LYNN — Mayor Jared Nicholson’s office’s Unarmed Response Initiative is in the process of finalizing its partnership with Eliot Community Human Service’s Community Behavioral Health Center, according to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer Faustina Cuevas.
By partnering with Eliot, the city will hire two employees to work at Eliot’s CBHC, Cuevas added. Those employees would be part of a team that will respond to behavioral-health calls.
The mayor’s office and its partners in the initiative, including Eliot and the Police Department’s Behavioral Health Intervention Program, presented information and updates on the initiative at a public forum Wednesday evening.
The partnership with Eliot, Cuevas said, will help meet the needs that a working group for the initiative identified.
Some residents of the city said they require an alternative to calling the police, according to the presentation. Community members the working group talked to, particularly from the Black and Afro-Latino communities, were scared of police response.
Having responders that are trained in dealing with mental-health crises, conflict resolution, and cultural humility was what the community wanted, Mo Barbosa, the director of community engagement for Health Resources in Action and a member of the working group, said.
The unarmed-response team at Eliot would fulfill those requirements, Cuevas said. Residents who require assistance but don’t want to call the police will be able to call CBHC.
The city will also hire an employee who will be based in the Public Health Department to oversee the partnership with Eliot, Cuevas said.
“It’s really important that we have somebody that’s a city employee to be able to oversee the program and make sure the contracts are being followed,” she said.
Cuevas added that there will be a community advisory board so the community can have a voice in the partnership.
Police Chief Chris Reddy presented what the department’s Behavioral Health Intervention Program is doing as part of the Unarmed Response Initiative. The Police Department is also partnering with Eliot for this program.
“We see tremendous benefits that this program will offer and overall, this is going to provide increased services to the community and better access to behavioral-health services for members of the community and it’s going to meet them where they’re at, out in the neighborhoods where they’re living and working,” Reddy said.
The program will have three team members: a clinician, a recovery coach, and a medic. Those three, he said, will respond with police on overdoses, Section 12s — involuntary commitments for mental-health treatment — person-in-crisis calls, suicidal persons, wellbeing checks, and panhandler calls.
“Our intention is, as we roll out this program, to learn from this as our starting point. And we expect that over time it’s going to evolve,” Reddy said. “[This] is an opportunity to bring really critical service from subject-matter specialists into the community to enable access to care so that we’re not dealing with individuals one time walking away and then coming back over and over again.”
The goal is to get residents connected to treatment and care, he said.
