LYNN — Faith and community leaders gathered at Bethel AME Church in Lynn Wednesday night for a community briefing on an unarmed crisis-response team, which would aim to intervene in non-violent emergencies.
This team, which would offer an alternative to an armed police response, is about pushing back against the idea of structural racism in this country, said Director of Lynn United for Change Issac Simon Hodes.
“This is deeply entangled with the new Jim Crow,” said Hodes.
Adriana Paz, co-chair of the Lynn Racial Justice Coalition, mentioned that it is often said that there are different Lynns, to describe unequal access to housing, jobs, and other conventional opportunities. However, according to Paz, citizens also have unequal access to “public safety and how we care for each other.”
Ella Thomas from Lynn United for Change said the police once came to her house and handcuffed her son, who was suffering from a mental illness.
“If we had something else in place except for the police officers, none of this would have happened,” said Thomas.
That was why, according to Paz, the city needed a program to decrease the likelihood of incarceration and to decriminalize homelessness and mental-health problems.
“ALERT is that program,” said Paz.
ALERT stands for All Lynn Emergency Response Team, and is designed to respond independently from the police in non-violent emergencies. Last summer, the city approved a budget, after more than a year of discussions between the mayor’s office and the Lynn Racial Justice Coalition, that allocated $500,000 to form an unarmed response team. The goal was to begin a pilot program by the start of next year.
“We had that money that was allocated for an unarmed crisis-response team, but there is no team on the ground,” said the Rev. Bernadette Hickman-Maynard, a racial-justice organizer at Essex County Community Organization (ECCO) who also co-chairs the Lynn Racial Justice Coalition.
Hickman-Maynard said this meeting was meant to educate the community about ALERT and to communicate that there are people supportive of this effort. It was also held to answer questions from the community “with the hopes of being able to move the needle and push things forward, because progress has stalled,” she said.
It happened because the police wanted to emphasize co-response, she said, “which is that the ALERT would respond with the police.” For now, $500,000 has been used to pay for one consultant, and the Lynn Racial Justice Coalition and City of Lynn are in the process of hiring another consultant that would use the funds.
“We want to make sure that Mayor Nicholson in his budget funds it at least at the same level,” said Hickman-Maynard.
According to Mayor Jared C. Nicholson, the program funding in next year’s budget is “probably not going to be on the level of $500,000,” as this was an initial allocation that was meant to be spent over time, and the planning for its expenditure is ongoing. The mayor also said that the police “expressed their commitment to be part of the conversation.”
“If we want this to work, we need everyone at the table,” said Nicholson.
Director of the Community Safety Department in Albuquerque, N.M. Mariela Ruiz-Angel, who spoke about her successful experience of building an unarmed crisis-response team, also stressed that collaborative efforts and long-term relationship building between the activists and the police were needed to make the project successful.
According to her, in their case, the police expressed their concerns with the project too, saying “we are going to go save you.” The activists had to go to the police, talk to them, and even make special cards just for them.
“The fear was leading to the pushback that we were getting,” she said.
Ruiz-Angel said the police — to a certain extent — should be utilized, but the idea is to create a response team trained to determine if a police officer is needed. But it turned out that “less than 1 percent of the calls we were out for, we needed a police officer,” said Ruiz-Angel.
She also mentioned that a lot of people will not call the police for fear it might negatively affect them, and that’s why an alternative was needed that can help people ensure they are making the best choices for them without putting them at risk of getting a criminal record or imprisonment.
“We know that the police should have input, but they should not have decision-making power about how ALERT is designed. Police should not be designing the alternative to police,” said Hickman-Maynard.
