Oakland Becomes Latest City Looking To Take Police Out Of Nonviolent 911 Calls

[Nevilledog]

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NPR
@NPR
Oakland is launching a pilot project to funnel some crisis calls away from police — and toward new mobile teams made of civilian EMTs and people with lived experience in the mental health, addiction, criminal justice or homeless services systems.

Oakland Becomes Latest City Looking To Take Police Out Of Nonviolent 911 Calls
The city's fire department will oversee the pilot project that aims to pair an EMT with someone with lived experience in the mental health, addiction, criminal justice or homeless services systems.
npr.org
8:27 PM · May 18, 2021

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997542990/oakland-becomes-latest-city-looking-to-take-police-out-of-nonviolent-911-calls

Some of the boldest reform experiments underway in the wake of the national reckoning on police violence and systemic racism following George Floyd's murder are pilot projects in Denver, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and elsewhere. They're confronting hard questions about what role, if any, police should play in responding to calls for persons in a nonviolent mental health, drug and alcohol or homeless crises.

This fall, Oakland aims to join those cities when it launches a pilot project to funnel some nonviolent, noncriminal calls to new, mobile teams of civilians.

"Not only mental health, but the whole range of lower-level issues that shouldn't require a gun to be part of the response," says Rebecca Kaplan, the city's vice mayor who has championed the nascent program called Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland, or MACRO.

Kaplan says sending police to mental health and behavioral calls they are not trained to handle is a grave mistake cities keep repeating. "Those cases often go very badly and sometimes horrifically," she says. "We have seen horrific deaths, killings by police throughout the nation when they've been called for matters that deal with mental health or homelessness or public intoxication — or any of these matters that are not a violent crime — and should be better handled by a non-police response."

*snip*

[The Magistrate]

1. This Is An Excellent Idea, Ma'am

[Nevilledog]

2. I agree, my dear.

[lamp_shade]

3. kick for visibility.

[tonedevil]

4. In a shorter form...

Defund The Police.

[Hekate]

5. Redistribute the funding more appropriately

[Hekate]

6. Excellent plans