On the same week that a jury delivered a guilty verdict in the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) convened a subcommittee to figure out how the country can better stem the avalanche of mental health issues into the laps of responding police officers, who aren’t trained as social workers.

Booker held up the letters of a police chiefs who want the federal government to step up funding for mental health and other social work services to alleviate officers slammed on routine calls by “the full power of a system” few of them are equipped to manage.

Sheriff Jerry Clayton of Michigan pleaded with Booker for more community-based services for mental health. So did other law enforcement officers.

As he gaveled in the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism’s first hearing – “Behavioral Health and Policing: Interactions and Solutions” – New Jersey’s junior senator tried to strike a bipartisan chord. Booker noted that his colleague, U.S. Senator John Cornyn, Republican from Texas, supports more mental health funding.

“I believe we can find common ground here,” he said. “There are so many issues we do a good job of delineating our differences. How can we come together, not to rehash our differences? It’s time we go that extra step.”

Booker gave a nod to a larger bill to try to advance policing in America, as he narrowed the subject today to those changes the country needs to undertake to respond to people with mental health challenges.

“We have failed to provide individuals with support services [to] live full lives,” he said. “We see our streets with people experiencing homelessness and short and tragic deaths. It often goes wrong. We are here to see how our great police officers try to deal with this issues. We have made police officers first responders. Officers are deeply frustrated and often overwhelmed because they are expected to play the role of social worker when they don’t have the skills to do so. These encounters can quickly escalate and turn deadly.

“Public health issues cannot be fixed with law enforcement services,” Booker added.

He stressed the need for health treatment access, housing, and medical support.

“I was elected [mayor of Newark] with a mandate to lower violent crime,” Bookeer said. “I spent hours and hours riding with police officers. I rode with them. I was humbled by their heroism. Their job is extraordinarily difficult. But what made their work harder was answering to a person in mental distress. They kept chasing call after call as opposed to doing work [they] needed to do; chasing calls when they could have more strategically used manpower preventing encounters with police.”