LYNN — All Lynn Emergency Response Team (ALERT), the city’s unarmed crisis-response team, is set to enter a new phase as two social workers from the MANTIS Consulting Firm updated the City Council on the project’s feasibility on Tuesday night.
Virginia Leigh and Rebecca Camargo, social workers at MANTIS, told councilors that the next step for ALERT is to open communications with the community and allow for questions and concerns from residents about the team.
“We assessed over five national models of unarmed-crisis responses and held over 35 hours of conversations with our stakeholders,” said Leigh. “Our stakeholders include the Lynn Fire Department, Lynn Police Department, Lynn Racial Justice Coalition, the mayor’s office and other subsidiaries.”
Following the engagement period, the next steps include creating a team to create a model for handling unarmed crises and then running a pilot program. When Ward 3 Councilor Coco Alinsug asked how long the process would take, Leigh said the phases could take somewhere between 18 months to two years.
“It very much depends on the size of the team and it depends on their timetable,” said Leigh. “There is a lot of planning and we need to take into account the needs of consumers.”
The mayor’s office is involved in the creation of the team.
Police Chief Christopher P. Reddy also spoke to the council and agreed that there is space in the city for the ALERT team. He said there needs to be a place for the Police Department to discuss public safety and how the team responds to incidents.
“How that response will occur is a complex process,” said Reddy. “These are incidents that occur across the city in a 24/7 time frame. We believe that as part of this process, the Police Department should have a seat at the table, not after the process is done.”
The City Council approved a $500,000 line item in the fiscal year 2022 budget for the creation of the ALERT team under the administration of former Mayor Thomas M. McGee. The team’s job will be to respond to non-violent situations by employing crisis-response workers in social work, emergency-medical assistance and de-escalation.
The team’s formation is in response to the Lynn Racial Justice Coalition, which has called for a decrease in the use of force during public-safety incidents and racial equity throughout the city.
MANTIS Consulting, along with other groups and firms, was hired to help create a blueprint to establish an unarmed-crisis plan in July. The firm helped to create the CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) program, a mobile crisis-intervention program, in Eugene, Ore. and did similar work in Oakland, Calif. and Rochester, N.Y.
Leigh said the pilot program in Lynn would be unique to New England.
“As far as I have been able to see, Lynn might be the first community to do what we are doing in Massachusetts,” she said.
