By David M. Greenwald
Davis, CA – The city council last week heard the first round of the budget proposal which included, for the first time, some of the items approved on April 6 as part of the re-imagining policing push. But activists who have been pushing for these changes are not happy that the management level staff position and Crisis Now are not funded.
Some gathered in the park last weekend to push for these changes.
Speaking during the event, former Mayor Robb Davis warned that the police have the power to frame the narrative and the “ability to make themselves the indispensable organization in the city for safety.
“Watch how the police inserted themselves into [the conversation saying], ‘We are the essential agency. Make sure that that crisis intervention happens. The police have positioned themselves as the essential agency for dealing with homelessness, the essential agency for dealing with issues related to crises of all kinds,’” he said.
Robb Davis pressed the city for these changes, “We need to earmark funds for a new director of public health and safety. We need to grab the narrative in your city. That institutional power is not yielded. The police are not going to yield institutional power, and there’s a place to deal with it from external pressure.”
He added, “What we’re doing, showing up, speaking our piece, proposing other things, analyzing the data, putting it before the population, writing op-eds [is essential].”
Davis added that “we need a director of public health and safety that reports directly to the city manager and is at the table when issues of public health and safety are brought up and can say, ‘we have preventive tools.’”
Police, he warned, are not trained with the skill set to deal with public health challenges.
He said, “Police will never be able to deal with public health challenges. They’re not structured that way. They’re not able to do it. Let’s just say it. They’re not able to.”
In terms of budgeting, he primarily made two key arguments.
First, that a lot of the positions are already being funded.
“When they say, well, where are we going to get the money to pay for it? You’re going to say, [it’s already funded and] you’re already doing it,” he said.
But he also noted, “They could take money today from any number of unfunded positions in this city, which have been unfunded for a long time and shift that money over, they could do it.”
The Vanguard also spoke with Morgan Poindexter and Jordan Varney after the event.
“We’ve talked a lot about how it really seems like this movement for re-imagining public safety has been driven by the public and has been driven essentially by residents of Davis saying the status quo is not acceptable anymore,” Morgan Poindexter said.
She believes that the council has said the right thing.
“If you read their speeches at some of these council meetings, they’re not in opposition,” she said. “They’re not antagonistic to the goal of re-imagining public safety and transitioning some of the funding to a department of public health and safety.”
But she believes some of this is lip service.
They need to “direct staff to actually budget for what we’re asking them to budget for. and that didn’t happen. That hasn’t happened.”
Jordan Varney likened it to a pool.
“It feels like they’re sticking their toe in and then taking it out,” she said. “Their words are good and helpful, but the action not there. And all we’re asking is for them to just try putting a couple toes in, maybe a part of their foot.”
She wants to see them “just earmarking funds to create something that will help the town be safer and we’ll change the statistics of what has already happened in town to be better for the future.”
There are two big asks here from the activists in the community—the Crisis Now model and the management level position.
“I would just love to see a plan. I would love to see it like a roadmap, which is some of the things that they did originally talk about, I think back in December,” Poindexter said, acknowledging the complexity of the Crisis Now model.
She noted, “Karen Larson gave us a $700 to $1.2 million range.” She acknowledged, “It’s a biggish range.”
Poindexter wants to see a roadmap.
She said that “if this was the buy-in that we had, and everybody was on board with this vision, then of course you would say, okay, we’re going to earmark a million of the ARP [American Rescue Plan] funds for startup costs for crisis. Now that million could change, it could be 700, it could be 600, it could be 1.5 million. We’re not sure, but we’re going to put our money where our mouth is.”
The city has three weeks until the final budget is expected to be passed on June 22. Jordan Varney and Morgan Pointdexter both want to see a “roadmap or a timeline about the nine that they all support for how those would get implemented.
“It’s not everything that I want, but honestly it would be good if the city council and city staff could demonstrate their commitment by funding setting aside in the budget management level positions,” Poindexter added.
The council and city have time to make the changes, but these activists including the former mayor want to see a commitment.
As former Mayor Davis put it, “Do not let a council member say we can’t do that.”
—David M. Greenwald reporting
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“Karen Larson gave us a $700 to $1.2 million range.” She acknowledged, “It’s a biggish range.”
Try for the seven hundred dollars, then be willing to up to a thousand.
For the budget funding a new management position, Mike Webb previously said the reason it was not yet on the budget was because they didn’t know whether that would duplicate an existing position.
Who is he thinking that is the duplicate or could absorb that work?
https://davisvanguard.org/2021/05/is-the-city-moving-fast-enough-on-police-reform/
That is a biggish range. Defund the biggish!
Note: The size of the crowd was ‘some’. The actual size of the crowd was reported by the Vanguard to be in a biggish range. The photo shows at least one person made a sign. OK, I see the edge of two others signs to be fair, so at least three signs.
Perhaps Pytel and Davis at 50 yards in Central Park, with Star Wars light sabers from the non-gendered toy department at Target.
That’s about $40,000/yr., per word.
Drain the pool! Abolish the toe?
Toes are part of the foot. Nevermind.
I thought unfunding was the whole idea . . . if that’s the same as defunding? But . . . if something is unfunded and you shift ‘the money’ over, aren’t you unfunding what you just shifted the ‘money’ to, since the source position was unfunded?
Weren’t we going for the Eugene model up until recently? Is that Crisis Now? Terrible name for a model by the way. “Crisis now!” Like ‘more crises!’ How about the “Fewer Crises” model? I’m for that.
As she said . . .
Sounds like we should put a mouth where the money is, or isn’t 😐 , and maybe we’ll get fed? What are these numbers? Millions? Hundreds? Thousands? Only the last one is clear. And WHY are they all over the place, whatever they represent?
