‘We don’t need police, period.’ Who should handle mental health 911 calls in Sacramento?
Against the backdrop of last summer’s national protests demanding police reforms, including defunding the police, the Sacramento City Council in July approved a plan to shift who responds to mental health crises, the homeless and other nonviolent calls away from police officers.
Reeling from George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis and multiple high-profile killings of Black men by Sacramento police, protesters at the time lambasted the plan, saying it didn’t go far enough to redirect services from the Sacramento Police Department’s $157 million budget.
Nearly a year after Floyd’s death, city leaders and the department’s new director say they’re on track to deploy the “right response,” even though changes likely won’t be fully implemented until July 2022. But community advocates — who said such an alternative response model was desperately needed — are criticizing how the department is being developed and who’s behind it.
They say the burgeoning department’s director, a former employee of two capital region police agencies, is developing the model without enough community input and could undermine the kinds of systemic reforms they believe are needed.
“This is just a clever way to continue funding police,” said Asantewaa Boykin, a registered nurse and a volunteer with Mental Health First Sacramento. “I don’t know what they’re doing, but it doesn’t sound like they’re sticking to their mission. ... We don’t need police, period. Specifically in those situations.”
Boykin is referring to City Manager Howard Chan’s appointment of Bridgette Dean as the director of the Department of Community Response. She was appointed as interim director in July. Since then, she continued to develop the new agency until late February when she became the department’s permanent director and tasked to roll out its response model.
Dean, a licensed clinical social worker, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work from Sacramento State, worked for the Sacramento Police Department. There, she oversaw its mental health and hospital units, along with the police homeless outreach Impact Team. Before that, she ran the Social Services Unit for the Roseville Police Department under Police Chief Daniel Hahn before joining him in Sacramento.
Dean said she is committed to creating an alternative that connects people with community-based services and long-term assistance while reducing repeated 911 calls for service. That help would include mental health services, drug abuse recovery, housing, medical treatment and food, along with other services not yet identified.
Police presence likely to persist
Dean and Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg say the Department of Community Response is squarely on that path to diverting tens of thousands of calls away from police.
“We must create a consistent non-law enforcement response to crises in our community that don’t involve serious violations of the law,” Steinberg said during an interview with The Sacramento Bee. “On homelessness, for example, we want to get police out of that business.”
Some situations will likely still require a law enforcement component, including the use of existing police dispatchers, as the program starts up, they said.
Dean said police would still be required to respond if criminal activity was reported or when the situation is not safe in a crisis that can escalate. She wants to work collaboratively with police and firefighters, because she says she believes that change must come from within the system.
“Even if there’s a safety situation, (community response teams) will still respond with police,” Dean said. “Police should be responding to criminal activity, and homelessness is not a criminal activity.”
With the exception of police involvement, the plan is similar to Mental Health First, which is part of the Oakland-based Anti Police-Terror Project and responds to calls for help from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Friday through Sunday. People call the volunteers directly at 916-670-4062 or reach out to MH First on Facebook or Twitter.
MH First and its parent APTP seek “to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color,” by providing help during psychiatric and drug abuse emergencies, as well as domestic violence situations that require victim extraction.
“Our goal is to minimize police contact with people who need care, so they don’t end up dead,” Boykin said.
Boykin, a nurse who runs the 40-person volunteer Sacramento chapter, is worried Dean’s past work may lead to the new agency’s quick demise by undermining its intended goal of eliminating police involvement.
‘Judge her on the job she does’
Steinberg disagrees, and says Dean has an advantage in developing a non-law enforcement response to crises by understanding how police departments work.
“Because you have worked for the Police Department and you’re a social worker and you’re respected in the community means you can’t lead a new approach? I think that is just a reactive point of view,” Steinberg said. “And it’s not fair. Judge her on the job she does and how she puts this department together.”
Dean hopes her own experiences with mental illness, poverty and homelessness demonstrate her compassion for helping those in need.
She was one of nine children to two parents who both suffered from mental illness and struggled with addiction. At the age of 16, Dean quit high school to help raise her younger siblings after her father took his own life. She says she grew up in extreme poverty and had her first two children by the age of 19.
“I share all of that, as someone who has been homeless with two of my babies and as a single mother, to let you know that the opportunity to do this work every day is important to me,” Dean told the City Council on Feb. 2.
Establishing partnerships with existing community organizations is crucial, Dean said. She plans to allocate 63% of the department’s budget to funding these groups and services. About 18% of the budget will go to labor costs, and 19% will go to one-time purchases of equipment and vehicles, she said.
Last month, Dean told council members she was scheduling meetings with groups to discuss youths and families, mental health, homelessness and drug abuse — four key areas that will be the focus of advisory panels for the department.
A disconnect with local groups?
Ryan McClinton, who participated in initial discussions with the mayor’s office about creating an alternate response model, said the agency’s development was supposed to occur transparently with significant input from community organizations, but that isn’t happening.
McClinton, who grew up in south Sacramento, is a program manager for Public Health Advocates and is developing a statewide campaign to transform first-response models.
The advocacy group, which is based in Davis, is gathering data to uncover the best response models to recommend to cities and what existing policy to support that transformation. The campaign is starting with Sacramento, Stockton and San Diego, he said.
