LYNN ― His name was Denis Reynoso.
Reynoso was a 29-year-old Iraq veteran, Lynn resident, and father of two with diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. According to NECN, on Sept. 5, 2013 Reynoso was walking around outside his apartment complex, shirtless and screaming, when a neighbor called 911. The police arrived and, according to former Police Chief Kevin Coppinger, Reynoso got ahold of one of the officers’ guns. In a police report, Reynoso was said to have fired the gun two times before officers fatally shot him.
Reynoso’s case was just one mentioned during a special Lynn City Council meeting on Oct. 24, 2020 discussing police accountability.
“At the end of the day, Mr. Reynoso lost his life to the hands of the Lynn police,” Local 201 Diversity Ambassador Matthew Griffin said at the meeting. “I ask this question: If there was an unarmed-response team that had approached Mr. Reynoso in this situation, a man that had seen the horrors of war in Iraq and what weapons can do and what it’s like to be on the other side of a violent attack, could an unarmed-response team have deescalated that situation?”
In most cases, unarmed crisis-response teams (UCRTs) consist of a dedicated group of mental-health and addiction-support professionals, social workers, medics, trained counselors or some combination thereof on hand to respond to nonviolent crisis calls.
“We believe that involving mental-health clinicians and other professionals in certain aspects of our response ― particularly those involving vulnerable populations ― could help to enhance public safety overall,” Police Chief Christopher Reddy said. “We also believe this could be an opportunity to enhance the important work that is already being done by our Behavioral Health Unit and other local providers in the effort to provide access to treatment and referrals for services to those in need.”
The Oct. 24, 2020 council meeting had a demonstrable effect on the city’s leadership: In addition to the introduction of body-worn cameras for Lynn police officers in April 2021, the City Council allocated $500,000 for the creation of Lynn’s UCRT ― the All-Lynn Emergency Response Team, or ALERT.
After a mayoral turnover and months of discussions and research aided by professional consultants, ALERT’s design phase is ready to begin. Prevent the Cycle was one of the community groups comprising the Lynn Racial Justice Coalition, which met monthly with former Mayor Thomas M. McGee to discuss the UCRT. Prevent the Cycle President Adriana Paz looks forward to continuing the meetings with newly-inaugurated Mayor Jared Nicholson.
“(McGee) needed to see what we were talking about and how relevant programs like an unarmed crisis-response team would be to Lynn,” Paz said. “Throughout the conversations we would try to be as honest as possible so that he understood the importance of this and knew where we were all coming from… hopefully we can set the same tone (with Nicholson).”
With ALERT’s stakeholders ― the mayor’s office, the Racial Justice Coalitionn and the police and fire departments ― ready to begin the consulting process anew, it’s time to talk about UCRTs, what they have to do with the death of Denis Reynoso, and what ALERT can do for Lynn residents.
“In a lot of ways, the city is leading on this (and) acting as a pioneer for adding this complement of folks to the public-safety team in response to a real community need,” said Nicholson.
The idea is to match people experiencing nonviolent crises related, but not limited to, mental illness, substance-use disorders, homelessness, and even noise complaints.
“I’ve been in the position where I had a noisy neighbor playing music at all types of hours and I had a newborn,” said city Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer Faustina Cuevas, who described her role in the creation of ALERT as acting as a “bridge” between stakeholders. “In this circumstance, I’ve heard community members say that’s one reason they would use an alternative crisis response. If we had an ALERT, I would call them instead of calling the police.
“I value my neighbor, I love my neighbor ― but also, I’m trying to sleep.”
While ALERT will be unique to a city of its size, according to Cuevas, most working UCRTs follow a 30-plus-year-old model: the CAHOOTS program.
CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) was developed by the self-described “hippies” at the White Bird Clinic, a community-support center based in Eugene, Ore. Since 1989, White Bird has been collaborating with the city’s police department in responding to crisis calls by sending out two-person teams of specialized medical and social workers, respectively.
While Cuevas and Nicholson were careful not to speculate too early as to what shape ALERT will take, one principal element is that its responders must, by definition, arrive at the scene unarmed.
“I believe uniformed men with guns showing up had heightened (Reynoso’s) PTSD that he was possibly going through,” Griffin said at the October 2020 meeting. “I believe a trained person, an expert in deescalating a situation for a person that has possibly an altered state of mind, could be very beneficial.”
Reddy, who was a captain at the time of Reynoso’s death, said the force remains “focused on increasing training and continuing to develop additional resources that may help to enhance our response options today and in the future.”
Meanwhile, the popularity of CAHOOTS and other programs speak for themselves: The State of Oregon reported that CAHOOTS saved the Eugene Police Department an average of $8.5 million each year from 2014-17, and White Bird crisis worker Ebony Morgan told NPR that the program called for backup in only 150 of 24,000 calls in 2019 ― a 99.3-percent success rate. But these statistics are not the only reason other cities have followed suit. Demand for UCRT-style programs has skyrocketed in recent years as critiques of police brutality have come to the forefront. Denver’s STAR program, Albuquerque and Durham’s Community Safety departments and New York City’s B-HEARD are examples of similar programs that have surfaced since 2020. Elsewhere in Massachusetts, Cambridge’s HEART program is in development under the oversight of its City Council.
According to Paz, the murder of George Floyd at the hands of ex-Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin was the catalyst for Lynn residents demanding change, and it was a mobilizing factor in October 2020’s meeting on police accountability.
“Just like everything else, one of the things that really put this in hypermotion was the murder of George Floyd, where it let us know that we really needed to move forward,” Paz said. “This is where the national landscape met local need and an unarmed-response team seemed like the next obvious step.”
ALERT’s stakeholders have heard the popular demand for a UCRT and are responding ― with an abundance of caution.
“We know (ALERT) is something that the previous mayor had begun to investigate and we recognize that there’s room for improvement in how we do behavioral-health responses in the city, as there always is in any types of responses,” Fire Chief Stephen Archer said. “But we are approaching it cautiously.”
None of the stakeholders were interested in hypothesizing on ALERT’s outcome, especially at the beginning of the design phase. Still, Nicholson hinted that the preparation will conclude by prioritizing civilian education.
“The final phase is to remind people that it’s out there,” he said. “I think from beginning to end, education is going to be an important part of the process.”
After all, every phase of ALERT’s rollout, every high-level conversation among stakeholders, and every report made by consultants ultimately has the residents of Lynn ― people like Reynoso and his family ― in mind.
“I think the most important part is that this is a benefit to the community. As we go through this process with the community in mind, and the different experiences that happen in Lynn, there’s a lot of folks who may say ‘I’ve never experienced anything like that here,'” Paz said. “But that shouldn’t eliminate the possibilities.”
