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Date: 9/13/2022
AMHERST – Amherst’s Community Responders for Equity, Safety and Service (CRESS) Department began active service on Sept. 6. The department provides an unarmed alternative to police response for various nonviolent calls as well as mental health support and community engagement.
CRESS’s 10-member staff consists of seven responders, a program assistant, an implementation leader and Director Earl Miller. Eight staff members are from Amherst and/or lived in the town for a significant period of time preceding the department’s inception. The majority of staff are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and peoples of color), some are parents, some are University of Massachusetts Amherst students, some are young professionals fresh out of college and two members are foreign language speakers (Spanish and Swahili, respectively). All have at least some degree of experiences in social service.
Miller described the interview process as “intensive,” explaining that “we not only wanted to find out if they were the right fit for us but if also whether we were the right fit for them.”
Staff training ran from July 5 to Sept. 2, with extensive help from the community including the Amherst Police Department (APD), Amherst Fire Department (AFD) and several mental health activism groups such as the Wildflower Alliance of Holyoke. Miller made a point to compliment both departments and the community groups for being a great help to the program as far as training, collaboration and to the respective chiefs of both departments for always making themselves available in any capacity necessary. Responders received comprehensive instruction in motivational interviewing, nonviolent communication, de-escalation, CPR/First Aid, situational awareness, suicide counseling, mental health and trauma treatment.
Miller explained motivational interviewing as “a mental health approach that’s rooted in relationship building and keeping someone in the driver’s seat of their own life,” while nonviolent communication centered around understanding how one’s communication can be interpreted by others with different perspectives with the aim of arriving at peaceful resolutions. He viewed the training window as extremely concentrated, as if four months’ worth of instruction were crammed into two.
The department will respond to all incidents within Amherst related to wellness checks, mental health calls, nonviolent school calls, non-trespass vagrancy, community engagement, assisting the Fire Department, assisting other police departments, assisting a citizen, assisting a business, administrative work and follow up. Noise complaints may soon join this list, but CRESS is still ironing out the details and jurisdiction of these calls with APD, as noise complaints can vary in their individual threat of violence. However, Miller was careful to note that CRESS is not bound to rigid guidelines and is here to serve the community in any way it can.
“That may look like driving people to get their groceries because there is not a good bus that can get them there, or taking people to the doctor’s office so they can get medical care and not get preventable conditions. It could look like anything. That piece about solving the problem that’s in front of people is what excites me most,” Miller said.
The goal of every CRESS response is to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all parties involved and to provide resources and relationships for those in need without threat of incarceration, violence or social ostracization. All responders are unarmed and will only practice consensual engagement, meaning that if they are called and upon arrival no one wants to speak with them, no one is obligated to speak with them or interact with them in any way.
While CRESS is defined as an alternative to traditional police response it is defined as a “co-equal department” in Miller’s words, meaning that it is not subordinate to APD, AFD or any other emergency response team. This model is unique when compared to similar programs throughout the country. Some programs, such as STAR in Denver, CO and CAHOOTS in Eugene, OR, perform similar tasks to CRESS, but they are usually subdivisions of their respective cities’ police departments,
Miller is no stranger to the issues he deals with professionally. As an impoverished child growing up in Holyoke during the crack cocaine epidemic, he witnessed drug addiction, violence, police brutality and mass incarceration on a daily basis. Along the way Miller said he dealt with foster care, homelessness and dropping out of high school – he later earned his GED at the Springfield OWL Center. Multiple members of his family were incarcerated and police raids were commonplace. As a result, Miller grew up with a fear of law enforcement.
Miller said his struggles instilled within him a powerful empathy and a deep desire to help others in his community, which he summed up by saying, “I really care about how people are treated, particularly people who have had challenging lives or trauma. I just know how easy it is for the world to forget those folks, so I try not to…I know what it’s like to have nothing.”
He began his career in Springfield at a recovery learning community center, one of five in the state, and at that time, the busiest. He saw between 60 and100 people per day, many of whom were suffering from addiction and homelessness. In dealing with so much homelessness, he decided to start a program in Springfield called Finding Shelter Through Peer Support, working to find housing to fit homeless individuals’ needs. He then took a position as coordinator of peer roles at the Center for Human Development. Next was a four-year stint as the director of recovery for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, until March of 2022 when he accepted the CRESS director role.
His philosophy on social work is that one should always lead with kindness and that all barriers blocking help must be eradicated, making it as easy as possible to seek and receive aid. The nonprofit element of CRESS is very important to him because he feels it establishes an even playing field:
“I think that one of the large failures of our society is the fact that how much money you have determines who’s going to help you, how competent they are, and how much they are going to care about their job. It’s an absolute shame,” he said.
Miller said he believes that people’s lives improve in the context of positive relationships, which is why much of CRESS’s procedure and rhetoric centers around relationship building, whether directly or by connecting those in need with outside resources, or by teaching them the skills to gain and maintain those relationships in their personal lives. When it comes to matters of addiction and mental health Miller firmly asserts that harm-reduction and preventative measures are far more positively impactful than reactionary and/or disciplinary reproach, because “people don’t get better when you punish them.”
In Miller’s opinion, CRESS is only as valuable to the community as it is tangible. CRESS is founded upon community feedback, and this will continue to be a deciding factor in department decision making. In addition to regularly meeting with community members privately, Miller invites any Amherst resident to attend open office hours every Friday from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. to voice concerns, ask questions or just stop by and get to know the team. The office is located on the second floor of the Bangs Community Center at 70 Boltwood Walk.