The ‘nine’ they all support? Nine what? Maybe instead of “700, it could be 600, it could be 1.5 million”, what we really need is a stitch in time, because it saves . . . well, you know.
Say that again?
I’ll call in to public comment tonight and demand every council member not say we can’t do that. Not not, who’s there?
But seriously folks, I’m all for a nice Mental Health Force (MHF). (could go along with Trump’s Space Force. I just wanted to say “Trump” at 8:00am to raise everyone’s blood pressure – no other reason: Boogity!) I think it makes total sense.
What I think is a cråppy idea is “988”. Public Health & Safety Department (PHSD) should INCLUDE the Police and the Mental Health Force (and Fire, etc), and all should be dispatched by 911, and the dispatchers should be independent agents of the PHSD and not the police force, and make the decisions. Yes, I know the activists want people to be able to call the MHF and make the decisions themselves (so that innocent people aren’t gunned down by the Davis Police?), but that’s a terrible idea. Think of it this way – most people are trained to call 911 – and will still call 911 on a mental health issue. Do you want those people deciding to call the police when it actually is a mental health issue – so that either 1) they improperly send police because of who the person called? or 2) 911 has to call 988 themselves because the member of the public called the wrong person, delaying response. Both are bad scenarios. Instead, all should be under one dispatch service for Davis, with dispatchers independent of the Police Dept. and trained to dispatch the proper response team. PERIOD! Activists calling 911 on a mental health issue can still ‘use the right words’ so police aren’t called, so don’t sweat it. You know I’m right.
Alan – my understanding is that you could still get mental health dispatched through 911. The reason they want to have a separate/ direct 988 call in, is some people are fearful of calling 911 and fearful that police would respond.
Would it go to the same place? Would there be one dispatching center? PC says the cost of a 2nd dispatching center is unrealistically prohibitive; seems historically to be lots of respect for PC’s views on here. EW implies there has never been the intent of a 2nd dispatching center and says the model I speak of is the model proposed. EG says 2nd dispatching center is totally doable, the implication being he favors that model? This really needs to be ironed out, big time, before these proposals are funded. Central Issue!!!
I don’t see the point of 988 if it goes to the same place as 911 – the illusion you’re not calling a dispatcher that might involve police? What’s the point? Some mental health calls will require a police dispatch – it’s not up to the caller to decide which – but it can be done much better if an alternative MHF is available. Let’s agree on this and maybe this will actually move forward.
Alan
Your last paragraph has merit, if and only if, you are considering this from the point of view of crisis management only. When I think of a Public Health Officer outside the Police Department, I am thinking of an officer whose duties include improving primary and secondary prevention so that future crisis can be managed before they ever get to a critical point. That is what the city needs not to solve today’s crisis, but to prevent those crises from ever occurring. This is what the Police Department are not equipped to address, and is a major lack in our city. The existence of such an office could be funded as former Mayor Davis said from existing positions, and would serve to save the city money in the long term.
Once again, in both private and public health, primary and secondary prevention are always, repeat always, more cost effective than is cure or remediation.
Welcome to Fantasy Land. Seriously, have any of these advocates ever had management responsibility for preparing and administering an operational budget in a local government? The only possible answer, No.
Now we have the proposal that a separate independent dispatch service is created by the City to be operational 24/7 and dedicated to the exclusive task of receiving and assigning calls for mental health intervention.
Before going any further with this patently absurd idea, anybody please ask any proponent to roughly calculate the cost for recruiting, hiring, training of these specialized dispatchers. Emergency response dispatchers are like gold nuggets–very scarce–and very difficult to find, and then retain. The stress level alone is incalculable and burnout is the norm for many.
Where are you going to put this new dispatch center? What about the miles of wiring and electrical work, and a necessarily complex computer-controlled dispatch center, all of which have to be specially coded to deter hackers. Think 7 figures.
Does anybody have any notion of the complexity, cost, time needed to apply and hopefully get a dedicated radio band from the FCC? Reality: It would take years, you’d have to hire an expensive consultant firm, and the probability of eventual success is zilch.
Where is the proposal for an independent and separate dispatch?
As far as I understand, the proposal was only a reorganization of dispatch to be independent to the police department. This means the city will have one dispatch, the same one at the police station, but the dispatchers do not hierarchically belong to the police.
Gotta love that can’t-do attitude. Let’s get some proposals developed before throwing in the towel. Other jurisdictions have managed to initiate these models. E.g., https://www.vera.org/behavioral-health-crisis-alternatives
“Police themselves have been saying for years that they are asked to do too much. Why do we continue to ask them to respond to crisis calls that health professionals could address more safely and effectively?”
This part of the article posted by Eric is critical. The police know this is true. City council members and staff know this is true. So why are we so entrenched in the position of demanding that our police departments served functions they are not equipped, trained, or experienced in handling safely? How would citizens and police have felt about these measures if they had been put forward as “unburdening” the police rather than “defunding the police”? What if from the very beginning, this had been sold as a way to augment, not detract from police activity in our communities since so many of us saw it that way from the beginning? And what if we had promoted primary and secondary prevention measures as means to decrease the burden on our police departments?
Defund the unfunded money!
Could have sworn that this is what health insurance is for.
Of course, when you purposefully take steps to encourage the uninsured (e.g., homeless individuals – who often struggle with mental/physical challenges and addictions) to take-up residence in a community (in areas in which it used to be illegal to do so – for anyone), one of the costs that’s incurred is dealing with “crisis calls”.
Largely avoided, in communities that don’t enable it.