Times-Herald (Vallejo)

Oakland considers alternativ­es to police response

- By Shomik Mukherjee smukherjee@times-standard. com

For all that Kim Dean was experienci­ng — the morning's “hella cold” wintry chill, the days-old bandages peeling off her wounded leg, the lack of weekend shelter — none would be classified by police as an active emergency.

So when two community workers found the 54-yearold hunched over an East Oakland curb, they calmly engaged her in conversati­on, offering blankets and new socks, and one attended to Dean's leg with steely focus, carefully applying saline to flush the wound before redressing it with gauze.

After handing Dean some extra bandages for later, the pair drove away in a van marked MACRO — Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland. They planned to circle back to the area later that week to see how she was doing.

“It's harder for women, especially older women, to survive out here,” Fran Ramirez, a trained medical technician and MACRO team member, said later as she applied sanitizer to her hands. “If you don't have a full-time encampment or another setup, you don't sleep at night. You have to be on guard.”

These are the lessons learned by workers at MACRO, a $16 million program in the Oakland Fire Department that began in April with the intention of taking nonviolent, nonemergen­cy 911 calls out of law enforcemen­t's hands. But they're also trying to provide assistance before those calls need to be made.

Cities across the Bay Area and beyond are experiment­ing with community nonpolice response, hailed by progressiv­es and police reformists as a pathway for treating those experienci­ng crises with compassion, not suspicion. San Francisco, New York City and Portland have all started pilot programs, while cities across the East Bay, from Antioch to Hayward, have explored the addition of mobile crisis

teams.

In Oakland, though, MACRO often finds itself under scrutiny from those who had expected the teams to spend most of their time responding to

lower-stakes 911 calls, allowing Oakland police to focus on violent crime.

Only about 3% of MACRO responders' 854 interactio­ns with the public involved a 911 dispatch from September,

when such calls began transferri­ng, to the end of the year. Another 3% came from community referrals — direct requests by the public for MACRO's assistance for themselves or others.

The rest of the interactio­ns were classified as “on-view” or “self dispatch,” which involve two-member teams driving the streets and looking for those who need help.

That's not enough for members of law enforcemen­t such as Barry Donelan, head of the Oakland police officers' union, who said the program's focus means it hasn't made a dent in the flood of emergency calls to police and fire department­s.

And it isn't just police officers who have complained. Members of a citizen group appointed to advise MACRO on its affairs say the program's leaders don't sufficient­ly communicat­e their progress.

“The community kept saying that people need someone other than the police department to show up because cops make us nervous,” said Millie Cleveland, a member of the community advisory board. “If that's the case, they need to be able to respond to calls that come into the dispatch center.”

 ?? KARL MONDON — BAY AREA NEWS GROUP ?? Fran Ramirez, a medical technician with Oakland's alternativ­e emergency response unit, MACRO, treats the leg of a woman found sitting on a curb Dec. 16in East Oakland.
KARL MONDON — BAY AREA NEWS GROUP Fran Ramirez, a medical technician with Oakland's alternativ­e emergency response unit, MACRO, treats the leg of a woman found sitting on a curb Dec. 16in East Oakland.

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