MARCH 10, 2023 CRISIS RESPONSE ALEXANDRA GRANBERG Groundcover contributor Last month, Care-Based Safety, a grassroots group, announced that they have secured funding to pilot an unarmed, non-police crisis response program in Ypsilanti in mid-2023 – the first of its kind in Michigan, according to the group. How the program – for now referred to by CBS as the Future Program – will look is still evolving. Some elements will likely be included: mobile response groups on the streets and transformative justice tools – with focus on individual and community healing rather than punishment in the face of violence. Another element will be an urgent response program through a public, 7-digit phone number, separate from 911 and with no referrals to police. Washtenaw County’s mental health department currently provides a similar service for mental health crises – but unlike CBS’s hope for the Future Program, that is a police collaboration. CBS has asked several impacted groups for local feedback. They have also consulted similar, successful initiatives in cities across the US. The idea is that the pilot will inform a model that can be scaled up and later implemented in all of Washtenaw County. Any existing actions here would not be duplicated by existing departments. Rather, the program seeks to fill a gap. No violence, no police Last summer CBS broke out from, and is functionally independent of, CROS, Coalition for Re-envisioning Our Safety. CROS was formed in April 2021, after the Ann Arbor City Council passed a resolution to create a new, unarmed public safety program. CROS focuses on advocacy; CBS on research, program design and fundraising. While the resolution made no mention of independence from police, CROS and CBS intend to create such a model. “An unarmed response is not a true unarmed response unless it is unarmed non-police,” Hoai An Pham, a CROS member, said in an interview to Hour Detroit. Crucially, CBS response teams would not handle active violence involving guns or non-consensual domestic issues. It would address issues such as conflict de-escalation and wellness checks, involving for example mental health, overdose, post-violence situations and complaints. Despite this, concerns about a non-police response have been voiced by Washtenaw County Sheriff Jerry Clayton, among others. One worry is that a seemingly non-violent situation can escalate into violence, requiring police. According to a data review by the New York Times, however, it appears only a fraction of policing is devoted to handling violent crime. Citing the review, CBS writes that most emergency calls are about “interpersonal complaints, traffic-related issues, wellness checks and medical calls.” No police, no violence Homelessness and mental illness are often more prevalent among incarcerated people than in the general population. Members of CBS and CROS want to see a system that focuses on community well-being – preventing rather than criminalizing problematic behavior. In CBS’s strategic plan published in February, the group states: “We believe in a future where public health programs and infrastructure are resourced, including the creation of new, care-based programs, making policing and state-sponsored punishment obsolete.” Ideally, the new program will not be connected to police at all, providing an alternative to crises. But Natalie Holbrook, a CBS member and spokesperson based in Ypsilanti, and part of the American Friends Service Committee, says she would “personally prefer 911 calls related to hunger or mental health crises to be directed to the program, over what is happening now.” A Washington Post investigation from 2015 showed that every fourth person who was killed by police suffered with mental illness. The AA City Council in its proposal states some of these deaths occur “where the deployment of police officers was not necessary.” Some police are also concerned about this. Among them, though not alone, is former Ann Arbor Police Chief Michael Cox, who told the Michigan Daily that mental health training is inadequate – and that therefore it is not ideal to send police to deal with mental health calls. Mayor Christopher Taylor has said explicitly that police are overworked, forced to deal with situations best dealt with by unarmed personnel. Violent failure Reform remains the popular go-to among both local and federal politicians, when advocating change in the police system. But attempts at reform – whether material, intellectual or organizational – have proven insufficient in the past. Body cameras, a type of material reform, were introduced on a wide scale shortly after police fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014. Three years later a study showed that the increased surveillance had not prevented police from using unwarranted violence. When police killed David McAtee in the summer of 2020, they had simply turned off their cameras. Chokeholds had already been banned in New York for 20 years, when a police officer choked Eric Garner to death in 2014. The case drew attention and drove police reforms around the country. Five years before George Floyd died under the knee of now-former policeman Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, the city had carried out these types of reforms. Among them was a warning system to detect problematic cases within the police force. Chauvin, with 17 complaints filed against him at the time, had evidently escaped this. Inherent violence CBS states that re-training or reforming police “is not a viable solution, given that the underlying purpose of policing is fundamentally different from the underlying purpose of providing direct care.” Driving CBS and abolitionism, both of which have roots in the Civil Rights movement, is the idea that policing as a system is inherently violent. In the words of abolitionist leader Mariame Kaba: “Everywhere, have they suppressed marginalized GROUNDCOVER NEWS Non-police crisis response piloting in Ypsilanti populations to protect the status quo … When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.” The police and mass incarceration systems, they mean, are not broken but working as they were designed to – leaving nothing to “be fixed.” While CBS is informed by research and statistics, its members are also people of the community who in some way have been impacted by the current system, or love somebody who has been harmed by police – as is the case for Holbrook. She believes the state is incapable of providing the care and protection that a community can. Holbrook dreams of strong neighborhoods that look after themselves; sharing power, “rather than handing it over to the state,” which, she says, “takes individual power away.” “We simply want something else to rely on. A system rooted in care and compassion.” A river runs through it So far, funding for CBS efforts comes from the Michigan Justice Fund with the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, and United Way of Washtenaw County. At the time of writing, CBS is in the process of hiring two co-directors to head the pilot in Ypsilanti. The co-directors will help develop the program based on community feedback, as well as years of research and interviews with experts. In April, CBS hopes to finalize the design in order to put the program to practice this summer. After that, the group will dissolve, having fulfilled its function – passing on the leadership to the new response team and Future Program. Read more about the proposed program and background at linktr.ee/ carebasedsafety 11 PUZZLE SOLUTIONS K N Z P Z I A P E R S E N O A Z A F P O S T S C R I P T U M C P I Q T P E R P R O S Q E D I R D O N E R U T A D I F X G R O E F D T T O P E R C E N T C T I V K A M S X S A D G N Z A E D E P L X O H R D V I Z B I M E R F I G Q E X L I B T E V D F S W A V T V Z I D Q E F E E E U R L E J F O B E N D E R F N S F C O T E P Q L U E A B A S A T V L G C C Q I M J Q S C O E E U M I B I D C E U S A T R I N L O C O T I E R R E P O A D N A U S E A M T O E Q
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