People who want funding redirected away from the Oakland Police Department toward non-cop interventions in so-called “mental health” cases often cite the program called MACRO as their preferred option. MACRO stands for “Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland.” Its boosters, who include vice Mayor Rebecca Kaplan, claim that, if someone is having a mental-health breakdown, it’s better to call in a firefighter, social worker, paramedic or psychological counselor than a cop. They say that cops aren’t trained for such interventions, which can lead to tragic consequences.
Cops are the first to agree. They don’t want to engage with mentally ill people either. The public also seems sympathetic. If a person is delusional and ranting on the streets, but is otherwise not dangerous, why call in armed officers, when a soft-spoken professional can be summoned to talk down the person in a peaceful way and de-escalate the situation.
This certainly makes sense. But problems arise when the details are examined. For instance, let’s say someone calls 911 because a mentally-ill person is acting out. Two cops arrive, and then quickly make the determination that this isn’t a matter for OPD, but for paramedics or social workers. They then call a number asking for such help. But it doesn’t arrive immediately, so what are the cops supposed to do? Wait until help arrives? They’re not trained for that, either.
When the Coalition met a few months ago with Kaplan, we asked her this question, and she replied that the cops could establish a perimeter around the mentally ill person until non-cop responders showed up. I thought then, and still think, that this is not very realistic. If the mentally ill person were located at, say, the corner of 12th Street and Broadway, are the cops supposed to shut down the entire intersection until a social worker arrives? What is the person starts walking away?
Another potential problem was pointed out by City Council member Treva Reid during a hearing. What if the social worker and/or firefighter/psychological counselor/paramedic arrived on the scene first (through some as-yet-to-be-determined public hotline number) and tried to de-escalate, but the mentally ill person then becomes violent? “What would warrant calling the police if the person in crisis picks up a weapon?” Reid wondered. She received no answer.
The concept of MACRO arose late last year, when the City Council began considering massive cuts to OPD’s budget following Black Lives Matter protests. The city’s official Reimagining Public Safety Task Force eventually recommended “cost savings…directed toward a non-police response/public safety solution… specifically for black communities in Oakland”; those “cost savings” were finalized in June, when the Council stripped OPD of $18 million. But even before that happened, some of the members of the Reimagining Task Force were having second thoughts. They warned the City Council not to defund OPD before there was proof that the alternative programs would actually work. Five of the 17 task force members wrote a letter to the city pointing out that, with so many lives already being lost to violence, “Even more lives will be lost if police are removed without an alternative response being put in place that is guaranteed to work as good as or better than the current system.”
This is a timely and important warning. You don’t get rid of the fire extinguishers until you’re assured of a better way of putting out the fires. But in many conversations I’ve had lately with people both in and outside of Oakland government, the impression I get is that these MACRO tactics are being applied without any evidence of their effectiveness. Non-police intervention is promoted by its proponents as an ideology worth pursuing, even if we have no idea if or how it works. Or, to put it in the words of one of the Reimagining Task Force members who signed the letter, Ginale Harris, “People aren’t fighting for equity, they’re fighting for ‘defund the police.’ Well, let’s fight for the equity piece, first.”
MACRO-type programs are being implemented, in bits and pieces in various parts of Oakland, with no real controls, and very little in the way of transparency. Our city, in other words, is becoming a gigantic social laboratory experiment in alternative approaches to mental health and public safety, but nobody can yet say if the experiment is working as planned. This will be an ongoing story over the months and years. The Coalition’s Jack Saunders is keeping a close eye on MACRO, and will be reporting on this at our Facebook group page.