasn’t uncommon that Officer Plunkett would stop in and be like ‘hey, how’s so-and-so?’ or ‘can you tell so-and-so I’m here? I got some cigarettes for him,'” said Alyssa Ecklind, the health and resource coordination manager at Spokane Regional Stabilization Center.
Employees at the center said Sgt. Plunkett is always going above and beyond in his job. Being able to help one of the employees there was part of why Plunkett got nominated for the community impact award.
Ecklind said one of her loved ones was having a mental health crisis. At first, she did not want to get law enforcement involved, but she said Plunkett showed up and changed her perspective.
“Knowing that we have someone out there on the front lines that truly cares about people in crisis and about people’s mental health and responding in a way that is helpful not harmful. It gives me a sense of trust,” Ecklind said.
This month, Plunkett was honored for that work by the Light a Lamp Foundation. He was also recently promoted to Sergeant and will be transitioning out of the behavioral health team, but he’s training other officers to continue what he’s started.
“I did tell Officer Plunkett at the Impact Awards that we were going to miss him,” Ecklind said.
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