OAKLAND, CA—When someone has a mental health crisis in Oakland, chances are good in the near future that police officers won't be showing up to try to calm them down.
The City Council this week unanimously signaled that it wants the fire department to handle mental health crises and other non-crime calls by sending out paramedics and counselors.
Although residents of Oakland and other cities have long discussed the benefit of dispatching special teams of civilians to deescalate tense situations, the idea picked up momentum in the wake of high-profile police killings of Black Americans and other people of color..
In the summer of 2019, the Oakland City Council authorized paying the Urban Strategies Council $40,000 to come up with a feasibility analysis of creating a non-police response team model such as the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets — CAHOOTS — program that the city of Eugene, Oregon, has successfully operated for three decades.
Until recently, Oakland administrators had been preparing to get the council's authorization to let a nonprofit operate such a program, but last month those that had been angling for the job pulled out following a contentious public safety committee debate. At that meeting, critics accused leading candidate Bay Area Community Services of doing poor work as a housing provider for the homeless.
Since then, the focus shifted to having the city run the so-called Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland program (MACRO) instead of farming it out to a third party.
"Through keeping MACRO in-house, the city would have oversight of the program and have the ability to monitor compliance," Vice Mayor Rebecca Kaplan wrote in a memo to council members.
Dozens of Oakland residents, city employees and activists supported the focus shift during Tuesday's council meeting, and in the days leading up to it.
"The intersection of mental health crisis, Blackness and law enforcement is too often a deadly cocktail for Black and Brown people going through a mental health crisis in Oakland," Cat Brooks, co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project and executive director of the Justice Teams Network, said in a written statement.
The Anti Police-Terror Project started its own free non-police response to people experiencing mental health episodes, substance abuse crises or domestic violence, called MH First Oakland. By bringing the MACRO response in-house, Brooks said, the city can expand what has so far been a successful model.
San Francisco started piloting its own version of non-police responses in November as a collaboration between that city's public health and fire departments, with help from its Department of Emergency Management. Based first in the Tenderloin with a goal to expand, each response team includes a community paramedic, a behavioral health clinician and a behavioral health peer specialist.
Kaplan said the Oakland Fire Department is a natural fit for overseeing MACRO since it already responds to emergencies 24 hours a day and has the infrastructure for dispatching teams and carrying needed equipment such as radios.
Zac Unger, president of Oakland Firefighters Local 55, agrees.
"As an institution, we have a sort of cultural competency as a fire department — we have a brand that people trust," Unger said in an interview. "We want to expand on that."
He said that instead of firefighters taking on the duties of response teams, he hopes mental health professionals, EMTs and other qualified people with "deep ties to the community" will be hired within the fire department to do it.
Fire department responders already interact some with people suffering from mental illness or substance abuse, Unger noted.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions, however, and the city would need to create new job descriptions.
Councilmember Dan Kalb suggested using the $1.85 million earmarked for contracting the work to a third party to the fire department pilot for a year. But the city would have to find another revenue source to operate the program permanently or expand it.
That money could be redirected from the police department budget in the future. Creating the MACRO response teams is among the many recommendations proposed by the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, a group chaired by Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas and Councilmember Loren Taylor. The task force was formed last year to explore how the city could reallocate police department funds to other services to improve public safety.
Councilmember Treva Reid asked what would warrant calling police if the person in crisis picks up a weapon, even if a response team has been sent.
No one at the council meeting provided a specific answer. Crisis workers for Eugene's CAHOOTS program told NPR last year they occasionally call in police when a person is in immediate danger or poses a threat to someone else. It doesn't happen often; out of 24,000 calls in 2019, they called police for backup about 150 times.
Oaklanders who spoke at the meeting urged the city to get the program up and running, fast.
City Administrator Ed Reiskin said staff supports the MACRO program and promised to implement it however the council directs.
The council authorized Reiskin to explore ways of "expediting" the pilot phase of MACRO, including contracting with Alameda County for mental health specialists, hiring and training staff in the fire department, and potentially working with nonprofits who do mental health outreach. Reiskin is to report back to the council on March 16.
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