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Date: 8/8/2022
NORTHAMPTON/AMHERST – On July 31, Our Revolution Massachusetts spearheaded the second part of a forum on initiatives by Massachusetts cities and towns to fundamentally change the way policing is done in their communities. The first occurred in April.
This forum continues its focus on the creation of alternatives to using police to respond to the most common types of emergencies, particularly those that do not involve violence. Several cities across the state have already moved to take emergency response services out of police hands.
For places like Amherst and Northampton, many of these emergency services have moved to other city departments, while Cambridge HEART (Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team) functions as a new, non-government service.
The people who spoke about these alternatives during the forum were Earl Miller, the director of Amherst’s Community Responders for Equity, Safety and Service (CRESS); Sean Donovan, the director of Northampton’s Department of Community Care; Stephanie Guirand, the senior researcher for Cambridge HEART; Adriana Paz of Prevent the Cycle and Barbara Ortiz of Cambridge HEART.
Amherst
Miller is Amherst’s first director for CRESS, which provides unarmed alternatives to policing.
“We are a free-standing public safety department,” said Miller. “We work with the Fire and Police Departments as peers.”
Currently, CRESS has eight multi-racial responders who just started their fifth week of training out of eight weeks. By September, Miller said they will be taking 911 calls involving anything from non-violent disputes to noise complaints, as well as dealing with folks who have mental health challenges.
“I think we all have to come to some sort of agreement that a 911 call represents some sort of societal breakdown,” said Miller. “If we continue to address problems from a standpoint of how 911 calls work, we’re going to really miss the opportunity to get upstream.”
All of CRESS’s responders are paid the same, and Miller said that the organization prioritized lived-in experience as much as educational experience when considering who joins.
“We’re building an institution; not something that’s
going to be here for a couple of weeks,” said Miller. “It’s really meaningful for us that [CRESS employees] have the same employment opportunities as everyone else in public safety.”
Miller said they are not infallible, and he plans to use the next five years to find out what works and what does not with CRESS. “We’re looking at the amount of 911 calls we take, but most importantly, we’re looking at the folks who felt like public safety was not an option for them,” said Miller. “[We want] them to feel like they have a public safety department that they can engage with … give us a chance to see the feeling folks have in our community.”
Northampton
In December 2021, Donovan was named the first implementation director for Northampton’s Department of Community Care, which is part of the wider Health and Human Services Department.
During a City Council meeting in May, Donovan, who also spent 10 years with Wildflower Alliance in Holyoke, said that the goal of the Department of Community Care is to address racial and social inequities by building “equitable, non-police, non-clinical responses for all while centering its most vulnerable community members in their struggles with emotional distress, substance use, houselessness, meeting basic needs, navigating conflicts and other related challenges.”
During the forum, he said Northampton is working with the University of Massachusetts Amherst Center for Program Evaluation to help the city evaluate their success with this department, in the future.
“In Northampton, we are between public health and public safety, which is unique,” said Donovan. “We’re figuring out an experiment here, and that gives us some sort of buy-in to ideas about prevention and thinking about how we’re using elements of harm reduction in our work that is already part of the public health framework.”
“We’re trying to create a separate team which has the support our public safety team,” continued Donovan. “And [this] really came from demands from our greater community, particularly folks impacted by policing because of their racial identity, their disabilities, being queer and trans, [being] immigrants.”
Donovan said the department has not entered the training phase yet but they did conduct an initial workshop back in July with Wildflower to learn more about co-regulation and de-escalation. “Beyond de-escalation, we’re trying to get at, ‘How do people connect with other folks in really challenging moments?’” said Donovan. “One thing I’m helping to do … while we’re making these institutional changes within our public safety framework, we’re also trying to offer opportunities for cultural shifts. Our program at Northampton is really trying to figure out how can we be in relationships with people differently.”
A lot of these discussions, according to Donovan, will include breaking down what it means to talk about mental health challenges and learning that context matters. “If we can bring people that have their own lived-in experience…there’s already a baseline for de-escalation,” said Donovan. “I really hope that we will have a really effective first-responder team that we’re going to start hiring for this fall, but on the other side of things, I really hope we just have more people in our community that have the skills and willingness to show up for each other.”
While they are in the beginning stages of the department, Donovan said there will be some public events in Northampton called the “Resilient Community Series.” The first one is Aug. 24.
Our Revolution Massachusetts is organizing a grassroots political revolution to challenge power and to prioritize the needs of all people and our planet. According to their website, they are building a statewide movement by fighting for economic, racial, social, sexual, gender and environmental justice for all.
People can watch a recording of the full forum on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/OurRevolutionMA/videos/731705051258622/.