McClinton said Dean has been extremely difficult to reach with unanswered emails and promises of scheduling meetings to discuss the department’s development. McClinton said Dean has created a “limited vacuum” that will only draw in a small group of community groups while shutting out the rest.
“What was supposed to happen and what is actually happening are two different worlds,” McClinton said. “How do you understand the need if you’re not connected to those who are already serving these communities?”
Boykin said Dean’s role could leave police in the mix, and may lead to the city deciding there’s no need for an alternative response. She said having 911 dispatchers deciding when to send police will lead to continued law enforcement involvement in these situations.
She was referring to police confrontations like the one involving Joseph Mann, 50, who was shot to death by Sacramento officers in July 2016 after 911 callers reported a man acting erratically and armed with a knife and gun. Authorities later determined Mann had a knife with a 3.5-inch blade. They never found a gun.
The first police officers who arrived that day in North Sacramento remained calm and tried to de-escalate the situation, video of the police shooting showed. Two officers arrived four minutes later and tried to run over Mann, before chasing him on foot and shooting him 14 times.
Several months later, the city of Sacramento reportedly agreed to pay $719,000 to Mann’s father to settle a civil lawsuit.
“I so desperately want to be wrong,” Boykin said of the Department of Community Response’s success. “If they do what they set out to do, it would be revolutionary.”
Dean ‘moving as fast as she can’
Bob Erlenbusch of Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness has a lot of faith in Dean’s abilities to build the foundation of the new and different department. He called Dean a “powerhouse” with a straightforward personality who “understands her mission” because of her past life experiences.
“She’s the ideal person to get this up-and-running,” said Erlenbusch, executive director of the homeless advocacy group. “I think she’s moving as fast as she can.”
He said the department Dean is developing promises to divert a majority of these crisis calls away from police. The homeless community has a high level of distrust for law enforcement officials, Erlenbusch said, and even officers with good intentions have been met with reluctance.
“You’re standing over a person, and you have a police uniform, a badge, a gun and a can of mace, they’re just not going to trust you,” Erlenbusch said. “We’ve heard from officers who said they offered a hotel voucher and they turned it down.”
So, it’s important that this department, which wants to serve people in crisis around-the-clock, has a team with a variety of skills. Erlenbusch said Dean needs to have on her team social workers, mental health experts, people trained in de-escalation techniques, registered nurses or physician assistants and drug recovery counselors.
And Dean’s team needs to be diverse, with people who live in the neighborhoods the department is serving. Erlenbusch said Dean’s team should be made of women, Black people, Latinos, Asians, bilingual language speakers, members of the LGBTQ community, young people and former homeless people.
“Bottom line, it has to be a diverse team in every sense,” Erlenbusch said. “It can’t just be a bunch of old white guys.”
Erlenbusch said he understands that Dean’s department would still require police to respond some of the time — like when a crime has been reported or someone was spotted with a weapon. But Erlenbusch said he expects there will still be a large majority of the calls that won’t need police, and that’s a significant change.
Similar community response models have succeeded in Oregon and Denver, Erlenbusch said.
Early success will be critical, Steinberg says
Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets, commonly referred to as CAHOOTS, has been operating for 31 years in Eugene, Oregon. It provides the first response for crises involving mental illness, homelessness and addiction by sending in two-person teams, a medic and a crisis worker, armed only with training and experience in the mental health field, including de-escalation and harm-reduction tactics.
The program responded to 24,000 calls in 2019, or about 20% of all calls in the city of 168,000 people. About 150 of those calls required police backup.
Sacramento police on average receive about 500,000 to 600,000 calls for service annually. Dean said about 34,121 of those calls in 2020 were related to homelessness, 13,374 calls were related to mental illness, 4,395 were calls involving someone needing a clinical mental health evaluation, 13,416 were family disturbance calls and 307 involved minors.
“And here, starting fresh, we have a great opportunity to show people that this approach will work everywhere,” Steinberg said of Sacramento’s potential.
Getting there will require “early wins” for the Department of Community Response, like at Cesar E. Chavez Plaza. The downtown square draws a lot of homeless encampments. Steinberg said “intensive outreach” is needed in that area to help find housing for homeless people there and make the park available to everyone.
As hiring begins, questions remain about model
The new department, given $5 million to launch by July 2022, will only succeed if there are enough homeless shelters or temporary housing to send people initially as response teams connect them with community resources, Steinberg said.
The department, and the wraparound services to support it, will take time to build.
“I’m impatient, but I also believe what’s worth doing is worth doing right,” Steinberg said. “I’m not into political hit-and-runs. ... I don’t think that serves the cause well.”
The needs of downtown will be different than those in East Sacramento, Oak Park, Del Paso Heights and south Sacramento, said McClinton, so there needs to be transparency about who is being hired, accountability about what is considered a success and which community groups will be working with Dean’s team.
Dean is already in the process of hiring team members who will “reflect the communities they serve.” She hopes to hire 85 employees who will provide services 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Her response teams will cover all areas throughout the city.
What remains unclear is how the creation of a community response model will affect the Police Department, specifically patrol officers routinely tasked with responding nonviolent, homeless and crisis calls.
When asked if he has any hope for the department succeeding, McClinton said “I do, because it’s what we have. ... The thing is, we need it to work.”
This story was originally published March 25, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
