The city’s unarmed emergency responders faced challenges from within city government in their first year of operation, with a special police unit sometimes showing up at the same calls that the unarmed team answered and 911 dispatchers reluctant to assign the unarmed team to eligible service requests. City councillors discussed the internal tensions Monday, but officials had no specific solutions to propose.
Strains between the new Community Safety Department as it fielded its unarmed alternative to police and a new police department “co-response” team that included a social worker were first reported by The Harvard Crimson on April 25. The student newspaper described how Community Safety Department officials were blindsided by the police initiative, which threatened to limit the emergency calls the civilian team could answer.
More was revealed at Monday’s council meeting. Departing Community Safety Department director Liz Speakman said the police co-response unit sometimes answered the same emergency calls that the department’s Community Assistance Response and Engagement team was sent to, with both units ending up at the same location.
Dispatchers were assigning Care to only 45 percent of the calls for which the team was eligible, until recently, Speakman said.
As Speakman described it, emergency dispatchers use a specific communications channel to direct the Care team to a request for help. When the team arrives, members notify the 911 center and transfer communications to a channel that anyone can access. The police co-response unit monitors that channel and can “self-assign” itself to the call if it believes that is appropriate, Speakman said.
The officer-social worker team is allowed to respond to any call, city spokesperson Jeremy Warnick said previously. In contrast, Care can answer only certain types of mental health and other calls, and only when there’s no threat of violence.
Care had to negotiate with police unions about what types of calls it could answer, and for months team members only picked up discarded needles and syringes.
Creatures of habit
As for the city’s emergency call center not assigning Care to calls it’s allowed to answer, Speakman said dispatchers “are very habitual.” For example, a call to check an unwanted person comes in “very frequently,” she said. “And our team was originally only on three days a week and then four days a week, and so the dispatchers were sort of habitually sending the team they typically send,” she said, referring to police. “And so creating a new habit was something that we wanted to work on.”
The numbers improved last month when the Care team expanded its hours to five days a week, she said. She said after the council meeting that the team was sent to 90 percent of eligible calls in March, because the Community Safety Department successfully addressed the issues that were affecting dispatch.
Dispatchers also didn’t send Care to calls it qualified for because they worried about violence even with no evidence of a problem, Speakman said at the council meeting. “For example, someone was locked in a McDonald’s bathroom and the dispatcher said, ‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe they had a weapon, maybe they had a knife.’”
The 911 call center housed the alternative response agency when that department was established, but city manager Yi-An Huang made it separate in early 2023 to ensure it was independent from the police department.
“Definitely work to do”
At Monday’s council meeting, Huang acknowledged the tension between the police co-response initiative and Care and said one reason it might arise is because the police department’s progressive outlook is similar to the Community Safety Department’s mandate. “I think that being said, we have all recognized and I think the reason behind community safety and an unarmed response is that when people call 911, oftentimes they don’t need somebody with a gun to show up,” Huang said.
He also noted that the co-response team may have been given leeway to answer all emergency calls because it’s funded by a grant, not city money, so police officials weren’t eager to restrict its deployment. Still, “I think there’s definitely work to do to clarify the overlap and, you know, essentially showing up to the same call is not great practice,” he said.
Huang didn’t say what’s specifically being done to prevent both teams from answering the same call. Councillor Patty Nolan suggested that the overlap might disappear if Care provided the co-response service, allowing police and Care to work together. The Community Safety Department will be discussed at a meeting of the council’s Public Safety Committee.
Unanswered question
Speakman is leaving her city job to work at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, a nonprofit based in Central Square, and will be replaced by Marie Mathieu, who was the Cambridge Public Library’s first social worker in 2021 before become assistant director of clinical services with Care in 2023.
Nolan asked Speakman if the conflict with police “and the stress of perhaps not being feeling fully supported is part of the reason you’re leaving.”
Mayor E. Denise Simmons said she didn’t think the question was appropriate.
“If she wants to answer it,” Nolan said.
“I would ask her not to,” Simmons said.
Speakman did not.
Care and citizen-led Heart
The Community Safety Department was approved in 2021; at the same time the council voted to have the city fund a grassroots police alternative outside city government, the Holistic Emergency Assistance Response Team. Heart was formed after the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020.
Both initiatives stalled for months. City officials finally took steps to activate the department in January 2023 after a Cambridge police officer shot and killed Arif Sayed Faisal, 20, a Bangladeshi immigrant and college student in a mental crisis. Faisal was cutting himself with a large knife as he ran from police through a Cambridgeport neighborhood, and refused to drop the knife while approaching an officer, police said. A judicial investigation found the officer was justified.
Meanwhile, the city awarded $300,000 in pandemic relief funds to Heart but did not give the organization a permanent grant until last year, when the Community Safety Department approved $150,000 to Heart from a fund in its budget intended to support antiviolence programs by community organizations.
The department’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 says it will provide financial and partnership support for community groups for antiviolence work, similar to this year, but does not specify how much. City spokesperson Warnick said details will be decided after the budget is approved. Heart now has a phone number but takes calls during limited hours only two days a week and can respond only over the phone. It also convenes support groups and hopes to establish a mobile “crisis response” program that can provide immediate help in person, its webpage says.
No direct line to Care
Speakman previously said she would like the Community Safety Department to have its own emergency telephone number. That has not happened. People who call 911 can ask that the call be sent to the Care team.
Briefly teary, Speakman told the council a story from her own life – of a loved one with mental health struggles that. “We felt really helpless, and there was no Care team. Maybe things would have been different if there were,” she said. “If you’re in a situation and you have a loved one who is really struggling and maybe yelling and throwing things because of the crisis that they’re in, and you don’t know who to call – what I would say is I would call this team every day. I have so much faith and trust in each of these human beings to show up with compassion, with love, with respect and dignity.”
The city’s proposed budget for the department calls for a slight reduction from this year’s projected expenses, to $2.7 million from $2.8 million, as some human resources responsibilities are taken up by a new employee benefits department. The total number of employees would remain at 15.
This post was updated to April 30, 2025, to clarify in the text and headline that the degree of calls referred to Community Safety Department responders rose in March.
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